"Harlan Ellison - Love ain,t nothing" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

file:///F|/rah/Harlan%20Ellison/Ellison,%20Harlan%20-%20Love%20Ain't%20Nothing.txt

"These are the Fates, daughters of Necessity ... Lachesis singing of the past, Clotho of the
present, Atropos of the future."
Plato, THE REPUBLIC
FOR SHERRI, WHO PICKED UP THE PIECES.
FOR LESLIE KAY WHO ARRANGES THE PIECES.
FOR LORI, WHO IS OPTING TO BE ONE OF THE PIECES.
There is an inscription on the lintel over the octagonal portal to Ellison Wonderland. It says:
Always look up.
Never look down;
All you ever see
are the pennies
people drop.
There is a seven-headed dog guarding the octagonal portal to Ellison Wonderland. If you aren't
nice, it will bite you in the ass.
Kilimanjaro is a snow covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in
Africa. Its western summit is called the Masai "Ngàje Ngài," the House of God. Close to the
western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the
leopard was seeking at that altitude.
THE SNOWS OF KILIMANJARO by Ernest Hemingway
INTRODUCTION
HAVING AN AFFAIR WITH A TROLL

One evening I met a young woman for whom I quickly developed carnal desires. We met at a party, I
think. I don't remember now. It was a while ago. And I cut her out of the crowd and finally we got
back to my house and it started to go wrong. Oh, not wrong in the way that once we were alone the
sexual thing didn't seem to be working out: quite the contrary. She began getting misty-eyed. I
could see that she was forming a fantasy view of the man who had swept her away to this strange
and colorful eyrie. She was thinking ahead: can this one be THE one I've been looking for? And I
didn't want that.
No point here in going into the reason I didn't want that; perhaps I was the wrong one for her on
more than a casual basis, perhaps she was wrong for me permanently, perhaps it was a hundred
different little things I sensed in the ambience of the evening. Whatever it was, I wanted to
discourage the fantasy, but not the sexual liaison. I'm not sure there's anything wrong with that.
But maybe there is. It depends where your concepts of morality lead you. For me, it was better to
be upfront about it, to say there's tonight, and maybe other nights, but under no circumstances is
this permanent.
And I tried to tell her, gently.
And that was wrong. Because it was hypocritical.
I wanted to have my picnic, but I didn't want to have to spend the time necessary to putting the
picnic-grounds back in the same condition I'd found it.
(That isn't a casually-conceived metaphor; and it's quite purposely not coarse in its comparisons.
To love well and wisely, I now believe, we must attempt to leave a situation with a love-partner
with the landscape and its inhabitants as well off, or better off, than they were when We arrived.
Like this:
(Walter Huston and Tim Holt and Fred C. Dobbs [sometimes known as Humphrey Bogart] are about to
leave the mountain from which they've clawed their gold. And Huston says to Holt and Bogart,
"We've got to spend a week putting the mountain back the way we found it." And Bogart looks
amazed, because they are running the risk of being set-upon once again by Alfonso Bedoya and his