"Harlan Ellison - Paingod & Other Delusions" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

for the commonweal I do for myself I am a selfish sonofabitch who contributes to “good causes” because I feel shitty if
I don’t. But if the truth be told, I’m the same as you: the deaths of a hundred thousand flood victims in some banana
republic doesn’t touch me one one-millionth as much as the death of my dog did. If you get wiped out on a freeway
somewhere and I don’t know you personally, I may go tsk-tsk, but the fact that I haven’t had a good bowel movement
in two days is more painful to me.
So those words burning on my ceiling really threw me.
They really got to me.
I had them printed on big yellow cards so they’d pop, and I started giving them to friends. I had one framed
for my office. It’s up on the wall to the right of my typewriter as I sit here telling you about it.
But if I’m not this terrific concerned human being, what’s it all in aid on Well, it’s in aid of my coming to terms
with my own mortality, something that’ll happen to all of you if it hasn’t already. And it speaks to what this collection
of stories is all about, in a way. So we’ll talk about pain.
Here are a few different kinds of pain I think are worthy of our attention.
The other night I had dinner with a good friend, a woman writer whom I’ve known for about ten years.
Though we’ve never had a romantic relationship, I love her dearly and care about her: she’s a good person, and a
talented writer, and those two qualities put her everlastingly on my list of When You Need Help, Even In The Dead Of
Night, I’m On Call. Over dinner, we talked about an anguish she has been experiencing for a number of years. She’s
afraid of dying alone and unloved.
Some of you are nodding in understanding. A few of you are smiling. The former understand pain, the latter
are assholes. Or very lucky. We’ve all dreaded that moment when we pack it in, get a fast rollback of days and nights,
and realize we’re about to go down the hole never having belonged to anyone. If you’ve never felt it, you’re either an
alien from far Arcturus or so insensitive your demise won’t matter. Or very lucky.
Her problem is best summed up by something Theodore Sturgeon once said: “There’s no absence of love in
the world, only worthy places to put it.” My friend gets involved with guys who do her in. Not all her fault. Some of it
is-we’re never wholly victims, we help construct the tiger traps filled with spikes-but not all of it. She’s vulnerable.
While not naive, she is innocent. And that’s a dangerous, but laudable capacity: to wander through a world that can
be very uncaring and amorally cruel, and still be astonished at the way the sunlight catches the edge of a coleus leaf.
Anybody puts her down for that has to go through me first.
So she keeps trying, and the ones with long teeth sense her vulnerability and they move in for the slow kill.
(That’s evil: only the human predator destroys slowly, any decent hunting animal rips out the throat and feeds, and
that’s that. The more I see of people, the better I like animals.)
 She is a woman who needs a man. There are men who need a good woman. There’s nothing sexist in saying
that, it’s a condition of the animal. (And just so I don’t get picketed by Gay Lib, there are men who need a good man
and women who need a good woman. There are also men who need a good chicken and women who need a big dog,
and that’s nobody’s business but their own, you get my meaning, so let’s cut the crap and move on.) Everybody
needs to belong to somebody. Sometime. For an hour, a day, a year, forever...it’s all the same. And when you’ve paid
dues on a bunch of decades without having made the proper linkup, you come to live with a pain that is a dull ache,
unlocalized, suffusing every inch of your skin and throbbing like a bruise down on the bone.
What to tell her, what to say? There’s nothing. I’ll try to find her someone who cares, but it’s a pain she’ll
have to either overcome by guerrilla attacks on the singles bars and young-marrieds’ parties, or learn to love herself
sufficiently well that she becomes more accessible to the men she’s turning off by unspoken words and invisible
vibes. People sense the pain, and they shy away from it, because they’ve felt it themselves, and they don’t want to get
contaminated. When you need a job and hunger for one openly, you never get hired because they smell desperation
on you like panther sweat.
But it’s a pain you can’t ignore. I can’t ignore.
Here’s another one.
What follows is one of hundreds of letters I get from readers. I hate getting mail, because I don’t have the
time to answer it, and I get a lot of it-probably due to writing introductions like this where I expose my viscera-but more
of that and what Avram Davidson says about it later on-and most of the time I send out a form letter, otherwise I
wouldn’t have time to write stories. But occasionally I get a letter that simply cannot be ignored: This is one of them.