"Richard Powers - The Gold Bug Variations" - читать интересную книгу автора (Powers Richard)

missing: the amateur's gloss that always
made the piece so difficult to listen to when
he was in the same room now left it
unbearable in his silence. "Here it comes.
There What a chord. Hear? The left hand, the
interior dissonance... ?" Every embedded line
became painfully apparent with no one there
to point it out.
Only when the reprise, the last da capo
bars resolved their suspension and fell back
into generating inertness did I leave, lock
the place, and climb the blocks back to the
branch. Two hours late in returning. My
colleagues, old maid Marians to a man,
seeing me drag in late, stared as if I had just
sprouted a full-fledged,
handlebar-mustached mania. One of the
eternally punctual, I had committed blatant
inconsistency. Settling behind the Reference
Desk as casually as possible, I resumed
answering the public's questions as if
nothing had happened.
But everything had. I worked like the
worst of bush-leaguers. It took me twenty
minutes to identify, for a polite woman not a
day less than ninety, the river that had a
funny name beginning with a vowel and
probably lying in Africa or India. She and my
atlas at last compromised on the Irrawaddy. I
did almost as poorly naming the one-armed
pro baseball player from the forties who puts
in an appearance every five years and should
have been child's play. By four, badly in need
of a break despite less than an hour's work,
already suspecting the break I needed, I
attended to the Quote Board.
Old institution, child of the fresh days of
my M.L.S., when I still believed in the
potential of democratically available facts:
the Quote Board began as my experiment in
free expression. An open corkboard with
blank cards broadcast a standing invitation
to "Add your favorite passage here." We did
well for a while, if not producing any
transcendental insights. But the inevitable
appearance of the limerick Ladies from Lunt
and the Lonely Master Painters soon forced
the notice "All quotes subject to final
approval by Staff." After-the-fact
justification of censorship, first fatal