"Victor Pelevin. Babylon (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

tempestuous'.
Possibly the specific elements in this clip were inspired by a black
and white photograph that hung above Tatarsky's desk. It was an
advertisement for some boutique, showing a young man with long hair and
carefully tended stubble in a luxurious wide-cut coat carelessly hung across
his shoulders - the wind filled out the form of the coat so that it echoed
the sail of a boat visible on the horizon. The waves breaking against the
rocks and splashing up on to the shore fell just short of his shiny shoes.
His face was set in a harsh, sullen grimace, and somehow he resembled the
birds with outstretched wings (maybe eagles, maybe seagulls) soaring into
the twilit sky from a supplement to the latest version of Photoshop (after
taking a closer look at the photograph, Tatarsky decided that the boat on
the horizon must have come sailing in from there too).
After contemplating it for days Tatarsky finally understood: all the
cliches to which the photograph was alluding had been born together with
romanticism in the nineteenth century; their remains, together with those of
the Count of Monte Cristo, had survived into the twentieth, but on the
threshold of the twenty-first the count's legacy had already been completely
squandered. The human mind had sold this romanticism to itself far too many
times to be able to do any more business on it. Now, no matter how sincerely
you wished to deceive yourself, it was virtually impossible to believe in
any correspondence between the image that was being sold and its implied
inner content. It was an empty form that had long ago ceased to mean what it
should have meant. Everything was moth-eaten: the thoughts provoked by the
sight of the conventional Niebelung in the studio photograph were not about
the proud Gothic spirit implied by the frothing waves and sideburns, but
about whether the photographer charged a lot, how much the model got paid
and whether the model had to pay a fine when his personal lubricant stained
the seat of the trousers from the company's spring collection.
Tatarsky's deductions led him into a state of total and utter
confusion. On the one hand, it seemed that he and Ed crafted a false
panorama of life for others (like a battle scene in a museum, where the
floor in front of the spectator is scattered with sand and worn-out boots
and shells, but the tanks and the explosions are only drawn on the wall),
guided solely by their intuition as to what the punters would swallow. On
the other hand, his own life was a frustrating attempt to move a bit closer
to the contents of this panorama. In essence it was an attempt to run into
the picture drawn on the wall. Being a co-author of this picture made the
attempt more than grotesque. Of course - or so it seemed to Tatarsky - a
rich man could escape the bounds of false reality. He could move beyond the
limits of the panorama that was compulsory for the poor. Tatarsky didn't
actually know much about what the world of the rich was like. There were
only vague images circling around in his consciousness, cliches from
advertising, which he himself had been rebroadcasting for such a long time
he couldn't possibly believe in them. What was clear to him was that you
could only find out what prospects opened up to a man with a substantial
bank account from the rich themselves, and on one occasion - by pure chance
- Tatarsky managed to do just that.
While he was drinking away a small fee in the Poor Folk bar, he
eavesdropped on a conversation between two TV chat-show hosts - it was after