"Thomas M. Disch - Understanding Human Behavior" - читать интересную книгу автора (Disch Thomas M)

"Oh nothing. Ms. Sillygiggles was hoping you'd be able to take them to Denver to see the dolls'
Pope, but Ms. Chillywiggles put her foot down and said Absolutely Not. You're a stranger: we
shouldn't even be talking to you."

He nodded, for it seemed quite true. He had no business coming out to New Focus at all.

"I should be going," he said.

Ms. Sillygiggles got to her feet and executed an awkward curtsey. Rochelle said it had been
nice to make his acquaintance. Ms. Chillywiggles sat on the wooden step and said nothing.

It seemed to him, as he walked down the stony path to where he'd locked his bicycle to a
rack, that everyone in the world was crazy, that craziness was synonymous with the human
condition. But then he could see, through a break in the close-ranked spruces, the arc of a
glider's flight -- not Rochelle Rockefeller's, this one had blue wings and his spirits soared with
the sheer music of it. He understood, in a moment of crystalline levelheadedness, that it didn't
make a speck of difference if people were insane. Or if he was, for that matter. Sane or
insane were just stages of the great struggle going on everywhere all the time: across the
valley, for instance, where the pines were fighting their way up the sides of the facing
mountain, hurling the grenades of their cones into the thin soil, pressing their slow advantage,
enduring the decimations of the lightning, aspiring (insanely, no doubt) toward the forever
unreachable fastness of the summit.

When he got to the road his lungs were heaving, his feet hurt, and his knees were not to be
reasoned with (he should not have been running along such a path), but his head was once
again solidly fixed on his shoulders. When he called his boss at the Denver Central Office to
apologize for absconding, he wasn't fired or even penalized. His boss, who was usually such a
tyrannosaurus, said everyone had days when they weren't themselves, and that it was all
right, so long as they were few and far between. He even offered some Valiums, which
Richard said no-thank-you to.

III
At Naropa the next Wednesday, the lecturer, a black man in a spotless white polyester suit,
lectured about Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray, who, in 1927, had killed Ruth's husband Albert in a
more than usually stupid fashion. He'd chosen this case, he said, because it represented the
lowest common denominator of the crime of passion, and would therefore serve to set in
perspective the mystery and romance of last week's assassinations, which Richard had
missed. First they watched a scene from an old comedy based on the murder, and then the
lecturer read aloud a section of the autobiography Judd Gray had written in Sing Sing while
waiting to be electrocuted:

"I was a morally sound, sober, God-fearing chap, working and saving to make Isabel my
wife and establish a home. I met plenty of girls -- at home and on the road, in trains
and hotels. I could, I thought, place every type: the nice girl who flirts, the nice girl
who doesn't, the brazen out-and-out streetwalker I was warned against. I was no
sensualist, I studied no modern cults, thought nothing about inhibitions and
repressions. Never read Rabelais in my life. Average, yes -- just one of those
Americans Mencken loves to laugh at. Even belonged to a club -- the Club of Corset
Salesmen of the Empire State -- clean-cut competitors meeting and shaking hands --
and liking it."