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

bandidos. So Huston explains very carefully that the mountain is a lady, and it has been good to
them, and they have to close its wounds.
(And finally, even flinty, paranoid Bogart understands, and he agrees, and they spend a week
repairing the ecological damage they've done to the mountain that was good to them.)
So instead of trying to weasel and worm my way through an explanation that would have been no real
explanation at all, I asked her if she would mind my sitting down and writing something for her.
She said that would be nice, and I did it, trying to say as bluntly as possible with fantasy
images what words from the "real world" would not adequately say. And this is what I wrote:
She looks at me with eyes blue as the snow on Fuji's summit in a woodblock print by Hiroshige. She
says, "You're really different, really unique." Beneath the paleness of her cheeks the blood
suddenly rushes and she only knows her nervousness has increased in the small room, though nothing
has altered from the moment before. She does not understand that her skin and survival mechanisms
have registered the presence of an alien creature. Her blood carries the certain knowledge. Like


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the sentient wind, she perceives only that she has crossed an invisible border and now roams naked
and weaponless in a terra incognita where wolves assume the shapes of men and babies are born with
golden glowing eyes and the sound from the stars is that of the very finest crystal.
To her fingertips come the vibrations of flowers singing in silent voices, telling of times before
the watery deeps carried the seed of humanity. Her skin: absorbing the vibrations of unicorn's
hooves as they beat the molten earth into gold. Her nostrils: bringing to her the scents of dreams
being born. Her delicate nerve-endings: vital and trembling with expectation of oddness.
She sits with a troll, with another kind of creature, and her uneasiness grows. Cellular knowledge
assaults her in wave after wave, and she cannot codify that knowledge.
"Let me tell you a story," I say, and in few words explain the horizons of the land into which she
has wandered.
Will she understand that mortals and trolls cannot mate?
It didn't go well with her. It was a sour relationship from the start. I wound up doing her
damage, hurting her; she didn't hurt me. I don't brag about it, I'm certainly not proud of it,
there was no notch cut in the stock of the weapon from the encounter. Machismo wasn't part of it:
I hurt her and she didn't hurt me only because it didn't mean as much to me. I was a hard thing.
Colder. She was vulnerable. It had to happen, I suppose. If I'd been a nicer person I'd have
forgone the sex and sent her away at the start. I explain it now, by way of justification, by
saying she is a born victim: someone waiting to be savaged by love. But the truth is simply that I
am precisely like everyone else when it comes to love ... I am a child. I want my picnic, and I
hate cleaning up the mess.
Pause. Go back to the start of this book, just before the beginning of this new introduction. Read
the quote from Hemingway's "The Snows of Kilimanjaro." Do you know what it was the leopard was
seeking? Do you understand why the creature climbed to that altitude and what happened to it? The
answer to the riddle is the answer, I think, to understanding how to travel the road of love. I
put the quote there, what has become a powerful literary metaphor since Hemingway first wrote it
exactly forty years ago in 1936, because it seems to me to contain the truest thing one can know
about traveling that difficult road. Friends of mine, around this house as I assemble this book
for a publisher's deadline, don't seem to understand why that little parable, riddle, metaphor,
whatever the hell it is, seems so eloquent, and so right for this book of kinda sorta love
stories. I hope these words will clear it up for them. Probably not, though. I'm not too clear on
this subject of love myself.