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

infinitely more complex and exhausting than, for instance, learning how to be a brain surgeon. But
the smug, self-satisfied moralists think it's precise and proper for someone to spend fifteen
years learning how to ease a subdural hematoma, yet twisted, sick and sad for someone to spend the
same fifteen years learning how to ease his or her loneliness. Answers to the former can be found
in medical textbooks and in O.R.s all over the world; answers to the latter slide and skitter and
avoid discovery save by chance and steady application to all possibilities.
The search is as important as the discovery.
(And therein lies the core of the answer to Hemingway's riddle about the leopard.)
Lori seems to feel as I write this, that even if I don't have the answers. at least I've had a
greater opportunity to find the answers than those who deny the search, settle for whatever's
handiest, and then spend the rest of their lives with secret thoughts and open frustration.
On the basis of her view, and the fact that I trust her opinions most of the time, I'm plunging
ahead with this essay on love. I hope to God she's right. If she's wrong, and I've been merely a
profligate, indulging myself in adolescent sex-antics, I'm going to look like a righteous schmuck
by the time this introduction is completed. If I don't already.
Ambrose Bierce has two definitions of "love" in THE ENLARGED DEVIL'S DICTIONARY (Doubleday, 1967,
and a sensational book). Bierce, a cynic beside whom I look like Pollyanna, writes this:
Love, n. The folly of thinking much of another before one knows anything of oneself.
Love, n. A temporary insanity curable by marriage or by removal of the patient from the influences
under which he incurred the disorder. This disease, like caries and many other ailments, is
prevalent only among civilized races living under artificial conditions; barbarous nations
breathing pure air and eating simple food enjoy immunity from its ravages. It is sometimes fatal,
but more frequently to the physician than to the patient.
People reading my books, most particularly the introductions in my books, think I am the
reincarnation of Bierce: that I am a mean, pugnacious, constantly depressed or alarmed sonofabitch
into whose life the sunshine of affection has never cast its effulgent glow. Fuck you, I say
politely.
Even the most drooling of the Jukes or the Kallikaks* should be able to perceive that someone who
manifests such volatile feelings about injustice, racism, stupidity, mediocrity and general
negative bullshit in the Universe has his times of joy and happiness and noble dreams that soar
aloft as one with the greatest aspirations of the human race. Those who read my works and remember
only the stories and essays that deal with blood, lust, violence, death, disfigurement, pain,
depression, smarmy sex and ka-ka do me a disservice. Also, they are sick and ought to be "put
away," if you catch my drift. I have written dozens and dozens of kind, gentle, happy, funny
stories and introductions. But do they remember those? Do they? Huh, I ask you, do they!?! Not on
your cryonic crypt, they don't! All they remember are stories such as "I Have No Mouth, and I Must
Scream" or "The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World." All they recall when my work is
mentioned are the shrieks of torment coming from my characters.
When the truth of the matter is that I'm basically a very happy fellow. Funny, too. I adore small
children, dogs of all breeds, Barney Miller and Richard Pryor and George Carlin and M*A*S*H,
noodles, the humorous novels of Donald Westlake. (Noodles have always seemed hilarious to me, go
figure it.) For instance, I got a letter today from Debe (No Last Name Given) at Millikin
University in Decatur, Illinois; and she went on you wouldn't believe about being a fan of my
writing, but how disturbing it all was, how I always seem to write sad or mean stuff. "Is there
another side?" she asked. "We all have our demons. But tell me more of you. You must have some


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