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

light, some happiness, something good that you cherish?"
Now, see! There you go. A perfect example. Here's this young woman (I presume she's fairly young
from the writing and the content) who encounters me in a series of books and gets all grunched out
of shape because she thinks I'm downcast, and she wants me to spill the beans on myself, to tell
her what makes me smile and laugh and love.
And apart from wanting to keep some personal feelings to myself--Gawd, you're a greedy bunch, no
matter how much I blather and reveal, you're never satisfied--the things I do unleash are
frequently as happy as they are miserable. But when I try to look on the bright side, and pass
along the lucent limbus of my personal joy, everyone who remembers those screams of anguish comes
down on me like a tsunami, accusing me of being maudlin and saccharine.
So if the observations I make about love seem just a tot on the pragmatic, even cynical, side ...
well, it's purely an attempt to walk the tightrope: to indulge an uncommon (to my readers)
softness of spirit without slopping over into Rod McKuen-ism; to be as tough-minded as possible
(and thereby useful) about something as intangible as love, without sounding bruised or
discouraged; to avoid clich├й without purposely wandering in the glades of perversion.
I've included two of those tightrope-walking routines in this book. Originally, they were
installments of a column I wrote for Art Kunkin when he was editor of the Los Angeles Free Press
and later, when legitimate-thugs-turned-illegitimate-"businessmen" screwed him out of his own
newspaper and he started an abortive, short-lived competitor, for Art's Los Angeles Weekly News.
Though they're true, not stories, they read like stories--I've listed them on the Table of
Contents as Personal Reminiscence I and II--and it's in the story-form that I feel most at ease
writing my views of love. Unless one is Shelley, a Nu├▒ez de Arce or La Rochefoucauld, one has no
business publicly shooting off one's mouth about something as mysterious and ethereal as love.
Unless one is le Marquis de Sade, in which case one has a personal vision of love that defies all
strictures.
But in fiction, even a groping dullard like myself can stumble upon a truth or two; or at least a
rule-of-thumb that seems to work in certain situations, among certain kinds of people. So when I
pass along these remarks, I'll try and couch them in anecdotal terms, all the better to entertain
you, my dears, and not coincidentally to alleviate my own nervousness in this area.
So here is just about all I know concerning love. Some of it light and happy, some of it cynical,
perhaps some of it even accurate and truthful. One never knows, do one.
The minute people fall in love, they become liars.
You'd think such good feelings in the gut and other places would make people want to ensure the
continuance of those feelings. But their fears overcome their good sense, not to mention their
ethics. They begin to lie, virtually from the first moment they feel the stirrings in the aorta
... or wherever it is love is supposed to make itself felt.
They lie in a hundred different ways. From the first tentative social conversations that bore them
silly, they lie by pretending to be interested in inanities. This is a generality, but I think it
holds: if it's guys, they listen to banal bullshit just on the off-chance they'll get laid. If
it's women, they listen to the blown-out-of-proportion nonsense of men so they can reinforce the
guy's need to be a Big Man. They lie to one another with looks and with words, and only the body-
language tells the truth.
They lie to keep the upper hand, even before they're threatened. The fear of rejection is so
ingrained, from the schoolyard, from the locker room, from the parties, from the Homecoming Dance,
from the years of seeing lithe tanned women in bikinis and feral muscular men with shirts open to
the sternum up there on four-color billboards; they fear the unknown outer darkness of someone
saying, "No."
So they lie to one another. Granted, it's akin to the social lying we all do at parties, in
restaurants, at social events: putting up with trivia to be politic or civilized or "gracious,"
whatever that means. Nonetheless, it is lying. And by feigning interest in that which bores or