"Roger Zelazny - A Museum Piece" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zelazny Roger)

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Roger Zelazny. A Museum Piece

Forced to admit that his art was going unnoticed in a
frivolous world, Jay Smith decided to get out of that world.
The four dollars and ninety-eight cents he spent for a mail
order course entitled _Yoga--the Path to Freedom_ did not,
however, help to free him. Rather, it served to accentuate his
humanity, in that it reduced his ability to purchase food by
four dollars and ninety-eight cents.
Seated in a padmasana, Smith contemplated little but the
fact that his navel drew slightly closer to his backbone with
each day that passed. While nirvana is a reasonably esthetic
concept, suicide assuredly is not, particularly if you haven't
the stomach for it. So he dismissed the fatalistic notion quite
reasonably.
"How simply one could take one's own life in ideal
surroundings!" he sighed, (tossing his golden locks which, for
obvious reasons, had achieved classically impressive lengths).
"The fat stoic in his bath, fanned by slave girls and sipping
his wine, as a faithful Greek leech opens his veins, eyes
downcast! One delicate Circassian," he sighed again, "_there_
perhaps, plucking upon a lyre as he dictates his funeral
oration--the latter to be read by a faithful countryman, eyes
all a-blink. How easily _he_ might do it! But the fallen
artist--say! Born yesterday and scorned today he goes, like the
elephant to his graveyard, alone and secret!"
He rose to his full height of six feet, one and a half
inches, and swung to face the mirror. Regarding his skin,
pallid as marble, and his straight nose, broad forehead, and
wide-spaced eyes, he decided that if one could not live by
creating art, then one might do worse that turn the thing the
other way about, so to speak.
He flexed those thews which had earned him half-tuition as
a halfback for the four years in which he had stoked the stithy
of his soul to the forging out of a movement all his own:
two-dimensional painted sculpture.
"Viewed in the round," one crabbed critic had noted,
"Mister Smith's offerings are either frescoes without walls or
vertical lines. The Etruscans excelled in the former form
because they knew where it belonged; kindergartens inculcate a
mastery of the latter in all five-year-olds."
Cleverness! More cleverness! Bah! He was sick of those
Johnsons who laid down the law at someone else's dinner table!
He noted with satisfaction that his month-long ascetic
regime had reduced his weight by thirty pounds to a mere two
twenty-five. He decided that he could pass as a Beaten
Gladiator, post-Hellenic.
"It is settled," he pronounced. "I'll _be_ art."