Subject: secrets of the vault
From: Scottie Bowman (rbowman@indigo.ie)
Date: Sat Mar 25 2000 - 02:17:32 EST
From Paul's account - which I'd never heard before -
it seems that Kafka's notebooks once contained something.
It reminded me of another story.
Colette the great French writer was drawn into the literary
life from the very first by both her parents. Her mother
was a kind of early feminist - politically active, with artistic
interests & defiantly bohemian in the face of the quiet,
rural mores of the little town in which they lived.
Her father, known as the Captain, was a retired military
man who'd lost a leg in a foreign war & who devoted
the long years of his retirement to the writing of his memoirs.
Each day he'd go to his study & impose on himself the discipline
of several hours' hard grind. No matter what the weather,
he'd smilingly refuse to be seduced away from his work,
getting through one of his large, specially made-up notebooks
every four or five months. Although the family pressed him
to try for publication, he modestly declined saying there was
no market for his stuff, they were simply an elderly man's
memories of war - no longer a fashionable topic. They eventually
accepted it was simply a rather amusing hobby that kept him
engaged with life & would at least provide an interesting record
for his descendents.
When he eventually died his children were curious to know
if there had been any racy secrets or gallantly unmentioned
exploits in his past. Opening the notebooks - more than twenty
of them - they discovered that the pages of beautiful, creamy,
hand-made paper were quite bare, untouched, virgin, zilcho.
That's what's waiting for posterity in the vault, Charlotte.
That, or as another bananafish has suggested, the last works
of Jack Nicholson in The Shining.
Scottie B.
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