I know you would have preferred one of those modern cars from Japan. I’ve learned to hate them. Japan is nothing but a parvenu in the OCCIDENTAL work of machinery, a clever imitator, incapable of capturing the profound logic that underlies the four speeds of the internal combustion engine. Have you ever seen a Japanese oil painting? It’s the same thing. The coloring is sickly, the composition chaotic, the touch of the brush uncertain. Where automobiles are concerned, they haven’t been able to come up with an equivalent to the fine technique of an Utamaro, a Suzuki Harunobu, those exquisite woodblock prints on rice paper. Only the Chinese, far wiser, have discovered the crowd of cyclists, the hybrid rickshaw. Isn’t the apparent ease with which a cyclist pedals, though all his muscles are straining, more Oriental? As is the modest size of the sedan chair. But this tendency toward lightness, when translated into automobile design, brought on the disaster of the horrible Nissan, the irresponsible airiness of the Mazda. The Japanese invasion has been successful because it found an important chink in the OCCIDENTAL bloc: the aerodynamic tendency. Evidence of which can be found in the showy “ducktail”—you see? Flight! — at the beginning of the sixties. Then in the seventies the Arabs had us worrying about not using so much oil, which meant we were ready when Ford, in despair, launched its execrable Torino, an entirely plain vehicle, nothing at all for the imagination to cling to, antiseptic.
I’m comforted only by the knowledge that vehicles propelled by solar batteries are on their way, and these new ecological cars, these zen cars — their retractable headlights making them look like insects — may give rise to automobiles that are fundamentally new, perhaps in no way different from arachnids, a complete fusion with nature: an emergence from the kingdom of the machine into something else. Can’t we view the horse as the final phase of the prehistoric automobile that belonged to the civilization prior to ours? Isn’t it true that the Japanese — them again! — have invented a many-limbed robot, the prototype of some future means of transport?
(We drove toward the sea together across the coastal hills, our PACKARD swift and ultrapowerful; LINDA eating her fill of grapes for the first time in years. The vineyards of Crimea.)
PALACE (CHINESE). I got off the train at O**, near Petersburg, at the beginning of June. The station virtually a ruin. Birdcalls in the silence, a warm breeze. To judge by the scant number of passengers continuing on, there must have been only two or three more stops on the line. At the edge of a shady grove of oak trees I came to a fence that bore the map of the park. I studied it as if it were an animated tableau and I a medieval knight confronting the thousand possible paths across a game board that chance might dictate. My finger inexorably traced the route to the CHINESE PALACE. I was thirsty. Birdcalls in the silence, a warm breeze.
How could I have imagined that what awaited me around a bend in that hedge maze would turn out to be an unexpected augury of the sort provided by the I Ching? The CHINESE PALACE was not the Ming pagoda, the gilded pavilion I had imagined. For a moment I thought I’d lost my way and had reached some imperial DACHA of Peter II heretofore unsuspected by historians. A pond — a small artificial lake with ducks — reflected the Italianate volutes of a PALACE entirely devoid of Asiatic complexities. I consulted the sign to be certain I hadn’t made a mistake. The caption, as revealing as a conceptualist label, read: CHINESE PALACE. And since, effectively, this Russian PALACE was thus transformed into the CHINESE PALACE I was seeking, I thought of two more plaques. One in front of the lake that read Sea, and the other over the little house for the ducks, stating Gryphons.
I found the basket of slippers for visitors entirely at my disposal; the season had only just begun. I chose a shapeless green pair with elastic bands at the heels then stood up and walked forward uncertainly, a centimeter of felt between the soles of my feet and the floor. As I waited for the guide, it began to rain. There would be no other visitors today. I crossed the threshold and shuffled along with difficulty, giving the parquet floor a nice polish, and for free.
The guide, a shawl draped over her shoulders, had the tired face of a schoolmistress prepared to repeat a boring lesson about anaerobic respiration, a subject that escapes both her comprehension and her immediate perception. Her palaver followed a strict rhythm and bothered me as an inopportune fog would have, or rather, a light that was overly bright. Facing a writing desk with mother-of-pearl inlay, I intensified my scrutiny in an attempt to elude her explanations (date of manufacture, provenance) and, leaning forward to observe its delicate iridescence more closely, understood, suddenly, that the owner of that PALACE had also tried to free himself from a boring European existence (which must have annoyed him as much as the guide’s aimless blather was irritating me) by surrounding himself with Chinoiseries. There in the left wing of his PALACE, he could embark on excursions into the virtual cosmos of a life exempt from fatiguing service to Mother Russia. He had accumulated bronzes and porcelains, spheres of carved openwork marble, carpets showing the crane of wisdom and the tortoise of longevity, as if he were never going to die, which is the illusion of those who exist in the perfect present moment of their knickknacks.
It was an ideal PALACE to live in, with minimal distance between my bosom and its magnificence. It made you feel that its owner, the gentleman who loved Japanese lacquers, had gone out for a brief stroll in the garden and would return, from one moment to the next, to the steaming samovar, afternoon TEA almost ready. The very fact that the Germans hadn’t occupied it during the war — information provided by the guide — lent it the attraction of goods prudently placed in the vault of a Swiss bank, safe from any danger.
I was incapable of imagining myself CZAR of all Russia, lord of the Grand Duchy of Muscovy, summering in Petergoff. But the CHINESE PALACE could well have been mine, along with a pair of thoroughbreds and its collection of Chinoiseries. To stroll through its rooms was to tighten and pluck the strings of many readings and images that had hung loosely in my thoracic cavity until then. They’d been dangling there for years, occasionally emitting beautiful notes, but the process by which they were tuned at last culminated in that PALACE and left me ready to be played upon by the long fingers of stimuli that were essentially insignificant.
But equivalent, I hasten to clarify. Only years later did I have the money to begin overcoming, little by little, in tiny baby steps, the cosmic distance that separated me from a life such as that one. It was like throwing things into an unfathomable abyss—$2 million mansions, fifty-five-meter yachts, holidays in Oceania — never, in any case, to achieve any diminution of the gap. Yet this could cause me no pain. The man who is born owning a golf course never comes to understand the formidable pressure, the truly fundamental value of such a possession. I, in effect, had nothing, absolutely nothing; however, like a bronzed torso in an advertisement, I had captured the spirit. To caress the jade of the little statues was to touch the curving limb of the crane in flight, offered by the Zen master but invisible to my blind eyes. Or it was as if the spirit of the owner of the PALACE had appeared in the flesh before me to break his walking stick over my shaven head.