Zelazny, Roger - A Museum Piece

VIP免费

2024-11-23 0 0 22.52KB 7 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Roger%20Zelazny%20-%20A%20museum%20Piece.txt

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."

Later that afternoon a lone figure entered the Museum of Art, a

bundle beneath his arm.

Spiritually haggard (although clean-shaven to the

armpits), Smith loitered about the Greek Period until it was

emptied of all but himself and marble.

He selected a dark corner and unwrapped his pedestal. He

secreted the various personal things necessary for a showcase

existence, including most of his clothing, in its hollow

bottom.

"Good-bye, world," he renounced, "you should treat your

artists better," and mounted the pedestal.

His food money had not been completely wasted, for the

techniques he had mastered for four ninety-eight while on the

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Roger%20Zelazny%20-%20A%20museum%20Piece.txt (1 of 7) [10/16/2004 4:57:29 PM]

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Zelazny, Roger - A Museum Piece.pdf

共7页,预览1页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Zelazny, Roger - A Museum Piece

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: