John Barth

Ah, God, it were an easy Matter to choose a Calling hadone all Time to live in! I should be fifty Years aBarrister, fifty a Physician, fifty a Clergyman, fifty aSoldier! Aye, and fifty a Thief, and fifty a Judge! AllRoads are fine Roads, beloved Sister, none more thananother, so that with one Life to spend I am a Manbare-bumm'd at Taylors with Cash for but one pair ofBreeches, or a Scholar at Brookstalls with Money for asingle Book: to choose ten were no Trouble; to choose one,impossible! All Trades, all Crafts, all Professions arewondrous, but none is finer than the rest together. Icannot choose, sweet Anna: twixt Stools my Breech fallethto the Ground!

Every artist joins a conversation that's been going on for generations, even millennia, before he or she joins the scene.

The Genie declared that in his time and place there were scientists of the passions who maintained that language itself, on the one hand, originated in 'infantile pregenital erotic exuberance, polymorphously perverse,' and that conscious attention, on the other, was a 'libidinal hypercathexis' -- by which magic phrases they seemed to mean that writing and reading, or telling and listening, were literally ways of making love.

The difference __wixt poet and coxcomb is precisely that the latter stops gaps like a ship fitter caulking seams, merely to keep the boat afloat, while the former doth his work as doth a man with a maid: he fills the gap, but with vigor, finesse, and care; there__ beauty and delight as well as utility in his plugging

The Bible is not man's word about God, but God's word about man.

This is an exciting time. A new chapter in our history.

More history's made by secret handshakes than by battles bills and proclamations.

Tis e'er the wont of simple folk to prize the deed and overlook the motive and of learned folk to discount the deed and lay open the soul of the doer.

Somewhere in the world there was a young woman with such splendid understanding that she'd see him entire, like a poem or story, and find his words so valuable after all that when he confessed his apprehensions she would explain why they were in fact the very things that made him precious to her...and to Western Civilization! There was no such girl, the simple truth being.

The reader! You, dogged, uninsultable, print-oriented bastard, it's you I'm addressing, who else, from inside this monstrous fiction. You've read me this far, then? Even this far? For what discreditable motive? How is it you don't go to a movie, watch TV, stare at a wall, play tennis with a friend, make amorous advances to the person who comes to your mind when I speak of amorous advances? Can nothing surfeit, saturate you, turn you off? Where's your shame?

In life,_ he said, __here are no essentially major or minor characters. To that extent, all fiction and biography, and most historiography, are a lie. Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story. Hamlet could be told from Polonius__ point of view and called The Tragedy of Polonius, Lord Chamberlain of Denmark. He didn__ think he was a minor character in anything, I daresay. Or suppose you__e an usher in a wedding. From the groom__ viewpoint he__ the major character; the others play supporting parts, even the bride. From your viewpoint, though, the wedding is a minor episode in the very interesting history of your life, and the bridge and groom both are minor figures. What you__e done is choose to play the part of a minor character: it can be pleasant for you to pretend to be less important you know you are, as Odysseus does when he disguises as a swineherd. And every member of the congregation at the wedding sees himself as the major character, condescending to witness the spectacle. So in this sense fiction isn__ a lie at all, but a true representation of the distortion that everyone makes of life. __ow, not only are we the heroes of our own life stories__e__e the ones who conceive the story, and give other people the essences of minor characters. But since no man__ life story as a rule is ever one story with a coherent plot, we__e always reconceiving just the sort of hero we are, and consequently just the sort of minor roles that other people are supposed to play. This is generally true. If any man displays almost the same character day in and day out, all day long, it__ either because he has no imagination, like an actor who can play only one role, or because he has an imagination so comprehensive that he sees each particular situation of his life as an episode in some grand over-all plot, and can so distort the situations that the same type of hero can deal with them all. But this is most unusual. __his kind of role-assigning is myth-making, and when it__ done consciously or unconsciously for the purpose of aggrandizing or protecting your ego__nd it__ probably done for this purpose all the time__t becomes Mythotherapy. Here__ the point: an immobility such as you experienced that time in Penn Station is possible only to a person who for some reason or other has ceased to participate in Mythotherapy. At that time on the bench you were neither a major nor a minor character: you were no character at all. It__ because this has happened once that it__ necessary for me to explain to you something that comes quite naturally to everyone else. It__ like teaching a paralytic how to walk again.

Now many crises in people__ lives occur because the hero role that they__e assumed for one situation or set of situations no longer applies to some new situation that comes up, or__he same thing in effect__ecause they haven__ the imagination to distort the new situation to fit their old role. This happens to parents, for instance, when their children grow older, and to lovers when one of them begins to dislike the other. If the new situation is too overpowering to ignore, and they can__ find a mask to meet it with, they may become schizophrenic__ last-resort mask__r simply shattered. All questions of integrity involve this consideration, because a man__ integrity consists in being faithful to the script he__ written for himself. ____e said you__e too unstable to play any one part all the time__ou__e also too unimaginative__o for you these crises had better be met by changing scripts as often as necessary. This should come naturally to you; the important thing for you is to realize what you__e doing so you won__ get caught without a script, or with the wrong script in a given situation. You did quite well, for example, for a beginner, to walk in here so confidently and almost arrogantly a while ago, and assign me the role of a quack. But you must be able to change masks at once if by some means or other I__ able to make the one you walked in with untenable. Perhaps____ just suggesting an offhand possibility__ou could change to thinking of me as The Sagacious Old Mentor, a kind of Machiavellian Nestor, say, and yourself as The Ingenuous But Promising Young Protégé, a young Alexander, who someday will put all these teachings into practice and far outshine the master. Do you get the idea? Or__his is repugnant, but it could be used as a last resort__he Silently Indignant Young Man, who tolerates the ravings of a Senile Crank but who will leave this house unsullied by them. I call this repugnant because if you ever used it you__ cut yourself off from much that you haven__ learned yet. __t__ extremely important that you learn to assume these masks wholeheartedly. Don__ think there__ anything behind them: ego means I, and I means ego, and the ego by definition is a mask. Where there__ no ego__his is you on the bench__here__ no I. If you sometimes have the feeling that your mask is insincere__mpossible word!__t__ only because one of your masks is incompatible with another. You mustn__ put on two at a time. There__ a source of conflict, and conflict between masks, like absence of masks, is a source of immobility. The more sharply you can dramatize your situation, and define your own role and everybody else__ role, the safer you__l be. It doesn__ matter in Mythotherapy for paralytics whether your role is major or minor, as long as it__ clearly conceived, but in the nature of things it__l normally be major. Now say something.

Now many crises in people__ lives occur because the hero role that they__e assumed for one situation or set of situations no longer applies to some new situation that comes up, or__he same thing in effect__ecause they haven__ the imagination to distort the new situation to fit their old role. This happens to parents, for instance, when their children grow older, and to lovers when one of them begins to dislike the other. If the new situation is too overpowering to ignore, and they can__ find a mask to meet it with, they may become schizophrenic__ last-resort mask__r simply shattered. All questions of integrity involve this consideration, because a man__ integrity consists in being faithful to the script he__ written for himself. ____e said you__e too unstable to play any one part all the time__ou__e also too unimaginative__o for you these crises had better be met by changing scripts as often as necessary. This should come naturally to you; the important thing for you is to realize what you__e doing so you won__ get caught without a script, or with the wrong script in a given situation. You did quite well, for example, for a beginner, to walk in here so confidently and almost arrogantly a while ago, and assign me the role of a quack. But you must be able to change masks at once if by some means or other I__ able to make the one

There's a great difficulty in makingchoices if you have any imagination at all. Faced with such a multitude of desireable choices, no one choiceseems satisfactory for very long by comparison with the aggregate desirability of all the rest, though compared to any *one* of the others it would not be found inferior. All equally attractive but none finally inviting.

people still fall in love, and out, yes, in and out, and out and in, and they please each other, and hurt each other, isn't that the truth, and they do these things in more or less conventionally dramatic fashion, unfashionable or not, go on, I'm going, and what goes on between them is still not only the most interesting but the most important thing in the bloody murderous world

Unhappily, things get clearer as we go along. I perceive that I have no body. What's less, I've been speaking of myself without delight or alternative as self-consciousness pure and sour; I declare now that even that isn't true. I'm not aware of myself at all, as far as I know. I don't think. . . I know what I'm talking about.