Camus Crosses The Street, parts 850 - 853

850. Buboni listened to Jemima with great interest and with each word began to squirm and twitch with all the thoughts swimming in his mind. Twice as she spoke he started to interrupt her, but held back trying to force himself for once to be polite, but when she finished a sentence he jumped in excitedly.

851. "This this..., is just exactly the crux of the problem of the modern artist," he said. "Don't you see, nobody is asking Coromo to paint pictures and nobody cares what he paints. He has to come up with the ideas all by himself, and on top of that, he has to provide the motivation." Here Buboni paused, and waited for Aunt Jemima to reply.

852. I want to take just a second and say something about this pause in Buboni's speech. By now you know what our Buboni is like, he has no respect for any one's opinions and will only listen to the Duck because the Duck is so intelligent, but here he was showing a subtitle deference to Aunt Jemima, and actually waiting patiently to see what she would have to say in reply. 

853. Yes, it was one of those unmistakable moments when you realize that one person is attracted to another person, and your eye flashes across the space between their eyes in order to ascertain if that attraction is reciprocated. I thought to myself, 'Buboni likes this Aunt Jemima', but I couldn't tell if she liked him, or was oblivious to his behavior.   

Camus Crosses The Street, parts 846 - 849

846. "But", the Duck continued, "I think it is you Aunt Jemima, that is embroidering your stories with pieces of fiction you have read in order to make the narration more interesting for your listeners. Perhaps long ago you happened to read Boccaccio's Decameron and so you added to your story of Coromo and the youngest sister the detail of his being very religious, in order to drag out that time in the woods when he was so full of desire."

847. "The difference is Mr. Duck", said Aunt Jemima, "I know Coromo and so I know he was very religious, but you did not know Marie Antoinette, so there.  Coromo's religious convictions had an interesting effect on his development as an artist as a matter of fact." "How so?" asked Buboni, always one to want to hear the details of some artists career. 

848. "Coromo had the idea to do paintings in his spare time and then try to find a way to have them get seen at the resort where he worked," said Aunt Jemima. "His biggest problem was always what to use for subject matter. He knew he wanted to paint pictures, he just did not know what those pictures should be about.

849. He finished six pictures, all of which were attempts to imitate children's pictures, as you know, but after he sold those paintings to Tallulah he had no reason to imitate children's pictures anymore. But if he was going to paint pictures, what sort of pictures should he paint, he wondered."

Camus Crosses The Street, parts 842 - 845

842. Do you notice the similarity of Coromo beginning to paint and Netochka beginning to sing.  Coromo was not interested in painting pictures at first, he came about it by accident because he was trying to emulate children's pictures to entertain his woman friends. So in both cases you see, people became involved in their art completely by accident.

843. The similarity in those stories makes me suspect that the Duck has invented the story of Netochka. He is transforming the details in my story about Coromo, changed it to fit a different circumstance, and trotted it out as some piece of discovered history only he can have knowledge of because of some Duck hocus pocus. But I have always thought it is very important to make a distinction between historical truth, and fiction made up by Ducks carried away by their own eloquence.

844. "Duck hocus pocus?" quacked the duck. "What are you talking about?" "I did not make up any story about Netochka, the story I told you was directly from the music tutor who heard it from his father the viola player and transcriber of Vivaldi's manuscripts. I told you what I heard, I never make anything up, and as far as Netochka being similar to Coromo, it is an interesting observation, but it is only a coincidence.

845. As a matter of fact although I have a fantastic memory and the ability to weave those memories into stories intended to explain certain ideas, I have no ability to invent anything because I have no imagination. My head is so full of the images of all the things I know actually happened there is no room for fairy tales and fiction, I have no use for fiction anyway. 

Camus Crosses The Street, parts 838 - 841

838. When is a gum wrapper sticking momentarily to a lamppost the most interesting thing you ever saw, something you promise yourself you will remember till your dying day?  It is that time you walked across a parking lot just after some doctor in a lab coat told you you are not going to die after all. "No' the doctor said, 'you are going to live, going to live for ever."

839. To say that ones life had no meaning, and was a waste of time is treason against the self. One has to rise up against a thought like that and..., Just then, Aunt Jemima noticed me and said, "Richard what is going on in that head of yours, you look like you are going to blow a fuse, are you all right." Apparently she could see painted on my face all the disturbed things that were going on in my head.

840. Her question made me feel self conscious and I could not start talking about what was on my mind at that moment so to change the subject I asked Aunt Jemima what she thought of the Duck's stories about Marie Antoinette, and the tutor's story about Vivaldi.

841. "I have no idea where this Duck gets his information", said Jemima, " I don't doubt that he knows what he is talking about. One thing stands out for me however, and it is the detail about Netochka becoming an opera singer by accident. When Netochka first starts to sing with passion and conviction it is just to entertain her friends, and not because she is interested in the music she is singing."

Camus Crosses The Street, parts 834 - 837

834. Frost on a winter window matters just as much as all the works of Shakespeare, and a shoe by the side of the road, driven over and crushed by traffic and soaked with rain water is just as worthy to be in a glass vitrine in the Louvre as the paintings of either Da Vinci or Van Gogh.

835. I suppose the Duck would say: Let us stop Marie Antoinette's cart in which she is being taken to the guillotine, have her step down and you, whomever you may be, shall get in in her place. Now it is you that is on the way to your death which will occur in fifteen minutes depending on the traffic.

836. Wouldn't you want that tumbrel to go slowly, or perhaps stop all together for as long as possible, and can't you see that a bee buzzing around near your ear is just as interesting as anything you have ever heard. In this situation it is obvious that the old wet shoe in the road is as interesting as any object in a museum you have paid money to stand in front of.

837. You may get down from Marie's cart now, and she will get back in, and with a sigh of relief go back to thinking that some sights and some sounds are more worthy of your attention than others. But you will be deceiving yourself, because the fact is, you are in that cart, and you will never get out of it, accept it.

Camus Crosses The Street, parts 830 - 833

830. So I began to take classes at the museum, that was my new purpose once I retired, but it was always with a nagging feeling that casting things into plaster had to also be entirely pointless, if indeed all the years leading up to the making of those casts was pointless. How many times did I sit back and look at the things I worked on, and in my mind would arise this image of the sun exploding, and a huge wall of flame coming to consume the earth and everything in it.

831. All my little plaster casts of hands and feet, and the big casts I had made and stored out in the garage where my wife could not see them, burnt to cinders, burnt to less than cinders, burnt to a vapor, along with all the great masterpieces of history, all the special museum collections. Even that old shoe box full of unusual stamps some old man has collected from World War I, at the back of the shelf in a closet where thieves will never find it, burnt to a crisp, destroyed for ever.

832. Those were the images passing through my mind, images all of which agreed with Buboni and his notion that a life could indeed be one long meaningless decent into nothingness. For him it was really worse than that, in that he had built up a career for himself, only to see it all disappear before his eyes in an instant and be replaced by humiliation.

833. But the Duck had to be right in the end, because it was an all or nothing equation, either everything matters for all time, or nothing matters, how can it be both and neither. One is faced in the end with a simple fact, some day none of this will exist, and so everything matters, or nothing matters, since that is so, the Duck thinks that an ant crawling across the edge of a table is just as important as Einstein's theories.

Camus Crosses The Street, parts 826 - 829

826. And what did Dostoevsky and Marie Antoinette have in common? Everything, everything that mattered. Because both of them were placed in a cart, and driven by others through crowds to their execution. Marie to be executed, and Dostoevsky to be pardoned at the last moment.

827. "Now Buboni", concluded the Duck, "are you really going to suggest that those fifteen minutes in the cart had no significance? The simple truth is that every segment of  fifteen minutes in a life is either equally significant, or on the other hand equally pointless. Take your choice, and as a Duck I chose the former, and you as a worn out old frustrated professor, will probably chose the latter."

828. But what of me, I thought to myself. How many times did I look up at the back wall of the post office and note the time, fifteen minutes more till the morning break, or thirty minutes more till lunch. How many times did I mark on a scrap of paper a line to represent a minute gone by on the way to five o'clock. My life was exactly like that famous poem with the line, "I measure out my life with coffee spoons."

829. And in the same way that I marked time each day in intervals of five minutes, so also I marked out the years to pass until my retirement, my retirement when I could turn my attention to all those things that really mattered to me, the only problem being that nothing really mattered to me. It was just wishful thinking. I suppose I felt that once I reached the magic age of 65 some purpose for life would pop up as if out of the ground, and I would turn my attention to it.