おととい書いたレビューらしきものを読み返してみると、いかにも一面的な感想で、Robert Musil あるいは本書の本質をとらえたものかどうかは大いに怪しい。が、少なくとも今のぼくは、ああいうふうにしか読めなかった。あんな要素しか目に入らなかった。その意味では、たとえ「一面的な感想」であっても、ぼくにとっては全面的なものである、と開き直るしかない。ま、いつものことですが。
今月なかばに紹介した "The Perfection of a Love" の引用箇所のキーワードは、'this ultimate human ecstasy', 'the very edge of life', 'a dark hiding-place for the stealthy urges of the soul within', 'her own being', 'behind the walls of her inner being', 'savage, abandoned ecstasy in being herself', 'far beyond the limits of the human being' などである。このように列挙してみると、その共通項に気がつくことだろう。それについて整理しようと思っているうちに、公私ともども諸般の事情でブログを更新する余裕がなくなってしまった。
"The Temptation of Quiet Veronica" でも、ぼくが思わず凝視したくだりは "The Perfection of a Love" と似たようなものだ。'Her sense of herself was now vague and fluid, and when she probed her own being all she could discover was the shifting of veiled, indefinite forms, as if she were touching something that stirred under a blanket, without being able to identify it.' (p.197)
'And suddenly she could not help thinking of something she had once been told: that millions of infinitestimal living entities have their habitation on every human being and that with every drawn breath and every breath exhaled there are incalculable rivers of life that come and go.' (p.204)
'In dreams one abandons oneself to a beloved the way one fluid merges with another; there is an altered sense of space, for the awakened soul is a hollow space within space and cannot ever be filled―the soul causes the space around it to warp and become like ice that is full of bubbles.' (p.211)
'... and when now and then her body secretly pressed these coverings [her clothes] around it a tremulous ripple of sensuality went through it, like a hidden light moving restlessly through a house behind closed shutters.' (p.215)
このような箇所や上のキーワードを頭に置きながら、ぼくは本書の感想をレビューにまとめたわけである。
