New Publication: "The Pass"
New Publication: “The Pass”
Among the stories that were translated but left unpublished in Singer’s lifetime, “The Pass” stands out as a special case. It is short yet ambitious in its conception, aiming to portray the consciousness of a man as he passes from life into death. Some of Singer’s experiments, like “Inventions,” had indeed been set aside during his lifetime, as had stories having to do with death, such as “A Letter to Mama,” which also portrays a man’s spirit at the moment he dies. But here, Singer takes the experiment to its logical end, giving the narration itself over to the dying process. The result is both brief and moving: a testament of faith in the eternal life of the spirit.
Excerpt from “The Pass” by Isaac Bashevis Singer.
On the bed lay a small man, stark naked, with a little black beard and gray in the middle. His high sunburned forehead was pink and peeling. A beak-like nose, marked by a pince-nez, projected from between two round bird-like eyes. His false teeth rested on the night table beside a book bearing the title Spirit and Reality. Professor Javitz scratched his hairy chest and from time to time glanced absently at his forearm. “God, so much hair,” he thought aloud, then, “Darwin was certainly right.” The beads of perspiration forming on the professor’s forehead clung to the dead skin. The air conditioning in his Miami hotel room was not functioning though he had put in a complaint to room service several hours before. There was nothing further he could do. Meanwhile the thermometer registered a sweltering 98 degrees, and the professor shifted uncomfortably in the wet bedclothes.
“I’ve certainly committed a folly. What nonsense to have come to Miami in the summer. As if it weren’t hot enough in New York. How could I have been taken in by foolish advertisements? Well, it’s done. I’ll have to bear it for another five days. I’ll imagine that I’m in a hospital or a prison. Suppose I were in Russia, accused of left-wing or right-wing deviation. God in heaven! How close I came to being there. They’d already stamped the visa on my passport.” Professor Javitz smiled. With the palm of his hand he mopped the wet turf of hair that remained in the middle of his head. “Yes, one makes mistakes. The last thing which a man does in his life is probably a mistake. “The Logic of Mistakes” – have I seen a book like that or is it my own idea? Suppose that to the geometry of Lobachevsky and Riemann one added a geometry built on false conclusions. The trouble is that the number of false geometries would be infinite. They may well try that too. ‘A’ is not ‘A.’ My own life might be called false mathematics: false axioms, false definitions, false conclusions. What was my coming here in the middle of August if not an erroneous calculation?
“And how about Esther? What would happen if I phoned her now? After two and a half years of silence, suddenly, ‘Hello, it’s me, David.’ Assuming that she still lives there, that she hasn’t married, that she’s at home now and that she’d be willing to talk to me – what would I say to her? Well, I’m not going to do it anyhow. Inertia can increase no less than momentum. A new Newtonian formula: the longer a spirit is at rest, the greater the force necessary to set it in motion. The question is, why did I ever stop calling her? What if I had to explain it to somebody? Say, in a courtroom. We had everything – love, sex, friendship. Suddenly I stopped calling her. Why, why? Could I formulate it? Yes. I became a hypochondriac and had the illusion that she wanted to destroy me, spiritually, with thoughts, words, a modern kind of incantation. I actually fled from murder by magic like someone who believes in Voodoo. I was afraid of the evil eye or some such superstition. She spoke too much about death. Even in bed. She’d fallen into necromancy. Would a writer be able to do justice to such a situation? No, it wouldn’t sound real. The result would be farfetched, a melodramatic piece of literature. But that kind of melodrama has actually stopped an old love and has left me a lonesome man. Would anybody believe that I, a rationalist, could have succumbed to mysticism? And why didn’t she ever call? Is it possible that she divined what I was running away from? Perhaps her brain worked in quite a different way. Would a Dostoevsky or a Proust be able to describe such a state of affairs? No, no writer can set down the real truth. It’s too irrational, too fantastic, too insane. The truth, like a nightmare, can never be told.”
Read the full story here and the editorial afterword here. This story has been nominated for the esteemed Pushcart Prize.