Story of o full text
The Best of O. Henry Full Text - The Furnished Room
RESTLESS, SHIFTING, FUGACIOUS as time itself is a certain vast bulk of the population of the red brick district of the lower West Side. Homeless, they have a hundred homes. They flit from furnished room to furnished room, transients forever—transients in abode, transients in heart and mind. They sing “Home, Sweet Home” in ragtime; they carry their lares et penates in a bandbox; their vine is entwined about a picture hat; a rubber plant is their fig tree.
Hence the houses of this district, having had a thousand dwellers, should have a thousand tales to tell, mostly dull ones, no doubt; but it would be strange if there could not be found a ghost or two in the wake of all these vagrant guests.
One evening after dark a young man prowled among these crumbling red mansions, ringing their bells. At the twelfth he rested his lean hand-baggage upon the step and wiped the dust from his hatband and forehead.
The bell sounded faint and far away in some remote, hollow depths.
To the door of this, the twelfth house whose bell he had rung, came a housekeeper who made him think of an unwholesome, surfeited worm that had eaten its nut to a hollow shell and now sought to fill the vacancy with edible lodgers.
He asked if there was a room to let.
“Come in,” said the housekeeper. Her voice came from her throat; hert hroat seemed lined with fur. “I have the third-floor back, vacant since a week back. Should you wish to look at it?”
The young man followed her up the stairs. A faint light from no particular source mitigated the shadows of the halls. They trod noiselessly upon a stair carpet that its own loom would have forsworn. It seemed to have become vegetable; to have degenerated in that rank, sunless air to lush lichen or spreading moss that grew in patches to the staircase and was viscid under the foot like organic matter. At each turn of the stairs were vacant niches in the wall.
Perhaps plants had once been set within them. If so they had died in that foul and tainted air. It may be that statues of the saints had stood there, but it was not difficult to conceive that imps and devils had dragged them forth in the darkness and down to the unholy depths of some furnished pit below.
“This is the room,” said the housekeeper, from her furry throat. “It's a nice room. It ain't often vacant. I had some most elegant people in it last summer—no trouble at all, and paid in advance to the minute. The water's at the end of the hall. Sprowls and Mooney kept it three months. They done a vaudeville sketch. Miss B'retta Sprowls—you may have heard of her—Oh, that was just the stage names—right there over the dresser is where the marriage certificate hung, framed. The gas is here, and you see there is plenty of closet room. It's a room everybody likes. It never stays idle long.”
“Do you have many theatrical people rooming here?” asked the young man.
“They comes and goes.
A good proportion of my lodgers is connected with the theatres. Yes, sir, this is the theatrical district. Actor people never stays long anywhere. I get my share. Yes, they comes and they goes.”
He engaged the room, paying for a week in advance. He was tired, he said, and would take possession at once. He counted out the money. The room had been made ready, she said, even to towels and water. As the housekeeper moved away he put, for the thousandth time, the question that he carried at the end of his tongue.
“A young girl—Miss Vashner—Miss Eloise Vashner—do you remember such a one among your lodgers? She would be singing on the stage, most likely. A fair girl, of medium height and slender, with reddish, gold hair and a dark mole near her left eyebrow.”
“No, I don't remember the name. Them stage people has names they change as often as their rooms. They comes and they goes. No, I don't call that one to mind.”
No. Always no. Five months of ceaseless interrogation and the inevitable negative.
So much time spent by day in questioning managers, agents, schools and choruses; by night among the audiences of theatres from all-star casts down to music halls so low that he dreaded to find what he most hoped for. He who had loved her best had tried to find her. He was sure that since her disappearance from home this great, water-girt city held her somewhere, but it was like a monstrous quicksand, shifting its particles constantly, with no foundation, its upper granules of to-day buried tomorrow in ooze and slime.
The furnished room received its latest guest with a first glow of pseudo-hospitality, a hectic, haggard, perfunctory welcome like the specious smile of a demirep. The sophistical comfort came in reflected gleams from the decayed furniture, the ragged brocade upholstery of a couch and two chairs, a foot-wide cheap pier-glass between the two windows, from one or two gilt picture frames and a brass bedstead in a corner.
The guest reclined, inert, upon a chair, while the room, confused in speech as though it were an apartment in Babel, tried to discourse to him of its divers tenantry.
A polychromatic rug like some brilliant-flowered rectangular, tropical islet lay surrounded by a billowy sea of soiled matting. Upon the gay-papered wall were those pictures that pursue the homeless one from house to house—The Huguenot Lovers, The First Quarrel, The Wedding Breakfast, Psyche at the Fountain. The mantel's chastely severe outline was ingloriously veiled behind some pert drapery drawn rakishly askew like the sashes of the Amazonian ballet. Upon it was some desolate flotsam cast aside by the room's marooned when a lucky sail had borne them to a fresh port—a trifling vase or two, pictures of actresses, a medicine bottle, some stray cards out of a deck.
One by one, as the characters of a cryptograph become explicit, the little signs left by the furnished room's procession of guests developed a significance. The threadbare space in the rug in front of the dresser told that lovely women had marched in the throng. Tiny fingerprints on the wall spoke of little prisoners trying to feel their way to sun and air.
A splattered stain, raying like the shadow of a bursting bomb, witnessed where a hurled glass or bottle had splintered with its contents against the wall. Across the pier glass had been scrawled with a diamond in staggering letters the name “Marie.” It seemed that the succession of dwellers in the furnished room had turned in fury—perhaps tempted beyond forbearance by its garish coldness—and wreaked upon it their passions. The furniture was chipped and bruised; the couch, distorted by bursting springs, seemed a horrible monster that had been slain during the stress of some grotesque convulsion. Some more potent upheaval had cloven a great slice from the marble mantel. Each plank in the floor owned its particular cant and shriek as from a separate and individual agony. It seemed incredible that all this malice and injury had been wrought upon the room by those who had called it for a time their home; and yet it may have been the cheated home instinct surviving blindly, the resentful rage at false household gods that had kindled their wrath.
A hut that is our own we can sweep and adorn and cherish.
The young tenant in the chair allowed these thoughts to file, soft-shod, through his mind, while there drifted into the room furnished sounds and furnished scents. He heard in one room a tittering and incontinent, slack laughter; in others the monologue of a scold, the rattling of dice, a lullaby, and one crying dully; above him a banjo tinkled with spirit. Doors banged somewhere; the elevated trains roared intermittently; a cat yowled miserably upon a back fence. And he breathed the breath of the house—a dank savour rather than a smell—a cold, musty effluvium as from underground vaults mingled with the reeking exhalations of linoleum and mildewed and rotten woodwork.
Then, suddenly, as he rested there, the room was filled with the strong, sweet odor of mignonette. It came as upon a single buffet of wind with such sureness and fragrance and emphasis that it almost seemed a living visitant. And the man cried aloud: “What, dear?” as if he had been called, and sprang up and faced about.
The rich odor clung to him and wrapped him around. He reached out his arms for it, all his senses for the time confused and commingled. How could one be peremptorily called by an odor? Surely it must have been a sound. But, was it not the sound that had touched, that had caressed him?
“She has been in this room,” he cried, and he sprang to wrest from it a token, for he knew he would recognize the smallest thing that had belonged to her or that she had touched. This enveloping scent of mignonette, the odor that she had loved and made her own—whence came it?
The room had been but carelessly set in order. Scattered upon the flimsy dresser scarf were half a dozen hairpins—those discreet, indistinguishable friends of womankind, feminine of gender, infinite of mood and uncommunicative of tense. These he ignored, conscious of their triumphant lack of identity. Ransacking the drawers of the dresser he came upon a discarded, tiny, ragged handkerchief. He pressed it to his face.
It was racy and insolent with heliotrope; he hurled it to the floor. In another drawer he found odd buttons, a theatre programme, a pawnbroker's card, two lost marshmallows, a book on the divination of dreams. In the last was a woman's black satin hair bow, which halted him, poised between ice and fire. But the black satin hair bow also is femininity's demure, impersonal, common ornament, and tells no tales.
And then he traversed the room like a hound on the scent, skimming the walls, considering the corners of the bulging matting on his hands and knees, rummaging mantel and tables, the curtains and hangings, the drunken cabinet in the corner, for a visible sign, unable to perceive that she was there beside, around, against, within, above him, clinging to him, wooing him, calling him so poignantly through the finer senses that even his grosser ones became cognizant of the call. Once again he answered loudly: “Yes, dear!” and turned, wild-eyed, to gaze on vacancy, for he could not yet discern form and color and love and outstretched arms in the odor of mignonette.
Oh, God! whence that odor, and since when have odors had a voice to call? Thus he groped.
He burrowed in crevices and corners, and found corks and cigarettes. These he passed in passive contempt. But once he found in a fold of the matting a half-smoked cigar, and this he ground beneath his heel with a green and trenchant oath. He sifted the room from end to end. He found dreary and ignoble small records of many a peripatetic tenant; but of her whom he sought, and who may have lodged there, and whose spirit seemed to hover there, he found no trace.
And then he thought of the housekeeper.
He ran from the haunted room downstairs and to a door that showed a crack of light. She came out to his knock. He smothered his excitement as best he could.
“Will you tell me, madam,” he besought her, “who occupied the room I have before I came?”
“Yes, sir. I can tell you again. ’Twas Sprowls and Mooney, as I said. Miss B'retta Sprowls it was in the theatres, but Missis Mooney she was.
My house is well known for respectability. The marriage certificate hung, framed, on a nail over—”
“What kind of a lady was Miss Sprowls—in looks, I mean?”
“Why, black-haired, sir, short, and stout, with a comical face. They left a week ago Tuesday.”
“And before they occupied it?”
“Why, there was a single gentleman connected with the draying business. He left owing me a week. Before him was Missis Crowder and her two children, that stayed four months; and back of them was old Mr. Doyle, whose sons paid for him. He kept the room six months. That goes back a year, sir, and further I do not remember.”
He thanked her and crept back to his room. The room was dead. The essence that had vivified it was gone. The perfume of mignonette had departed. In its place was the old, stale odor of moldy house furniture, of atmosphere in storage.
The ebbing of his hope drained his faith. He sat staring at the yellow, singing gaslight.
Soon he walked to the bed and began to tear the sheets into strips. With the blade of his knife he drove them tightly into every crevice around windows and door. When all was snug and taut he turned out the light, turned the gas full on again and laid himself gratefully upon the bed.
* * * * * *
It was Mrs. McCool's night to go with the can for beer. So she fetched it and sat with Mrs. Purdy in one of those subterranean retreats where housekeepers foregather and the worm dieth seldom.
“I rented out my third-floor-back this evening,” said Mrs. Purdy, across a fine circle of foam. “A young man took it. He went up to bed two hours ago.”
“Now, did ye, Mrs. Purdy, ma'am?” said Mrs. McCool, with intense admiration. “You do be a wonder for rentin' rooms of that kind. And did ye tell him, then?” she concluded in a husky whisper, laden with mystery.
“Rooms,” said Mrs. Purdy, in her furriest tones, “are furnished for to rent. I did not tell him, Mrs.
McCool.”
“’Tis right ye are, ma'am; ’tis by renting rooms we kape alive. Ye have the rale sense for business, ma'am. There be many people will rayjict the rentin' of a room if they be tould a suicide has been after dyin' in the bed of it.”
“As you say, we has our living to be making,” remarked Mrs. Purdy.
“Yis, ma'am; ’tis true. ’Tis just one wake ago this day I helped ye lay out the third-floor-back. A pretty slip of a colleen she was to be killin' herself wid the gas—a swate little face she had, Mrs. Purdy, ma'am.”
“She'd a-been called handsome, as you say,” said Mrs. Purdy, assenting but critical, “but for that mole she had a-growin' by her left eyebrow. Do fill up your glass again, Mrs. McCool.”
The Best of O. Henry Full Text - The Last Leaf
IN A LITTLE district west of Washington Square the streets have run crazy and broken themselves into small strips called “places.” These “places” make strange angles and curves.
One street crosses itself a time or two. An artist once discovered a valuable possibility in this street. Suppose a collector with a bill for paints, paper and canvas should, in traversing this route, suddenly meet himself coming back, without a cent having been paid on account!
So, to quaint old Greenwich Village the art people soon came prowling, hunting for north windows and eighteenth-century gables and Dutch attics and low rents. Then they imported some pewter mugs and a chafing dish or two from Sixth avenue, and became a “colony.”
At the top of a squatty, three-story brick Sue and Johnsy had their studio. “Johnsy” was familiar for Joanna. One was from Maine; the other from California. They had met at the table d'hote of an Eighth street “Delmonico's,” and found their tastes in art, chicory salad and bishop sleeves so congenial that the joint studio resulted.
That was in May. In November a cold, unseen stranger, whom the doctors called Pneumonia, stalked about the colony, touching one here and there with his icy fingers.
Over on the east side this ravager strode boldly, smiting his victims by scores, but his feet trod slowly through the maze of the narrow and moss-grown “places.”
Mr. Pneumonia was not what you would call a chivalric old gentleman. A mite of a little woman with blood thinned by California zephyrs was hardly fair game for the red-fisted, short-breathed old duffer. But Johnsy he smote; and she lay, scarcely moving, on her painted iron bedstead, looking through the small Dutch window-panes at the blank side of the next brick house.
One morning the busy doctor invited Sue into the hallway with a shaggy, gray eyebrow.
“She has one chance in—let us say, ten,” he said, as he shook down the mercury in his clinical thermometer. “And that chance is for her to want to live. This way people have of lining-up on the side of the undertaker makes the entire pharmacopeia look silly. Your little lady has made up her mind that she's not going to get well. Has she anything on her mind?”
“She—she wanted to paint the Bay of Naples some day,” said Sue.
“Paint?—bosh! Has she anything on her mind worth thinking about twice—a man, for instance?”
“A man?” said Sue, with a jew's-harp twang in her voice. “Is a man worth—but, no, doctor; there is nothing of the kind.”
“Well, it is the weakness, then,” said the doctor. “I will do all that science, so far as it may filter through my efforts, can accomplish. But whenever my patient begins to count the carriages in her funeral procession I subtract 50 per cent. from the curative power of medicines. If you will get her to ask one question about the new winter styles in cloak sleeves I will promise you a one-in-five chance for her, instead of one in ten.”
After the doctor had gone Sue went into the workroom and cried a Japanese napkin to a pulp. Then she swaggered into Johnsy's room with her drawing board, whistling ragtime.
Johnsy lay, scarcely making a ripple under the bedclothes, with her face toward the window. Sue stopped whistling, thinking she was asleep.
She arranged her board and began a pen-and-ink drawing to illustrate a magazine story. Young artists must pave their way to Art by drawing pictures for magazine stories that young authors write to pave their way to Literature.
As Sue was sketching a pair of elegant horseshow riding trousers and a monocle on the figure of the hero, an Idaho cowboy, she heard a low sound, several times repeated. She went quickly to the bedside.
Johnsy's eyes were open wide. She was looking out the window and counting—counting backward.
“Twelve,” she said, and a little later “eleven”; and then “ten,” and “nine”; and then “eight” and “seven,” almost together.
Sue looked solicitously out the window. What was there to count? There was only a bare, dreary yard to be seen, and the blank side of the brick house twenty feet away. An old, old ivy vine, gnarled and decayed at the roots, climbed half way up the brick wall. The cold breath of autumn had stricken its leaves from the vine until its skeleton branches clung, almost bare, to the crumbling bricks.
“What is it, dear?” asked Sue.
“Six,” said Johnsy, in almost a whisper. “They're falling faster now. Three days ago there were almost a hundred. It made my head ache to count them. But now it's easy. There goes another one. There are only five left now.”
“Five what, dear? Tell your Sudie.”
“Leaves. On the ivy vine. When the last one falls I must go, too. I've known that for three days. Didn't the doctor tell you?”
“Oh, I never heard of such nonsense,” complained Sue, with magnificent scorn. “What have old ivy leaves to do with your getting well? And you used to love that vine so, you naughty girl. Don't be a goosey. Why, the doctor told me this morning that your chances for getting well real soon were—let's see exactly what he said—he said the chances were ten to one! Why, that's almost as good a chance as we have in New York when we ride on the street cars or walk past a new building. Try to take some broth now, and let Sudie go back to her drawing, so she can sell the editor man with it, and buy port wine for her sick child, and pork chops for her greedy self.
”
“You needn't get any more wine,” said Johnsy, keeping her eyes fixed out the window. “There goes another. No, I don't want any broth. That leaves just four. I want to see the last one fall before it gets dark. Then I'll go, too.”
“Johnsy, dear,” said Sue, bending over her, “will you promise me to keep your eyes closed, and not look out the window until I am done working? I must hand those drawings in by tomorrow. I need the light, or I would draw the shade down.”
“Couldn't you draw in the other room?” asked Johnsy, coldly.
“I'd rather be here by you,” said Sue. “Besides, I don't want you to keep looking at those silly ivy leaves.”
“Tell me as soon as you have finished,” said Johnsy, closing her eyes, and lying white and still as a fallen statue, “because I want to see the last one fall. I'm tired of waiting. I'm tired of thinking. I want to turn loose my hold on everything, and go sailing down, down, just like one of those poor, tired leaves.
”
“Try to sleep,” said Sue. “I must call Behrman up to be my model for the old hermit miner. I'll not be gone a minute. Don't try to move ’till I come back.”
Old Behrman was a painter who lived on the ground floor beneath them. He was past sixty and had a Michael Angelo's Moses beard curling down from the head of a satyr along the body of an imp. Behrman was a failure in art. Forty years he had wielded the brush without getting near enough to touch the hem of his Mistress's robe. He had been always about to paint a masterpiece, but had never yet begun it. For several years he had painted nothing except now and then a daub in the line of commerce or advertising. He earned a little by serving as a model to those young artists in the colony who could not pay the price of a professional. He drank gin to excess, and still talked of his coming masterpiece. For the rest he was a fierce little old man, who scoffed terribly at softness in any one, and who regarded himself as especial mastiff-in-waiting to protect the two young artists in the studio above.
Sue found Behrman smelling strongly of juniper berries in his dimly lighted den below. In one corner was a blank canvas on an easel that had been waiting there for twenty-five years to receive the first line of the masterpiece. She told him of Johnsy's fancy, and how she feared she would, indeed, light and fragile as a leaf herself, float away when her slight hold upon the world grew weaker.
Old Behrman, with his red eyes plainly streaming, shouted his contempt and derision for such idiotic imaginings.
“Vass!” he cried. “Is dere people in de world mit der foolishness to die because leafs dey drop off from a confounded vine? I haf not heard of such a thing. No, I will not bose as a model for your fool hermit-dunderhead. Vy do you allow dot silly pusiness to come in der prain of her? Ach, dot poor leetle Miss Yohnsy.”
“She is very ill and weak,” said Sue, “and the fever has left her mind morbid and full of strange fancies. Very well, Mr.
Behrman, if you do not care to pose for me, you needn't. But I think you are a horrid old—old flibbertigibbet.”
“You are just like a woman!” yelled Behrman. “Who said I will not bose? Go on. I come mit you. For half an hour I haf peen trying to say dot I am ready to bose. Gott! dis is not any blace in which one so goot as Miss Yohnsy shall lie sick. Some day I vill baint a masterpiece, and ve shall all go away. Gott! yes.”
Johnsy was sleeping when they went upstairs. Sue pulled the shade down to the window-sill, and motioned Behrman into the other room. In there they peered out the window fearfully at the ivy vine. Then they looked at each other for a moment without speaking. A persistent, cold rain was falling, mingled with snow. Behrman, in his old blue shirt, took his seat as the hermit miner on an upturned kettle for a rock.
When Sue awoke from an hour's sleep the next morning she found Johnsy with dull, wide-open eyes staring at the drawn green shade.
“Pull it up; I want to see,” she ordered, in a whisper.
Wearily Sue obeyed.
But, lo! after the beating rain and fierce gusts of wind that had endured through the livelong night, there yet stood out against the brick wall one ivy leaf. It was the last on the vine. Still dark green near its stem, but with its serrated edges tinted with the yellow of dissolution and decay, it hung bravely from a branch some twenty feet above the ground.
“It is the last one,” said Johnsy. “I thought it would surely fall during the night. I heard the wind. It will fall to-day, and I shall die at the same time.”
“Dear, dear!” said Sue, leaning her worn face down to the pillow, “think of me, if you won't think of yourself. What would I do?”
But Johnsy did not answer. The lonesomest thing in all the world is a soul when it is making ready to go on its mysterious, far journey. The fancy seemed to possess her more strongly as one by one the ties that bound her to friendship and to earth were loosed.
The day wore away, and even through the twilight they could see the lone ivy leaf clinging to its stem against the wall. And then, with the coming of the night the north wind was again loosed, while the rain still beat against the windows and pattered down from the low Dutch eaves.
When it was light enough Johnsy, the merciless, commanded that the shade be raised.
The ivy leaf was still there.
Johnsy lay for a long time looking at it. And then she called to Sue, who was stirring her chicken broth over the gas stove.
“I've been a bad girl, Sudie,” said Johnsy. “Something has made that last leaf stay there to show me how wicked I was. It is a sin to want to die. You may bring me a little broth now, and some milk with a little port in it, and—no; bring me a hand-mirror first, and then pack some pillows about me, and I will sit up and watch you cook.”
An hour later she said:
“Sudie, some day I hope to paint the Bay of Naples.
”
The doctor came in the afternoon, and Sue had an excuse to go into the hallway as he left.
“Even chances,” said the doctor, taking Sue's thin, shaking hand in his. “With good nursing you'll win. And now I must see another case I have downstairs. Behrman, his name is—some kind of an artist, I believe. Pneumonia, too. He is an old, weak man, and the attack is acute. There is no hope for him; but he goes to the hospital to-day to be made more comfortable.”
The next day the doctor said to Sue: “She's out of danger. You've won. Nutrition and care now—that's all.”
And that afternoon Sue came to the bed where Johnsy lay, contentedly knitting a very blue and very useless woolen shoulder scarf, and put one arm around her, pillows and all.
“I have something to tell you, white mouse,” she said. “Mr. Behrman died of pneumonia to-day in the hospital. He was ill only two days. The janitor found him on the morning of the first day in his room downstairs helpless with pain.
His shoes and clothing were wet through and icy cold. They couldn't imagine where he had been on such a dreadful night. And then they found a lantern, still lighted, and a ladder that had been dragged from its place, and some scattered brushes, and a palette with green and yellow colors mixed on it, and—look out the window, dear, at the last ivy leaf on the wall. Didn't you wonder why it never fluttered or moved when the wind blew? Ah, darling, it's Behrman's masterpiece—he painted it there the night that the last leaf fell.”
History and fable - East. Full text of the poem - History and fable
Repnin, my friend, owner of the brush,
Pouring the soul into a dead canvas!
You are like me, Phoebe's pet!
Give me your hand: together we are
Let's walk the graceful path.
I'll show you there
Items worthy of you,
Which will kindle a fire
In your chest, young artist!
You see two temples at this height.
One, decorated with a Corinthian colonnade;
Gold and azure shine everywhere,
Parian marble breathes in charming statues.
Temple of Fables then; and this one, on the right side,
There is a temple of History, both simple and important:
In the vast dome with which it is covered,
And in the interpillars the sacred dusk is poured.
We will visit both temples,
And we will honor both deities with a sacrifice.
Let us first enter this one, which is so beautiful. In wide white robes,
A gray-haired, venerable priest,
With a curtained head, tied with a crown,
Of wildflowers, green myrtle and laurel,
Leaning on a golden-stringed harp,
On the eve, meets us with an important greeting.
This old man is Homer - Homer, the singer of the gods.
- Vouchsafe us to enter the sanctuary of the goddess,
Zana we are involved in her mysteries. -
Sacred to us, grinning the eye,
The elder opens the door of the temple:
Rapture and trembling is holy, my whole spirit embraces!
I see delights... But no, I can't describe them
I can describe them in words—you, O painter,
Will you depict them with your art?. .
What kinds of
And transformations!
There is rebellious abuse,
Struggle, running,
Bright faces here
And dances of nymphs!
Inexhaustible beauty, source of wealth! —
Grab a brush, a palette, and write!
Write
God-spoken Dodona gloomy grove,
And the golden tripod of Pythia,
And the delightful Tempe valley,
And the Hesperides garden.
And write the feast of the gods in the halls of Kronion,
Huge, created by Ifest.
To repose joyfully around sweet dishes
Blessed are the inhabitants of Olympus
And stretch out to the desired meal
Hands, looking at the father;
In the autumn of ambrosial curls
The brow of sovereign Zeus
It shone with goodness. And Ira is majestic
In a golden diadem,
Empress Pallas with an aegis and with a spear,
Apollo is bright with a quiver, with a lyre.
And you, O mother of pleasures, the sweetest goddess,
Owning this wonderful belt,
And you would have matured there with the cathedral of the young Graces
And with laughing Eros.
O divine sight! oh wondrous elegance!
There the songs of the Muses captivate the ear;
The goddess of youth pours sweet nectar into bowls,
And dear Ganymede smashes! But we are descending from the cloudy peaks of Olympus
To the Trojan fields,
Where the Achaean army will conquer the city of Priam,
Where Xanthos rushes the corpses, where Hector and Achilles
Rage. From then on with the wise Odysseus
We descend into the sacred ocean and see
Cyclopes, Scylla, Hell, Circe, Navzikayu,
And many other miracles. Are you ready? - now let's go to another temple
This gloomy transition,
Which only one lamp illuminates;
Criticism has its throne here
Sets boundaries for lies and truth. You were a poet - be a philosopher now!
Reading good and evil on these hanging boards,
Know how to choose objects from among them.
Depict great and holy people,
Whom evil fate cannot defeat.
With your skillful brush
Reveal good and evil in striking contrasts:
In the sufferers of truth, a beautiful soul
Penetrated through every trait, -
Socrates talks with friends, the death of Pius,
The truthful Aristides writes his exile,
Regulus goes back to captivity,
True to the truth Trazea dies.
And in the bowels of luxury, among riches, honors,
Tyrant's flatterer, Damocles, intoxicated with happiness,
He raised a puffy look, but, seeing himself above himself
A sharp sword, hanging by a thread, freezes. How consoling it is for the well-intentioned to contemplate
Only instructive, only strong pictures!
With Plutarch in them, Repnin, with Tacitus show us
The greatness and baseness of mortals
And ignite the soul of the audience to goodness.
The history of the video “Going to the river”: full text, meaning, to whom it is addressed, why the author calls himself Dur-Dachnik
Valera Polevikov
He has become so full of knowledge that he seems to have been living on trillions and trillions of similar planets for a hundred trillion and billion years, do you understand?
In September 2015, the video "Walking to the River" appeared on YouTube - a four-minute monologue of a man who walks through the field and takes pictures of himself on his phone. It quickly became viral: it went into quotes, memes, references. And now it's just a classic of Russian Internet culture.
This video was shot by Sergey Simakov. He has been running the Serge Dur-Dachnik channel since 2012, but he became popular just after Going to the River.
How that video appeared - in fact, there is not anger, but euphoria
Serge recorded it on September 29, 2015, walking along the Kuban River - in the area of Maryinskaya Stanitsa. That day he walked 70-80 kilometers. I went out in the morning, and by the evening I was charged with energy - and splashed it out on video, recording this monologue. He talked about this both in an interview and several times on his channel (we can’t give links, because there is a swear word in the video).
“It was improvisation, impromptu. On the wave of inspiration from walking, such a walker's euphoria. The mood was wonderful, *** [indifference] such. In general, often when I go to the fields, I will scream there, I will swear, I will say all sorts of such monologues to myself.
I have had thousands of such monologues in my life. And this one became famous because I filmed it. There were even cooler ones that weren't on camera. I can scream so much, say such things, that I already break my voice, the real escape.
I often find myself in such tonic states. Here I will work out on the horizontal bars - and the same thing begins. Pret. I am hyperactive, I have a specific composition of neurotransmitters. Those who are in work or in sports will understand me. When you either dug a hole after a powerful workout or dug a hole, laid out brickwork, chopped half a car truck with firewood - and you are rushing, it seems that the sea is knee-deep, the mountains are shoulder-deep. This is a normal state of increased energy for any person who engages in physical labor or sports. Plus, I have it combined with the fact that I'm a talker. For me, my increased talkative reflection is a given.
It was just an emotion that came out. I didn't seek fame with this video, I just filmed it and posted it. "
Who is this video dedicated to? What is his idea?
In one of his interviews, Serge said that there was a trigger for the video - a person who at that time was offering him money and opportunities to earn it. But in that interview, and in all the other stories about "Going to the River", he says: after all, it was a dialogue with himself.
“It is addressed to itself, to its ego. This is a conversation of a being freed from the ego, going to the river, to that greedy side that wants to enslave and devour the whole world, to earn all the money.
This is the triumph of freedom and the rise to infinity. The chant of freedom. On the other hand, this is a typical excuse for their insignificance. An indication of my weakness. The monologue shows that I want money, girls, yachts - but I can't get it. Because a complete weakling and complete shit. I signed my insignificance.
It turns out like this. On the one hand, sublime freedom. On the other - the justification of their own insignificance. These are polar structures, but together they have an absolute formula of influence. Therefore, the video touches everyone, because everyone simultaneously strives for freedom and justifies their insignificance.
And in the middle between these two polarities - what is called, to each his own. Everyone has their own path and it is necessary to follow it. And it is symbolic that I was walking in the video along the road, my own way, alone.”
Who is Serge Dur-Dachnik: he works with his hands, earns money on donations, lives alone in his childhood apartment
Serge is Sergey. Fool is a fool. A summer resident is a vocation in life. He explains that a fool is a free-thinking person who, in his thoughts, gives himself up to emotions, and not to reason. And Serge considers himself so. And he says that in the word fool there is “cheers” at the base of the word - which he really likes.
Summer resident - because Serge has been a big fan of working with his hands, in the field or on the farm since childhood. And now he has two jobs: 1) he is a video blogger - he makes money on streams and in social networks 2) he is a handyman in the brigade. He says he enjoys both jobs. And he considers both vocations, because he has two main needs and passions: to work with his hands and to speak.
He has 151 thousand subscribers and 354 videos on his YouTube channel. Basically, these are cuts from his streams, which he spends almost every week. At the beginning of February 2022, he had already conducted 208 live broadcasts.
Serge almost always spends them in the same place - in front of the curtains in his apartment. In the same white T-shirt. And always in shorts. He said that he lives alone. In the apartment in which he grew up - he moved out from his parents, but now he has returned there. It is equipped exactly the same as in his childhood.
Serge also has a second YouTube channel with 65,000 subscribers and 515 videos. On it, he posts videos from the street. How he just goes somewhere and thinks. Or how he works, goes in for sports, pulls stones. Serge also has a VK page - there you can see his photos, posts on the wall, playlist.
Serge's secrets and the three main rules of life
“I have never taken drugs. I tried alcohol, but I don't like it, it poisons. Tobacco tried once - what a disgusting thing? I'm generally very squeamish about all this.
Who said that only substances can cause a surge of thoughts and energy? My secret is that I love the sun very much. From an early age I like to be outside when it bakes. I often had head burns - that's it. Apparently, the radiation of the sun, its electromagnetism has such an effect on me. It's still stellar radiation.
The second secret is hyperactivity and love of work. I love weeding, carrying something, chopping firewood. I'm rushing from this, there is a release of dopamines.
The third secret is solitude. The feeling of the moment that you are the center of the universe. It can only be felt alone. I can talk to the sun, to the clouds, to everything. From the universe. And you can do it anywhere - even in the toilet. And when you are with someone, not alone, it is difficult to achieve dissolution in nature and the universe.
I have three main rules of my life, which I have deduced for myself. They are harsh, but I stick to them:
- Rely only on yourself. The cause of all joy and suffering is in yourself.
- The rule of six "don'ts": don't believe, don't be afraid, don't ask, don't trust, don't wait, don't hope.
- Never feel sorry for yourself. One has only to give oneself pity - everything immediately crumbles.
Full text of the video “Going to the river” – we are just glad that somewhere on the “Gol” he is
“***, yes, I *** [do not care] about you, ***, listen . What kind of car do you have there, ***, apartments, assholes there, ***, yachts, everything. I *** [do not care], even if there is a Bentley, even, ***, ***, Maybach, even a Rolls-Royce, even a Bugatti, ***, even a hundred-meter yacht. I don't care about that, you know? How many are you there, who *** [fuck], what women, what these females are chic or satin, ***, you are flying into space, I don’t give a shit about that, you understand?
I, ***, have become so full of knowledge that I seem to have been living on trillions and trillions of planets like this Earth for a hundred trillion and billion years, ***, you know. This world is already absolutely clear to me, and here I am looking for only one thing, ***: peace and tranquility. And this harmony from merging with the infinitely eternal, from contemplating this great fractal likeness and from this wonderful unity of being, infinitely eternal, wherever you look: even deep into the infinitely small, even upwards - infinitely large, you understand? And you tell me again with yours here. ***, go ahead, fuss further: this is your distribution, this is your path and your horizon of knowledge and sensation of your nature. It's disproportionately small compared to mine, you know?
I seem to have long been a deep old man, immortal, well, or almost immortal, who has been on this planet since its very inception. Back when only the Sun had just formed as a star. And this gas and dust cloud after the explosion of the Sun, when it flared up like a star, began to form these coacervates of the planet, you understand, I have been on this Earth for almost five billion years, ***, I live and know along and across this whole world , and you give me some ...
I *** [do not care] for your cars, for your, ***, ***, yachts, for your apartments, there, for your benefit. I was on this planet an infinite multitude: cooler than Caesar, and cooler than Hitler, and cooler than all the great ones, you know, I was. And somewhere he was complete shit, even worse than here. I feel many of these conditions. Somewhere I was more like a plant, somewhere I was more like a bird, there, a worm, somewhere there was just a clot of stone, it's all a soul, you know? It has completely diverse facets of similarity, an infinite set. But you don't understand this, so you go yourself, ***.
It's as if we live in this world with different sensations and different aspirations, respectively, our place is different, our distribution is also different. I wish you all the coolest cars, so that you have, and all the best females, so that they spread their legs in front of you, that they open the cracks in front of you topsy-turvy, ***, like a carpet, this is the very thing, they opened, corrupted, corrupted, and you so that *** [coupled] until blue in the face, red-hot, out, like the setting sun. And to fly on the best yachts and planes. And he finished right from the porthole, and did everything that could only come to mind and not come. If there are few ideas, contact me, I will offer you a hundred trillion for each of your ideas, how to do everything.
Well, that's all I am, I'm walking like a deep old man who has seen the eternal, touched the divine, himself became god-like and aspires to this infinite. And who abides in peace, peace, harmony, grace, in this innermost bliss, involved in everything and everything, you understand.
That's it, that's our difference. So I'm going to admire the universe, and you're going to be filled with some facets, that's the whole difference, you understand.
