Topical Guide 41
Mark Dorset
Dark-Haired Girl, The
This is the first appearance of Albertine Gaudet. She will make many other appearances as The Dark-Haired Girl before Peter learns her name, and eventually she will become his long-suffering wife, his muse, his everything.
Across the river, a dark-haired girl about your age, a beauty in a white bathing suit, with eyes that even at this distance make your heart stop for a moment, lies on the deck of a lean blue sloop, stretching her legs out, turning her face to the sun, dozing, dreaming, going nowhere. . . .
I stood up and swept my hands out toward the bay. Raskol looked where I indicated, and the dark-haired girl across the way stirred when I raised my voice.
“There will be bands playing,” I said, “and all the boats along here will be decked out with pennants and crepe paper and banners. The mayor will give a speech from a barge decorated with flowers, and pretty girls will be throwing flowers into the river.”
The girl across the way propped herself on an elbow and watched me with some curiosity.
“Then we’ll come paddling by, and all the clamboats will pass by us in a line, as a salute. Reporters will take our picture, and everyone will wonder how we got the nerve to take such a trip, and they’ll marvel at all the work that went into building the boat and planning the menu. We’ll be in the paper, and we’ll be famous.”
The girl across the way stood up, picked up her towel, and walked toward the house where she lived.Little Follies, “Life on the Bolotomy”
Idleness, Daydreaming, Dolce far Niente
Many of the days of youth are sweet, but the sweetest of all may be those that friends, friends who are determined that they will be friends forever, spend doing nothing but sitting and dreaming, as Raskol and I were on the day that we decided to journey up the Bolotomy.
Imagine, please, the lassitude of a summer day along the estuarial stretch of the river. The sun is stuck in place directly overhead and seems to yawn there, dozing. Heat is suspended in the air like fog. The river is lying at slack tide, as relaxed and unhurried as a boy lying on his back and watching the clouds drift by, dreaming.Little Follies, “Life on the Bolotomy”
We are great fools. “He has spent his life in idleness,” we say; “I have done nothing today.” What, have you not lived? That is not only the fundamental but the most illustrious of your occupations. . . . Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately.
Michel de Montaigne, “Of Experience”
Going Nowhere
“Raskol,” I asked, “what’s past the bridge?”
“Mmmm?” he asked. He had been studying the dark-haired girl. “What’s past the bridge? I don’t know.”
“Let’s find out,” I said.
“Sure,” he said. Some time passed before he added, “Let’s go.”
Neither of us moved.Little Follies, “Life on the Bolotomy”
VLADIMIR: Well? Shall we go?
ESTRAGON: Yes, let’s go.
They do not move.
Schemes and Dreams; Follies
“We’ll need a boat,” I said.
“Yeah,” Raskol agreed. . . .
“We could build a boat,” I said, hesitantly, careful not to let my eagerness show.
“You bet,” said Raskol. . . .
There was a lot of planning to do, I realized. For a moment, I felt nearly overwhelmed, but I told myself that if I went about it methodically I could get everything done in good time. The first thing, clearly, was the boat, but it wasn’t too soon to start thinking about the things we would need on the trip. Clothes, a tent, camp knives, maybe the machete that my father had bought at the army-navy store for clearing brush, food—
“We’ll need plenty of food,” said Raskol.
“And not just that,” I said, all my thoughts bursting from me. “We’ll need maps, and a compass, extra socks, lots of stuff. . . . We’ll be the talk of the town. When we start out, people will line the bulkhead, cheering us and wishing us well. . . . We’ll be in the paper, and we’ll be famous.”Little Follies, “Life on the Bolotomy”
My mother wanted my father to finish a corner of the attic as a bedroom for me. All she wanted was four plasterboard walls and a solid floor. My father began working at night on plans for the room, and on many nights he worked on into the morning, leaving for work late and red-eyed, rushing off without breakfast. . . . At last, one evening after dinner, he spread the plans out on the kitchen table for us to see. The room he planned would fill the whole attic, from one end of the house to the other. The attic stairs would be torn out: I would reach my room by climbing a rope ladder from the kitchen, and in the morning I would slide down a fire pole to the hall outside the bathroom. A model railroad would run completely around the perimeter of the room, through mountains, alongside a river, and through a miniature Babbington that would fill the corner that my mother had thought would serve as the entire bedroom. Painted on the walls behind Babbington would be the bay, the clam flats, the islands, and the sea and the sky, receding to a thin, precise horizon. Painted on the floor would be a chess board, where I would be able to play living games with my playmates in the neighborhood. At the center of the room, a helical staircase would lead to the top of a lighthouse that would grow from the center of the roof like a cupola gone mad. I would be charged with the responsibility of seeing that it was always lit at night.
Little Follies, “Do Clams Bite?”
Comedy is defined by Aristotle to be a picture of the frailties of the lower part of mankind, to distinguish it from tragedy, which is an exhibition of the misfortunes of the great. . . . The principal question therefore is, whether in describing low or middle life, an exhibition of its follies be not preferable to a detail of its calamities?
Oliver Goldsmith, “An Essay on the Theatre; or, A Comparison Between Laughing and Sentimental Comedy”
We are all obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Within a Budding Grove (translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff)
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