The Arcades Project - Operi

on the tip of one's tongue. Nter all, nothing of the lot appears to be new. The
goldfish come perhaps from a pond that dried up long ago, the revolver will have
been a corpus delicti, and these scores could hardly have preserved their pre·
vious owner from starvation when her last pupils stayed away.
Never trust what writers say about their own writings. When Zola undertook to
defend his Therese Raquin against hostile critics, he explained that his book was a
scientific study of the temperaments. His task had been to show, in an example,
exactly how the sanguine and the nervous temperaments act on one another-to
the detriment of each. But this explanation could satisfy no one. Nor does it
explain the unprecedented admixture of colportage, the bloodthirstiness, the
cinematic goriness of ti,e action. W1lich-by no accident-takes place in an
arcade. If this book really expounds something scientifically, ti,en it's the death of
the Paris arcades, the decay of a type of architecture. The book's atmosphere is
saturated with the poisons of this process, and its people are destroyed by them.
One knew of places in ancient Greece where the way led down into the under­
world. Our waking existence likewise is a land which, at certain hidden points,
leads down into the underworld-a land full of inconspicuous places fi·om which
dreams arise. All day long, suspecting nothing, we pass them by, but no sooner
has sleep come than we are eagerly groping our way back to lose ourselves in the
dark corridors. By day, the labyrinth of urban dwellings resembles conscious­
ness; the arcades (which are galleries leading into the city's past) issue unre­
marked onto the streets. At night, however; under the tenebrous mass of the
houses, their denser darkness bursts forth like a threat, and the nocturnal pedes­
trian hurries past-unless, that is, we have emboldened him to tum into the
narrow hme.
Falser colors are possible in the arcades; that combs are red and green surprises
no one. Snow White's stepmother had such things, and when tile comb did not
do its work, the beautifnl apple was there to help out-half red, half poison­
green, like cheap combs. Everywhere stockings play a starring role. Now tiley are
lying under phonographs, across the way in a stanlp shop; another time on the
side table of a tavern, where they are watched over by a girl. And again in front of
the stamp shop opposite, where, between the envelopes witil various stamps in
refined assortments, manuals of an antiquated art of life are lovelessly dis­
pensed-Secret Embraces and Maddening Illusions, introductions to outmoded
vices and discarded passions. The shop windows are covered with vividly col­
ored Epinal-style posters, on which Harlequin betroths his daughter; Napoleon
rides through Marengo, and, amid all types of standard artillery pieces, delicate
English burghers travel the high road to hell and the forsaken path of the Gospel.
No customer ought to enter this shop with preconceived ideas; on leaving, he
will be the more content to take home a volume: Malebranche's Recherche de fa