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When they reached the station, the train was already standing there. The people in the station pointed to the group, called out such things as: ‘They all belong to the Theatre of Oklahoma,’ the theatre seemed to be far better known than Karl had supposed, although of course he’d never been at all interested in theatrical matters previously. A whole carriage had been reserved for the group, the head of transport was more assiduous than the conductor in urging them in. First he looked into each compartment, arranging a thing or two here and there, and only then did he climb in himself. Karl had managed to get a window seat, and pulled Giacomo in next to him. So they sat pressed together, and both were really looking forward to the trip, they had yet to travel in such a carefree manner in America. When the train began to move, they put their hands out of the window to wave, at which the youths opposite dug each other in the ribs and found it stupid.

They rode for two days and two nights. Only now did Karl begin to grasp the size of America. He looked out of the window tirelessly, and Giacomo craned towards it with him, until the youths opposite, more interested in playing cards, had had enough, and gave him the window seat opposite. Karl thanked them – Giacomo’s English wasn’t comprehensible to everyone – and as time passed, as happens with people sharing a compartment, they became much friendlier, though their friendliness often took trying forms, for instance each time they dropped a card and looked for it on the floor, they pinched Karl or Giacomo in the leg as hard as they could. Giacomo would cry out, and pull his legs up, Karl sometimes tried to reply with a kick, but otherwise bore it in silence. Everything that happened in the little smoke-filled compartment – even though the windows were open – paled into insignificance compared to what was outside.
On the first day they travelled over a high mountain range. Blue-black formations of rock approached the train in sharp wedges, they leaned out of the window and tried in vain to see their peaks, narrow dark cloven valleys opened, with a finger they traced the direction in which they disappeared, broad mountain streams came rushing like great waves on their hilly courses, and, pushing thousands of little foaming wavelets ahead
of them, they plunged under the bridges over which the train passed, so close that the chill breath of them made their faces shudder.

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“Certainly,” I answered. “They are a seat apart. The gap is the unoccupied seat.”

He leaned over to me and spoke seriously. “Between the red-whiskered man and the white-hatted man sits Ben Wasson. You have heard me speak of him. He is the cleverest pugilist of his weight in the country. He is also a Caribbean negro, full-blooded, and the blackest in the United States. He has on a black overcoat buttoned up. I saw him when he came in and took that seat. As soon as he sat down he disappeared. Watch closely; he may smile.”

I was for crossing over to verify Lloyd’s statement, but he restrained me. “Wait,” he said.

I waited and watched, till the red-whiskered man turned his head as though addressing the unoccupied seat; and then, in that empty space, I saw the rolling whites of a pair of eyes and the white double-crescent of two rows of teeth, and for the instant I could make out a negro’s face. But with the passing of the smile his visibility passed, and the chair seemed vacant as before.

“Were he perfectly black, you could sit alongside him and not see him,” Lloyd said; and I confess the illustration was apt enough to make me well-nigh convinced.

I visited Lloyd’s laboratory a number of times after that, and found him always deep in his search after the absolute black. His experiments covered all sorts Of pigments, such as lamp-blacks, tars, carbonised vegetable matters, soots of oils and fats, and the various carbonised animal substances.

“White light is composed of the seven primary colours,” he argued to me. “But it is itself, of itself, invisible. Only by being reflected from objects do it and the objects become visible. But only that portion of it that is reflected becomes visible. For instance, here is a blue tobacco-box. The white light strikes against it, and, with one exception, all its component colours - violet, indigo, green, yellow, orange, and red - are absorbed. The one exception is BLUE. It is not absorbed, but reflected. Therefore the tobacco-box gives us a sensation of blueness. We do not see the other colours because they are absorbed. We see only the blue. For the same reason grass is GREEN. The green waves of white light are thrown upon our eyes.”

“When we paint our houses, we do not apply colour to them,” he said at another time. “What we do is to apply certain substances that have the property of absorbing from white light all the colours except those that we would have our houses appear. When a substance reflects all the colours to the eye, it seems to us white. When it absorbs all the colours, it is black. But, as I said before, we have as yet no perfect black. All the colours are not absorbed. The perfect black, guarding against high lights, will be utterly and absolutely invisible. Look at that, for example.”

He pointed to the palette lying on his work-table. Different shades of black pigments were brushed on it. One, in particular, I could hardly see. It gave my eyes a blurring sensation, and I rubbed them and looked again.

“That,” he said impressively, “is the blackest black you or any mortal man ever looked upon. But just you wait, and I’ll have a black so black that no mortal man will be able to look upon it - and see it!”

On the other hand, I used to find Paul Tichlorne plunged as deeply into the study of light polarisation, diffraction, and interference, single and double refraction, and all manner of strange organic compounds.

“Transparency: a state or quality of body which permits all rays of light to pass through,” he defined for me. “That is what I am seeking. Lloyd blunders up against the shadow with his perfect opaqueness. But I escape it. A transparent body casts no shadow; neither does it reflect light-waves - that is, the perfectly transparent does not. So, avoiding high lights, not only will such a body cast no shadow, but, since it reflects no light, it will also be invisible.”

We were standing by the window at another time. Paul was engaged in polishing a number of lenses, which were ranged along the sill. Suddenly, after a pause in the conversation, he said, “Oh! I’ve dropped a lens. Stick your head out, old man, and see where it went to.”

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Joint par son éditeur français qui lui a raconté l’incroyable rumeur de sa «disparition», Michel Houellebecq est tombé des nues. Actuellement sans portable, ni Internet, l’écrivain est en Espagne où il réside en partie.

Il était la semaine dernière à Paris. Houellebecq a admis avoir complètement oublié qu’il avait donné son accord il y a quelques mois pour une tournée en Hollande et en Belgique pour le lancement de son roman La carte et le territoire (prix Goncourt 2010).

Avec flegme, il a estimé inutile de couper court aux nouvelles les plus folles qui courent sur son compte depuis quelques jours (enlèvement, disparition…).

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"Junto a la cuestión del querer vivir aparecen tres problemáticas cruciales que volverán una y otra vez en todos mis libros. En primer lugar, el problema del comienzo del pensar. Es sabido que este problema se plantea con fuerza a todo discurso que se quiere radical, es decir, que somete a crítica sus propios fundamentos. Hay por lo menos tres modos de plantear el problema del comienzo: la solución clásica que pone el Absoluto fuera, la solución hegeliana que integra el Absoluto en el discurso en tanto que resultado y la solución hermenéutica que expulsa el Absoluto al relativizarlo. Pero ¿por qué aparece el problema del comienzo? Porque el ser es siempre ser político, y ese carácter se autorefleja como hiato. El hiato, esa ruptura interna, es la que los tres comienzos tradicionales obvian al neutralizar el ser. La apuesta prevari- cante será un intento de asumir la necesidad del hiato reconociéndolo como consubstancial al despliegue teórico."

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