The lost ones

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There he was, working full-time in the James Joyce household for what spare cash the dying author could afford in the mad milieu of pre-Nazi Europe, being hounded relentlessly by the debt collectors and by Joyce’s incurably schizophrenic daughter - who was hopelessly smitten with him. ABODE WHERE LOST bodies roam each searching for its lost one. Vast enough for search to be in vain. Narrow enough for flight to be in vain. Inside a flattened cylinder fifty metres round and sixteen high for the sake of harmony." No trace anywhere of life, you say, pah, no difficulty there, imagination not dead yet, yes, dead good, imagination dead imagine.

His] way of advancing due east […] was to turn his bust as far as possible towards the north and at the same time to fling out his right leg as far as possible towards the south, and then to turn his bust as far as possible towards the south and at the same time to fling out his left leg as far as possible towards the north… In the beginning he always spoke walking. So it seems to me now. Then sometimes walking and sometimes still. In the end still only. And the voice getting fainter all the time.At the final, most unendurable point of pain, Freud signalled to his physician that he would welcome some morphine. The cylinder has three separate, informal bands of activity. Around the periphery are the climbers waiting for their turns on the ladders. The periphery is also where the sedentary and vanquished lost ones prefer to lean against the wall, uninterested in searching or climbing anymore. As they are underfoot of the climbers, they are viewed as an annoyance. Just in from the outer band is a single-file line of lost ones who are weary of searching in the center of the sphere, where most of the lost ones reside. Book Genre: Cultural, Fiction, France, Ireland, Literature, Novels, Philosophy, Plays, Short Stories, Theatre Spaced throughout the upper half of the cylinder are niches of varying size. Some are self-contained. Others are connected to each other by tunnels. The lost ones can climb into a niche by ladders which are distributed throughout the cylinder. The ladders are often missing rungs at irregular intervals. Most of the lost ones have an irrepressible desire to climb the ladders, and there are large queues around the base of each one, as the lost ones wait their turn to climb. The upper and lower sections of the sixteen metre high and nearly sixteen metre wide cylinder containing the lost ones is linked by a series of ladders that ‘vary greatly in size’, the shortest measuring ‘not less than six metres’, the longest enabling ‘the tallest climbers [to] touch the ceiling with their fingertips’. The ladders, whose rungs are intermittently and unpredictably absent, are used to convey ‘the searchers’ – each of the cylinder’s two hundred lost bodies still searching for its lost one – to the niches or alcoves, some of which are connected by tunnels, that are located in the upper reaches.

The Lost Ones is set in an "abode where lost bodies roam each searching for its lost one". The abode is a flattened cylinder with rubber walls fifty meters in circumference and eighteen meters high. It is constantly illuminated by a dim, yellow light, and the temperature fluctuates between 5°C to 25°C, sometimes in as small an interval as four seconds. This leads to extremely parched skin, and the bodies brush against each other like dry leaves. Kisses make an "indescribable sound" and the rubber makes the footsteps mostly silent. There are 200 inhabitants, or one per square meter. Some are related to each other. Some are even married to each other, but the conditions make recognition difficult. What do you when all the lights go on? There's "Nowhere to Run, Nowhere to Hide" when all the world is purged of mystery. Can you read lips?The trajectory is also reflected in Enough, another short prose piece from this period. While not a ‘closed space’ story, it is nevertheless a continuation of the evolution (or, rather, degeneration) of the form. Above all, worldbuilding is not technically necessary. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism. It is the attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn’t there. A good writer would never try to do that, even with a place that is there. It isn’t possible, & if it was the results wouldn’t be readable: they would constitute not a book but the biggest library ever built, a hallowed place of dedication & lifelong study. This gives us a clue to the psychological type of the worldbuilder & the worldbuilder’s victim, & makes us very afraid. “Very afraid,” by M. John Harrison

Die Frage nach der Individuation scheint sich unter den Gegebenheiten des Zylinders nicht einmal mehr zu stellen. Analog zu Endspiel, wo Hamm das Diktum der überflüssigen Schwachen/Alten buchstäblich nimmt und seine Eltern in Mülleimern entsorgt - während er und sein Diener ebenfalls keine richtig funktionierenden Körper mehr besitzen - gilt auch in The Lost Ones der Einzelne als ‚expendabel‘ und ist dem Apparatus der Gesellschaft/des Zylinders untergeordnet. The Lost Ones (novel), novel by Ian Cameron, later made into a 1974 Disney movie The Island at the Top of the World The example that dominated my childhood imagination was Tolkien’s legendarium: his attempt, over many decades, to recount the history and nature of his fictional cosmos Eä from creation on until its twilight. Many people, I expect, who’ve been raised as devout Christians have come to Tolkien’s work in a similar way. That is, the stories that were dominant in my childhood by a very wide margin came from the most influential world-portrait in western culture: the Bible. Even as a young teen, I was growing ever distant from the religious conviction in the literal truth of that world-portrait that I’d been reared to treat as a basic presupposition of living. However, I remained fascinated by the Bible’s over-arching literary project as I conceived of it: the Bible as the story of an entire cosmos, from creation on until its culmination in the eschaton. Tolkien’s work had the same quality, without, however, imposing the burden of literal truth. People: it's clearly a documentary/ cinema de Mornay of life in a cylindrical hellgatory in which blind, violent, naked people into 'no-strings' screwing just rawk when the annual semihard strikes the distaff. Yeah, and a bunch of ladders and shit. Quit trying to hang your paper on another fella's wall, guys.

THE LOST ONES

M. John Harrison, in a now infamous 2007 blog post, criticized the impulse toward the kind of encyclopedic worldbuilding that has gripped science fiction and fantasy ever since Tolkien: The narrator is scatter-minded – he chews his words, relishing the strange and new and intriguing. “One body per square meter, or two hundred bodies in all” he breathes tenderly as he roams through this story, his feet padding across the length and width of the floor. He’s spread out a painter’s cloth, stained with color and grime, which ripples and bunches at the edges. It is this bleak, almost lunar landscape which the tiny figures call home, and it creates a deeply unsettling apprehension, as if you were out at a restaurant and had a waiter standing next to you at all times, one hand on the tablecloth, ready to yank it all away. How suddenly mortal we all are, indeed, if our universe can so easily be scooped up and rolled aside! Lccn 72084341 Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.17 Openlibrary OL15026399M Openlibrary_edition

He was more intensely human than so many of us current readers can understand. You have to look at the late works of his great mentor Flaubert to guess at the raw emotion that went into this wonderful simple prose. I first encountered The Lost Ones as a young teen. Along with Finnegans Wake, it was the text that began my lifelong love affair with modernist literature. At that point, I’d been been immersed in fantasy literature for a while, and thus was transfixed by literary worldbuilding. Fiction writers often talk about worldbuilding. However, for reasons that escape me, readers of mainstream fiction often roll their eyes at the creation of imaginary worlds. Of course, mainstream works create imaginary places often enough. Usually, though, they situate them in actual locations and times familiar from the world around us: an imaginary courthouse in the New York of today, an imaginary county in Mississippi, or an imaginary street in Victorian London.

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Dites-moi si je ne suis pas joyeux!” translates in T.S.Eliot’s Lines for an Old Man into “Tell me if I am not glad!”