American Ghosts and Old World Wonders 精彩片段：
The Merchant of Shadows-1
I killed the car. And at once provoked such sudden, resonant quiet as if, when I switched off the ignition, I myself brought into being the shimmering late afternoon hush, the ripening sun, the very Pacific that, way below, at the foot of the cliff, shattered its foamy peripheries with the sound of a thousand distant cinema organs.
Id never get used to California. After three years, still the enchanted visitor. However frequently I had been disappointed, I still couldnt help it, I still tingled with expectation, still always thought that something wonderful might happen.
Call me the Innocent Abroad.
All the same, you can take the boy out of London but you cant take London out of the boy. You will find my grasp of the local lingo enthusiastic but shaky. I call gas "petrol", and so on. I dont intend to go native, Im not here for good, Im here upon a pilgrimage. I have hied me, like a holy palmer, from the dishevelled capital of a foggy, three-cornered island on the other side of the world where the light is only good for water-colourists to this place where, to wax metaphysical about it, Light was made Flesh.
I am a student of Light and Illusion. That is, of cinema. When first I clapped my eyes on that HOLLYWOODLAND sign back in the city now five hours hard drive distant, I thought Id glimpsed the Holy Grail.
And now, as if it were the most everyday thing in the world, I was on my way to meet a legend. A living legend, who roosted on this lonely cliff-top like a forlorn seabird.
I was parked in a gravelled lot where the rough track Id painfully negotiated since I left the minor road that brought me from the freeway terminated. I shared the parking lot with a small, red, crap-caked Toyota truck that, some time ago, had seen better days. There was straw in the back. Funny kind of transportation for a legend. But I knew she was in there, behind the gated wall in front of me, and I needed a little time along with the ocean before the tryst began. I climbed out of the car and crept close to the edge of the precipice.
The ocean shushed and tittered like an audience when the lights dim before the main feature.
The first time I saw the Pacific, Id had a vision of sea gods, but not the ones I knew, oh, no. Not even Botticellis prime 36B cup blonde ever came in on this surf. My entire European mythology capsized under the crash of waves Britannia never ruled and then I knew that the denizens of these deeps are sui generis and belong to no mythology but their weird own. They have the strangest eyes, lenses on stalks that go flicker, flicker, and give you the truth twenty-four times a second. Their torsos luminesce in every shade of technicolor but have no depth, no substance, no dimensionality. Beings from a wholy strange pantheon. Beautiful -- but alien.
Aliens were somewhat on my mind, however, perhaps because I was somewhat alienated myself in LA, but also due to the obsession of my room-mate. While I researched my thesis, I was rooming back there in the city in an apartment over a New Age bookshop-cum-healthfood restaurant with a science fiction freak Id met at a much earlier stage of studenthood during the chance intimacy of the mutual runs in Barcelona. Now he and I subsisted on brown rice courtesy of the Japanese waitress from downstairs, with whom we were both on, ahem, intimate terms, and he was always talking about aliens. He thought most of the people you met on the streets were aliens cunningly simulating human beings. He thought the Venusians were behind it.
He said he had tested Hirokos reality quotient sufficiently and she was clear, but I guessed from his look he wasnt too sure about me. That shared diarrhoea in the Plaza Real was providing a shaky bond. I stayed out of the place as much as possible. I kept my head down at school all day and tried to manifest humanity as well as I knew how whenever I came home for a snack, a shower and, if I got the chance, one of Hirokos courteous if curiously impersonal embraces. Now my host showed signs of getting into leather. Would it soon be time to move?
It must be the light that sends them crazy, that white light now refracting from the sibilant Pacific, the precious light that, when it is distilled, becomes the movies. Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae, the Great Art of Light and Shade as Athanias Kircher put it, he who tinkered with magic lanterns four centuries ago in the Gothic north.
And from that Gothic north had come the object of the quest that brought me to this luminous hill-top -- a long-dead Teutonic illusionist whod played with light and shade as well as any. You know him as Hank Mann, that "dark genius of the screen", the director with "the occult touch", that neglected giant etc. etc. etc.
But stay, you may ask, how can a dead man, no matter how occult his touch, be the object of a quest?