Monday, April 7, 2008

It can't be the way I pick the books, being of such disparate natures, but I keep finding more and more depraved scenes in seemingly literate books...this time it's in The Silver Swan, a mystery by Benjamin Black, a/k/a John Banville, a Booker prize winner. The book alternates between the present and flashbacks to a dead woman's life, the latter of which became more and more debauched. The woman referenced is looking at a pornographic photo of another woman. Here's the quote:

"The feeling she had was that feeling, hot all over and at the same time somehow cold, that she would have when she woke a s a child in the cot-bed in her parents' bedroom, and realized that she was wetting herself, wetting herself and horrified to be doing it and yet unable to stop for the shameful pleasure it have her. And she was not able to stop now, either, not able not to open her eyes and turn the picture and look at it again. She was disgusted with herself, yet excited, too, in a horrible way that made her think she should be ashamed, though she was not, not really."

And we've all had that feeling, that terrible sinking feeling, that I'm doing something or seeing something naughty, and it's sooooo good, it feels so good, and I don't care if it's wrong, but if it is, how could it make me feel so good, so aroused, so hot.