Paul Cleeman

“The sun tried to shine through the clouds but its light was dimmed even in us; high noon approached. I looked outside through the tinted windows at the people promenading down Madison. Couples held hands, bankers squeezed through crowds of window shoppers late for their daily thieving but all of them, even the poor, seemed content with existence, some even seemed happy. Nearly everyone’s outer shell was delicate and gracious that at the end of it all, on the border of nonexistence, each and everyone was happy to be alive. Everyone carried their heads with a radiance past the space they occupied and glided through time like flamenco dancers in a studio as big as the planet. Everyone wore masks that hid their sorrow (either that or they were sincerely happy) or wore armor that lightened the burden on their shoulders. Worst of all, I could not detect ever a flicker of thought; brains mired behind viral images and videos of people making even greater fools of themselves than they already were. And as the greatest fool of them all, I walked among them, never having learned to don the mask of happiness.”
― Bruce Crown, How Dim the Promised Land

“Out in the fjord I dragged myself up at once, wet with fever and exhaustion, and gazed landwards, and bade farewell for the present to the town – to Christiania, where the windows gleamed so brightly in all the homes.”
― Knut Hamsun

“A successful actor is praised for never giving up his dreams to become someone else for a living but to dream to be an unmasked artist is a mortal sin in a consumerist society. Artists don't consume; they create things that can’t be consumed with riches. You consume art by seeing, by listening, by feeling, never by buying.”
― Bruce Crown, How Dim the Promised Land

“I looked up at the ivory towers above us all. Nowhere else equals the feral design of this city. Tall skyscrapers that act as gorges hollowing out between flat cement dancing into narrow alleyways like bottomless pits. Building walls rusted the color of blood. Sometimes when you look down the horizon from afar the city looks wider than it is, like a thin field of magical lights gleaming with the hopes of children and idealists; a light on at midnight in one of the penthouses or the changing hues of the Empire State Building. Most of the time though, the city is covered with a layer of honking cars and greed, sirens and the war cry of solicitors, all full of brambles and impenetrable conscience; garbage, steaming manholes, and heat waves twirling smog and pollution through your lungs like mirages as you walk breathlessly through a boiling desert.”
― Bruce Crown, How Dim the Promised Land