Status Updates From The Comedians

Opposite the wall of the cemetery stood a jeep, but the sight of it for a moment didn’t change the current of my thoughts.

‘We’re a bloody advertisement for human existence.’

. . . we are as brave as the Cubans, but the terrain is very cruel. We have destroyed our forests. You have to live in caves and sleep on stones. And there’s the question of water . . .’

It was as though he were apologizing to me and proffering humbly his passport—Nationality: human being. Special peculiarities: cuckold.

‘I wonder if he has Baudelaire in his breast-pocket to stop the bullets.’

Never before had Martha come of her own will, unpressed, to the (hotel). We had never slept before in my bed. It was for half-an-hour only, but the sleep was deeper than any I have known since. I woke flinching from her mouth with my wounded gum.

We lay quietly side by side in our grave, and I loved her as I had never done in the Peugeot or the bedroom above Hamit’s store. We approached one another by words more nearly than we had ever approached by touch.

I listened to him with astonishment. The dream was intact. Reality could not touch him.

One of the hungry unowned cats which haunted that end of the drive had leapt, in fear of the intrusion, on to the top of the hearse and it stood there arched and shivering like something struck by lightening. No one attempted to drive it away—the Haitians may well have believed it to contain the soul of the ex-Minister himself.

Next day a number of the distracted me from the fate of Jones, but I do not believe Mr. Smith for one moment forgot him.

For writers it is always said that the first twenty years of life contain the whole of experience—the rest is observation, but I think it is equally true of all of us.

I wasn’t going to confide my reasons to the purser. They were too personal and too serious, if one can describe as serious the confused comedy of our private lives.

‘But hasn’t it occurred to you, Mr. Brown, that it isn’t the poor who make the trouble in the world? Wars are made by politicians, by capitalists, by intellectuals, by bureaucrats, by Wall Street bosses or Communist bosses—they are none of them made by the poor.’
‘And the rich and the powerful aren’t vegetarian, I suppose?
‘No sir. Not usually.’ Again I felt ashamed of my cynicism.

—who cares for dead politicians sufficiently to remember with what issues they were identified? Free Trade is less interesting than an Ashanti war, though the London pigeons do not distinguish between the two.