Pavlo > Recent Status Updates

“Of course! he thought. He had touched the screen. It was a touch screen! The red lights around the edges must be infrared sensors. Tim had never seen such a screen, but he’d read about them in magazines.”

“And a line from the Troubles came to her, a civilian’s line to a journalist on the street. ‘It’s not the bullet with my name on it that frightens me. It’s the one addressed “to whom it may concern.’”

“Today is August 4, 2057,” said a second voice from the kitchen ceiling, “in the city of Allendale, California.”

“ ‘Be in nothing so moderate as in love of man,’ [Robinson Jeffers] advised his twin sons, and referred to mankind as a ‘botched experiment that has run wild and ought to be stopped.’ He was accused of ‘proto-fascism.’ He called himself an ‘Inhumanist.’”

“Nor does [my husband] understand that when we talk about sale-leasebacks and right-of-way condemnations we are talking in code about the things we like best, the yellow fields and the cottonwoods and the rivers rising and falling and the mountain roads closing when the heavy snow comes in. We miss each other’s points, have another drink and regard the fire.”

“In some ways it was the conventional clandestine affair in a place like San Bernardino, a place where little is bright or graceful, where it is routine to misplace the future and easy to start looking for it in bed.”

“And there you have it. One way or another we all have to write our studies of D. H. Lawrence. Even if they will never be published, even if we will never complete them, even if all we are left with after years and years of effort is an unfinished, unfinishable record of how we failed to live up to our own earlier ambitions, still we all have to try to make some progress with our books about D. H. Lawrence.”

“My greatest urge in life is to do nothing. It’s not even an absence of motivation, a lack, for I do have a strong urge: to do nothing. To down tools, to stop. Except I know that if I do that I will fall into despair, and I know that it is worth doing anything in one’s power to avoid depression because from there, from being depressed, it is only an imperceptible step to despair: the last refuge of the ego.”

“The more I ponder these questions the more I am persuaded that the real subject of this book, the one that writing it was an attempt to evade, is despair.”

“It was easy to imagine the scene described by Auden when he came here in 1939: ‘Cars of women pilgrims go up every day to stand reverently there and wonder what it would have been like to sleep with him.’”

“But in retrospect even this unbearable misery – I’ve said it before and I might well say it again – turns out to have been bearable. Life is bearable even when it’s unbearable: that is what is so terrible, that is the unbearable thing about it.”