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Numbers in the Dark

The evening dark slips into streets and avenues, shades the spaces between the leaves of the trees, dots the moving tram arms with sparks, opens up in soft cones beneath the punctual streetlamps, turns on festive displays in shop windows, throwing into relief the curtained domesticity of apartments above.

The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish

“We-by whom I mean anyone over sixty-commit two offenses just by existing. One is Lack of Ve-locity. We drive too slowly, walk too slowly, talk too slowly. The world will do business with dictators, perverts, and drug barons of all stripes, but being slowed down it cannot abide. Our second of-fence is being Everyman's memento mori.

"Warmth, touch, presence, shared air. It's the difference between the voice and an echo. You could hear the echo of a song for all ime, but it would never beat hearing the song•…

"Right, but-"

"And to live life well you need to know when to ignore what is expected of you. Even if it means breaking the rules."

I asked why Meronym'd never spoke this yarnin' in the Valleys.
Valleysmen’d not want to hear, she answered, that human hunger birthed the Civ’lize, but human hunger killed it too. I know it from other tribes offland what I stayed with. Times are you say a person's b'liefs ain't true, they think you're sayin their lifes ain't true an' their truth ain't true.

Yay, she was prob'ly right.

The way she had an impulse to make the awkward feel normal. It was a kind of care.

She was always that person. The one who was just in tune. The one who knew that life was easier if you cared about people. She just made life more natural.

Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

She looked like a tourist who'd asked for directions to a place she thought was simple enough to get to only to hear a series of hypothetical turns, alleys, one-way streets. Her response was to nod politely at the perilous elaborateness of it all; to nod and save herself from the nowledge that she would never be able to get where she wanted to go.

The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish

He made a noise like a didgeridoo at the root of his throat, “That don't grow in Marlboro Country." My head enlarged itself by magnitude of many hundreds, Alice-style, and became a multi story car park wherein dwelt a thousand and one operatic Citroëns. “My word, you can say that again," mouthed the Man Formerly known as Timothy Cavendish.

The next thing I remember…

Brownies

Nevertheless, they put on sad faces, We had all been taught that adulthood was full of sorrow and pain, taxes and bills, dreaded work and dealings with whites, sickness and death. I tried to do what the others did. I tried to look silent.

Letters from Zedelghem

People knelt in prayer, some moving their lips. Envy'em, really do. I envy God, too, privy to their secrets. Faith, the least exclusive club on Earth, has the craftiest doorman. Every time I've stepped through its wide-open doorway, I find myself stepping out on the street again. Did my best to think beatific thoughts, but my mind kept running its fingers over Jocasta.

A Sandstone Farmhouse

Trying to do the right thing, the normal thing, running toward her farm, her death. In his vision of her running she was bright and quick and small, like an animal caught in a gunsight. This was the mother Joey had loved, the mother before they moved, before she betrayed him with the farm and its sandstone house.

Tuesday, June 4, 1991

But tomorrow, dawn will come the way I picture her,
barefoot and disheveled, standing outside my window in one of the fragile cotton dresses of the poor.
She will look in at me with her thin arms extended, offering a handful of birdsong and a small cup of light.

Swedenborgian Hell:

Picture a community made up of people all totally in love with themselves, not caring about others unless they are allies, and you will see that their love is no different from that of thieves for each other.

One Minus One

And, as we walked back down to see her, the nurse coming with us, there was this double regret—the simple one that I had kept away, and the other one, much harder to fathom, that I had been given no choice, that she had never wanted me very much, and that she was not going to be able to rectify that in the few days she had left in the world.

That men who don't make friends easily seldom have any trouble making enemies is perhaps ironic, at least in the sense that intimacy is at the core of both relationships. In the leather shops where Mather Grouse worked, he had no friends, though with the majority of his fellow workers he was on congenial terms.

Winter Syntax
A sentence starts out like a lone traveler heading into a blizzard at midnight,
tilting into the wind, one arm shielding his face, the tails of his thin coat flapping behind him.

Wow!

The Wind

How just before the door opened and she was grabbed by the hair and dragged backward, my grandmother turned to her children and tried to smile, to give them this last glimpse of her.

In 1947 West Point officially “decommissioned” all of its horses.

Patton had claimed that the saddest moment in his life came when he stood at attention, weeping, as his cavalry regiment marched past to stack their sabers for the last time.

Douglas MacArthur

"The shadows are lengthening for me. The twilight is here," he co cluded. "Today marks my final roll call with you, but I want you know that when I cross the river my last conscious thoughts will be the corps, and the corps, and the corps."

The point of his nose was impossibly aristocratic, precocious for a baby, I thought, uncertain. This was the first baby I had ever been privileged to study. He didn't blink, like the leader of a prison gang. He didn't change his expression. So the study was mutual. He stared holes through me. He saw straight into my heart and didn't seem to care that it was riddled with cowardice, hubris, stupidity, regret.

…war by ambush instead of by combat, by infiltration instead of by aggression, seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him... These are the kinds of challenges that will be before us in the next decade if freedom is to be saved, a whole new kind of strategy, a wholly different kind of force, and therefore a new and wholly different kind of military training.

As always, he presented an air of elegant outrage.

What’s new?

He stood in the entryway, glaring, belligerent. I glared back at him, furious that he'd interrupted my communication with Flora. Beat it! I'm talking to a dead customer!

Asema and I were both paralyzed. There was a sliding sensation. Like when you see the car driving along in front of you slip on ice and proceed across the roadway sideways. It is something that an Indigenous person often feels as they listen to non-Indians appreciate an unbelievably dense dealing with Indians

The woman in the book looked indianesque, or she might have just been in a bad mood.

Leaf Storm

"I'm sure it's not a message. I'm sure it's not that he looks like someone but that he's the same person he looks like. I'm sure, rather, that he's a military man. He's got a black pointed mustache and a face like copper. He's wearing high boots and I'm sure that it's not that he looks like someone but that he's the same person he looks like."

Silver Water
His funeral was like a Lourdes for the mentally ill. If you were psychotic, borderline, bad-off neurotic, or just very hard to get along with, you were there. People shaking so bad from years of heavy meds that they fell out of the pews. People holding hands, crying, moaning, talking to themselves.

As natural beauty declines over the years, so too, unnoticed, do standards of beauty.

Travelin Man

He could elude a wider search than the state would send into the swamp after a black man. For this was black man's country, slow and silent, absorbing the white man's inroads like a sponge. A white man loomed large on Ocean Island, but a black man was swallowed up in it, and disappeared.

He believed he had everything he needed, and he did not need much. A gift not only represented clutter, it took up room in his thoughts as one more distracting obligation of gratitude, as an unwanted requirement to think of someone else, of their goodwill bearing down on him like a low cloud.

Mkondo

…she felt a darkness tear away from her eyes. Shivers ran down her arms; joy founted up. It was rapture, the oldest feeling, a sensation like rising from the thick canopy of forest and turning, looking out over the treetops, seeing the world again, for the first time.

Mkondo

The twining of their lives: born on different halves of the world; brought together by chance and curiosity; leveraged apart by the incompatibility of their respective landscapes