Mark André > Recent Status Updates

In the first golden age of the world there was no need of these perplexities; there was then no other sort of learning but what was naturally collected from every man's common sense , . . since the dictates of nature and common morality were restraint and obligation sufficient: and as to all the mysteries of providence, they made them rather the object of their wonder, than their curiosity;

Thus some decrepit old fellows, [ . . . ] perhaps shall fall deeply in love with a young girl, and accordingly court her with as much of gaiety and briskness as the liveliest spark in the whole town: and we cannot but know, that for an old man to marry a young wife without a portion, to be a cooler to other men's lust, is grown so common, that it is become the a-la-mode of the times.

Farther, in every course of life how many wracks there may be of torturing diseases, how many unhappy accidents may casually occur, how many unexpected disasters Not to mention such miseries as men are mutually the cause of, as poverty, imprisonment, slander, reproach, revenge, treachery, malice, cousenage, deceit, and so many more, as to reckon them all would be as puzzling arithmetic as the numbering of the sands.

Between us stands a parrot cage that we found for the cat. She is coming with us, and lies in the cage before her saucer of meat, and purrs.

Then we begin to realize we are in for trouble. The observation balloons have spotted the smoke from our chimney, and the shells start to drop on us. They are those damned spraying little Daisy-cutters that make only a small whole and scatter widely close to the ground. They keep dropping closer and closer all around us; . . . . A couple of splinters whizz through the top of the kitchen window.

It's one of those unpleasant opioid feverish half-sleep states, more a fugue-state than a sleep-state, less a floating than like being cast adrift on rough seas, tossed mightily in and out of this half-sleep where your mind's still working and you can ask yourself whether you're asleep even as you dream. And any dreams you do have seem ragged at the edges, gnawed on, incomplete.

I wish you way more than luck.

But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.

So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can’t take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.

There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I’m talking about.

It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

He broods on it abstractly sometimes, when high: this No-One-Must-Know thing. It's not fear per se, fear of discovery. Beyond that it all gets too abstract and twined up to lead to anything, Hal's brooding. Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he's devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves.

Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying andthe same agony—Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?

It was a fleeting illusion: the bishop began to make the sign of the cross in the air opposite the crowd on the pier, and he kept on doing it mechanically afterwards, without malice or inspiration, until the boat was lost from view and all that remained was the uproar of the roosters.

She had a well-earned reputation as an accurate interpreter of other people’s dreams, provided they were told her before eating, but she hadn’t noticed any ominous augury in those two dreams of her son’s, or in the other dreams of trees he’d described to her on the mornings preceding his death.

These worst mornings with cold floors and hot windows and merciless light — the soul's certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but
sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheer.

It's the mornings after the spider-and-heights dreams that are the most painful, that it takes sometimes three coffees and two showers and sometimes a run to loosen the grip on his soul's throat; and these post-dream mornings are even worse if he wakes unalone, if the previous night's Subject is still there, . . .

. . . entombed in that kind of psychic darkness where you're dreading whatever you think of.

'So tonight to shush you how about if I say I have administrative bones to pick with God, Boo. I'll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I'm not crazy about. I'm pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I'm not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I, Boo.'

Hal?'

l l

'...Hey Hal?'

'Yes Mario?'

'Are you asleep?'

'Booboo, we've been over this. I can't be asleep if we're talking.'

'That's what I thought.'

'Happy to reassure you.'

She was the kind of fatally pretty and nubile wraithlike figure who glides through the sweaty junior-high corridors of every nocturnal emitter's dreamscape. Hair that Green had heard described by an overwrought teacher as 'flaxen 1 ; a body which the fickle angel of puberty — had visited, kissed, and already left, back in sixth; legs which not even orange Keds with purple-glitter-encrusted laces could make unserious.

When I come home late from banquets, from scientific societies, or from social gatherings in someone’s home, a small half-trained female chimpanzee is waiting for me, and I take my pleasure with her the way apes do.

Incidentally, among human beings people all too often are deceived by freedom. And since freedom is reckoned among the most sublime feelings, the corresponding disappointment is also among the most sublime.

The whole thing was too low to stand upright and too narrow for sitting down. So I crouched with bent knees, which shook all the time, and since at first I probably did not wish to see anyone and to remain constantly in the darkness, I turned towards the crate, while the bars of the cage cut into the flesh on my back. People consider such confinement of wild animals beneficial in the very first period of time, . . .

When it comes to a question of the truth, every great mind discards the most subtle refinements of manners.

Giving up that obstinacy was, in fact, the highest command that I gave myself. I, a free ape, submitted myself to this yoke.

Reginald Love his Wardine. Wardine be like to die of scared. She say no to Reginald beg. She say, if she go to Reginald momma, then Reginald momma go to Wardine momma, then Wardine momma think Wardine be lie down with Reginald. Wardine say her momma say Wardine let a man lie down before she sixteen and she beat Wardine to death. Reginald say he aint no way going to let that happen to Wardine.

I'm ten for Pete's sake. I think maybe your appointment calendar's squares got juggled. I'm the potentially gifted ten-year-old tennis and lexical prodigy whose mom's a continental mover and shaker in the prescriptive-grammar academic world and whose dad's a towering figure in optical and avant-garde film circles . . .

The dope scared him. It made him afraid. It wasn't that he was afraid of the dope, it was that smoking it made him afraid of everything else. It had long since stopped being a release or relief or fun.