Andrew Stewart’s Reviews > On Heroes and Tombs > Status Update

it is certain that at the end of four days of being trapped in that stinking cubicle, with their resentment of each other growing more violent, the stronger one will eat the weaker. In this case the concierge eats the maid, perhaps only bits and pieces at first, starting with her fingers, and then after hitting her over the head or knocking her senseless against the walls of the elevator, he devours the rest of her.

“And as I felt the liquid and the blood run down my cheek, I thought: “Now I am going to have to endure having the same thing done to my other eye.” Calmly, apparently without any sort of hatred (as I remember, this astonished me), the great bird finished its work on my left eye and then, drawing back a little, it repeated the same operation on my right.”

“If it were up to you, there wouldn’t even be schools.”

“If people didn’t know how to read, they wouldn’t be turned into idiots by newspapers and magazines. Unfortunately, even if they were illiterate, other marvels of progress would still exist: radio, television. It would be necessary to pierce children’s eardrums and pluck their eyes out. But this would be a more difficult program to carry out.”

“If everybody were like you, the world would never have made any progress,” Señorita González Iturrat exploded.
“And what makes you think that it has made progress?”
She smiled scornfully.
“According to you, naturally, getting to New York in twenty hours isn’t progress.”
“I don’t see the advantage of being able to get to New York in a big hurry. The more time it takes the better.”

“In my view the conclusion is obvious: the Prince of Darkness continues to rule with an iron hand. And the instrument of this rule is the Sacred Sect of the Blind. And all this is so clear that I would be tempted to burst out laughing were I not terror-stricken.”

This guy is nuts. Or is he?

O gods of night!
O gods of darkness, of incest and crime,
of melancholy and of suicide.
O gods of rats and caverns,
of cockroaches and bats!
O violent, inscrutable gods
Of dreams and death!

When was the beginning of all this that is about to end in my murder?

That’s one hell of a start to a chapter.

I will save report on the blind for tomorrow.