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

“America! The mythical land where people throw money away on the streets. And then came the grinding toil, the miserable wages, the work days twelve and fourteen hours long. In the end that had proved to be the real America for the immense majority: poverty and tears, humiliation and pain, homesickness and nostalgia. Like children taken in by fairy tales and led off into slavery.”

while other children hurried through pages of Homer, bored, reading them only because they were assigned, I felt my first shudder of terror when the poet described with frightening power and almost mechanical precision, with the perversity of a connoisseur and violent, vengeful sadism, the moment when Ulysses and his companions run a red-hot stake through the great eye of the Cyclops and make it boil in its socket.

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.”

I felt the beak enter my eye, the rubbery resistance, and then it penetrating, cruelly and painfully, liquid running down my cheek. By virtue of a mechanism I’m unable to understand since it is illogical, I kept my head in the same position, as though I were endeavoring to make the great bird’s evil task easier, just as we keep our mouth open and head still in the dentist’s chair, though we suffer intense pain.

“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.