Paromita’s Reviews > Percival Everett by Virgil Russell > Status Update

If you live long enough you come to understand that the only terrifying thing is not knowing when a thing is going to happen, whether good or bad. And the older you get, the more you count on knowing when things are going to happen. Bad things, uncomfortable things, death things, are only unsettling and dismaying when they fail to comply with the schedule, the scheme, the plan.

What civil rights? I’m telling you a story. I’m not talking about civil rights. I’m an American; I take my civil rights for granted, just the way I’m supposed to, and then when the government tries to take them away, I go out and buy something, make a purchase, to save the economy, and then I forget about what they’re stealing from me.

Some of us seem to have perished, that is the bleak, woebegone truth, that not even in the blue stillness of death can we be decisive, resolute, unwavering. It was once that life found nourishment, pabulum (and I mean them in whatever ways you can make them mean), in death.

I do not want to know about the human heart. I do not desire to speak at all about those indwelling, intimate reaches of the heart in which anguish is an undiminishing personal interrogation, much less to analytically enfetter those reaches. I have the sense, the good sense, the decency, to have nothing to say.

Strictly speaking and I love to speak strictly, there are no utterances in the world but only sentences, cut off from the actual world by their beginnings and their periods, question marks, or nothing but the fact that they end, cut off even from any real exchange between so-called speakers. Very Zen of me, indeed, in deed.

This is not what I came in here for, but it’s better, it’s so much better, but still it’s not what I wanted, but it will no doubt be what I will want in the future, but how will I, in sound judgment, be able to return to this place with the notion that I can get what I got last time, my reason for returning?

Every hour he didn’t work, he read, and at night he read himself to sleep and eagerly searched out dreams where he was someone else. In this dream he was a writer, maybe, and like all of his dreams, it was narrated.

It had all sneaked up on my father and on me as well, thinking, he and my brother and I, that he would turn a corner and be new in some way, but that corner turned out to be a steep hill and gravity turned out to be as inevitable as we all know it is.