Amanda’s Reviews > Pendulum > Status Update

Three of us, rod thought, despising ourselves and each other. No wonder the jobs had won so easily. We were rotten, and our rotten still.

The craving, which she thought she had overcome entirely, mixed with the anxiety, the wanting, and became an agony.

What is important and valuable about the present situation is precisely the fact that it is an insurrection by youth. Youth's role in the past has been to support revolutions organized by middle-aged and old men for objectives which were only partially and incidentally connected with the youth's own needs and aspirations. In any culture, the young represent the dynamism of the society, its creativity.

His suffering was outside time, or time itself had stopped. /// His head was not aching exactly, but ringing with emptiness.

He moved against her, and she turned to him, a swimmer clinging to a spar after the ship had gone down. But the sea was warm, dotted with floating wreckage, and she felt strong still, and without fear.

The picture...was not a pretty one. But was there any reason why it should be? The world had been a casual and pointless enough place before the collapse, and was worse now. Things were real in their own right, rather than as part of any universal aspect. [T]he most important thing ...was what took place here...but it was still a separate joy, a satisfaction isolated from the... less powerful ones.

He felt the strain of accumulated fatigue, of holding depression constantly at bay period dusk of a December evening.

he hugged the courage that had come to him, made dizzy by the blessing period it would not last but while he kept it he was transformed with hope.

The continuing hot weather probably did not help. Day followed stuffy day, not always sunny but always oppressive. This evening the sky was a gray weight over the gray houses period in the hut, it was stifling; one drew breath as a conscious act he did his best to make a prayer of it: an awareness of God sustaining one from breath to breath, instant to instant.

Teachings are something else again. Spontaneity, irreverence... The rules flouted and the gods mocked. They can't understand it and they are hell bent on crushing it period but they won't find it as easiest they think.