I want to immerse myself in American magic and dread.
The TV was a rage-making machine, working at him all the time, giving him direction and scope, enlarging him in a sense, filling him with a world rage, a great stalking soreness and rancour.
I’ll tell you what it means, these orbiting sensors that can hear us in our beds. It means the end of loyalty. The more complex the systems, the less conviction in people. Conviction will be drained out of us. Devices will drain us, make us vague and pliant.
Our lives, examined carefully in all their affinities and links, abound with suggestive meaning, with themes and involute turnings we have not allowed ourselves to see completely.
If you could stretch a given minute, what would you find between its unstuck components? Probably some kind of astral madness. A bleak comprehension of the final size of things.
Television. Maybe it was all a study in the art of mummification. The effect of the medium is so evanescent that those who work in its time apparatus feel the need to preserve themselves, delivering their bodies to be lacquered and trussed, sprayed with the rarest of pressurized jellies, all to one end, a release from the perilous context of time. This is their only vanity, to expect to dwell forever in hermetic sub-corridors, free of every ravage, secure as old kings asleep in sodium.
Grass: I live in a great steel tower that reflects the blazing sun. People catch fire just walking by. The more bodies that pile up around you, the greater your equity, the stronger your power, the longer you live. This is the point of living in a high rise. To see the bodies pile up at sunset, the nostalgic hour, the hour of summing up, stirring the cocktails, feeling the great tower sway in the hot winds.
Choice is a subtle form of disease.
I move past the scaffolding and walk down the steps, hearing one language after another, rich, harsh, mysterious, strong. This is what we bring to the temple, not prayer or chant or slaughtered rams. Our offering is language.
I had not yet learned to appreciate the slowly gliding drift of identical things; chunks of time spun past me like meteorites in a universe predicated on repetition.
How do we stand with others when the things that separate us are imposed at birth, when the separation haunts us and follows us day and night?
What are the people like? Do the women wear plaid skirts, cable-knit sweaters? Are the men in hacking jackets? What’s a hacking jacket?” “They’ve grown comfortable with their money,” I said. “They genuinely believe they’re entitled to it. This conviction gives them a kind of rude health. They glow a little.” “I have trouble imagining death at that income level,” she said. “Maybe there is no death as we know it. Just documents changing hands.
Some good-bad nights I spent, loving my self-hatred.
I’d never felt more human than I did when my mother lay in bed, dying. This was not the frailty of a man who is said to be “only human,” subject to a weakness or a vulnerability. This was a wave of sadness and loss that made me understand that I was a man expanded by grief.
There’s a dolphin’s brain in my in-box but come see me in forty-eight hours.
She wasn’t a child who needed imaginary friends. She was imaginary to herself.
Is it better to commit evil and attempt to balance it with an exalted act than to live a resolutely neutral life?
This was New York. Every living breathing genotype entered his cab at some point, day or night. And if this was an inflated notion, that was New York as well. Two.
It takes centuries to invent the primitive.
He liked to mingle with shopping mall crowds. “I’m counting on you to tell me, Jack.” “Tell you what?” “You’re the only person I know that’s educated enough to give me the answer.” “The answer to what?” “Were people this dumb before television?” One.