Everything nonsense now. Those mourners came up. Hands extended. Sons intact. Wearing on their faces enforced sadness-masks to hide any sign of their happiness, which – which went on. They could not hide how alive they yet were with it, with their happiness at the potential of their still-living sons. Until lately I was one of them. Strolling whistling through the slaughterhouse, averting my eyes from the carnage, able to laugh and dream and hope because it had not yet happened to me. To us.
One day, walking neer one of your Yuman houses, smelling all the interest with snout, I herd, from inside, the most amazing sound. Turns out, what that sound is, was: the Yuman voice, making werds. They sounded grate! They sounded like prety music! I listened to those music werds until the sun went down...
What a beautiful country this must have been once, when you could hop in a coupe and buy a bag of burgers and drive, drive, drive, stopping to swim in a river or sleep in a grove of trees without worrying about intaking mutagens or having the militia arrest you and send you to the Everglades for eternity.
What is truth, if not an ongoing faith in, and continuing hope for, that which one feels and knows in one’s heart to be right, all temporary and ephemeral contraindications notwithstanding?
Got used to being slightly sad!
At the heart of Vonnegut’s voice is a humility my earnest young self didn’t feel comfortable with: In it, I heard evidence of real humiliation. War really was hell, with hell being the place where whatever you normally counted on or leaned on was taken from you, absolutely. Bill Pilgrim is a skinny virginal dork, and when he gets to war, war leaps on his skinny dorkitude and devastates him unglamorously, and haunts him ever after.
Saunders writes like something of a saint. He seems in touch with some better being. He teaches us not only how to write but how to live. He sets the bar and also the example. He hopes we might see the possibility of our better selves and act on it. He seems sent – what other way to put it? – to teach us mercy and grace.
Now all these happy sites and sounds seem like triks. Now it seems like the gud times are mere lee smoke that, upon blowing away, here is the reel life, which is: rok hats, kikking, stomping.
There are days so perfect you feel: This is what life about. When old, will feel whole life worth it, because I got to experience this perfect day. Today that kind of day.
The terror and consternation of the Presidential couple may be imagined by anyone who has ever loved a child, and suffered that dread intimation common to all parents, that Fate may not hold that life in as high a regard, and may dispose of it at will. In “Selected Civil War Letters of Edwine Willow,” edited by Constance Mays. With.
It smelled of man sweat and spaghetti sauce and old books. Like a library where sweaty men went to cook spaghetti.
I am trying to rekindle my feeling of fondness for the world.
On our wedding day I was forty-six, she was eighteen.
Even the nuns went racist after the convent was reappraised and it seemed their pension fund was in jeopardy.
Two passing temporariness developed feelings for one another. Two puffs of smoke became mutually fond. I mistook him for solidity, and now must pay.
It was just a strong feeling in my hart that it was no gud for Foxes to give up and just be ded on perpose.
Our grief must be defeated; it must not become our master, and make us ineffective, and put us even deeper into the ditch.
And we rode forward into the night, past the sleeping houses of our countrymen.
Once again I am only who I am.
I guess I was sad that love was not real? Or not all that real, anyway? I guess I was sad that love could feel so real and the next minute be gone, and all because of something Abnesti was doing.