The devil, who lives in the dripping, dank cellar of the town church and manipulates things through the weak preacher, takes over the town. The real question, though, was why the devil wanted to take over the town to begin with. All it was was a miserable nothing of a few blocks surrounded by cornfields.
It was far too hot to think about complicated matters.
The passage of the right amount of time would show me what was needed. I had to wait for it, like waiting patiently for the phone to ring. And in order to wait that patiently, I had to put my faith in time. I had to believe that time was on my side.
The sad fact is that language and logic cut off from reality have a far greater power than the language and logic of reality – with all that extraneous matter weighing down like a rock on any actions we take. In.
Some things can only be done in exchange for life,” the man said.
Still, this was on the order of a minor miracle, running across someone to whom you can express your feeling so clearly, so completely. Most people go their entire lives without meeting a person like that. It would have been mistake to label this “love”. It was more like total empathy.
Consistency and an established worldview were excess baggage in the intellectual mobile warfare that flared up in the mass media’s tiny time segments, and it was his great advantage to be free of such things.
Eventually she tires of directing her speech outwards and closes her mouth in apparent resignation. A new silence comes to overlay the silence that is already there.
If I do tell you the story, the two of us will always share it. And I don’t know if that’s the right thing to do. if I lift open the lid now, you’ll be implicated. Is that what you want? You really want to know something I’ve sacrificed so much trying to forget?
He went on for months, hardly eating or drinking, until he had rolled the boulder to the very peak of the high mountain. There he stopped and surveyed the world. Now he could see more of the world than anyone. This was the place he would live – where no grass grew, where no birds flew. For water, he could only lick the ice and frost. For food, he could only gnaw on moss. Be he had no regrets, because now he could look out over the whole world.
Everyone ended up alone sooner or later. He was thirty at the time, beyond the age for complaining about loneliness. He felt as if he had put on several years all at once. But that was all. No further emotion welled up inside him.
Little by little, I would get snared by the world out there. This was the first step; first I say yes to this, then later on it’ll be something else.
Alright, then, where do the lost names go? The probability of their surviving in the maze of a city must be extremely low.
Even a monkey misses an occasional branch and falls.
I was ready to get the hell off the mountain, but somehow that offered no satisfaction. I had gotten in too deep. I would have been so easy if only I could have cried. But crying wasn’t an option, because I felt that far ahead of me there was something really worth crying about.
She was a quiet little creature living deep in the woods, with pale wings like the shadow of a spirit.
Like someone excitedly relating a story, only to find the words petering out, the path gets narrower the further I go, the undergrowth taking over.
You must not let fatigue set in,” she warns. “That is what my mother said. Let your body work until it is spent, but keep your mind for yourself.
Making maps was the one small dream of his one small life. Who had the right to make fun of him for that?
Hermit crabs don’t drive away what’s living in a shell. They just quietly take over the leftover shell of a dead shellfish.