It was a town like some towns in the American South, frozen in its history as Lot’s wife was trapped in salt, and doomed, therefore, as its history, that overwhelming, omnipresent gift of God, could not be questioned, to be the property of the gray, unquestioning mediocre.
I love a few people and they love me and some of them are white, and isn’t love more important than color?
What others did was their responsibility, for which they would answer when the judgment trumpet sounded. But what I did was my responsibility, and I would have to answer too.
He lived, now, in time, with the roar and the stink and the beauty and the horror of innumerable men: he had been dropped onto this inferno in the twinkling of an eye.
A story is impelled by the necessity to reveal: the aim of the story is revelation, which means that a story can have nothing – at least not deliberately – to hide. This also means that a story resolves nothing. The resolution of a story must occur in us, with what we make of the questions with which the story leaves us. A plot, on the other hand, must come to a resolution, prove a point: a plot must answer all the questions which it pretends to pose.
For the crime of their ancestry, millions of people in the middle of the twentieth century, and in the heart of Europe – God’s citadel – were sent to a death so calculated, so hideous, and so prolonged that no age before this enlightened one had been able to imagine it, much less achieve and record it.
I told myself all sorts of lies, standing there at the bar, but I could not move. And this was partly because I knew that it did not really matter anymore; it did not even matter if I never spoke to Giovanni again; for they had become visible, as visible as the wafers on the shirt of the flaming princess, they stormed all over me, my awakening, my insistent possibilities.
Fonny is working on the wood, on the stone, whistling, smiling. And, from far away, but coming nearer, the baby cries and cries and cries and cries and cries and cries and cries and cries, cries like it means to wake the dead.
But in the end, it is the threat of universal extinction over all the world today that changes totally and forever the nature of reality and brings into devastating question the true meaning of man’s history. We human beings now have the power to exterminate ourselves. This seems to be the entire sum of our achievements. We have taken this journey and arrived at this place in God’s name. This then, is the best that God – the white God – can do. If that is so, then it is time to replace him.
The conquests of England – every single one of them bloody – are part of what Americans have in mind when they speak of England’s glory. In the United States, violence and heroism have been made synonymous when it comes to Blacks. And the only way to defeat Malcom’s point is to concede and then ask oneself why this is so.
We’re all bastards. That’s why we need our friends.
Both clung to a fantasy rather than to each other, tried to suck pleasure from the crannies of the mind, rather than surrender the secrets of the body.
Isn’t love more important than colour?
Only time might help, time which surrendered all secrets but only on the inexorable condition, as far as he could tell, that the secret could no longer be used.
The blacks now suspected him of being an ally – though not a friend, never a friend!
He wanted to enter into, or to forget, the chaos at his center.
We live in a country in which words are mostly used to cover the sleeper, not to wake him up; and therefore, it seems to me, the adulation so cruelly proffered our elders has nothing to do with their achievement – which, I repeat, was mighty – but has to do with our impulse to look back on what we now imagine to have been a happier time. It is an adulation which has panic at the root.
And he knew again that she was not saying everything she meant; in a kind of secret language she was telling him today something that he must remember and understand tomorrow.
What a pain in the ass old Jesus Christ had turned out to be, and it probably wasn’t even the poor, doomed, loving, hopheaded old Jew’s fault.
If the world wasn’t so full of dead folks maybe those of us that’s trying to live wouldn’t have to suffer so bad.