Too bad Mahler never saw a Morley wah-wah pedal, he thought, or he would have scored it into one of his longer works.
Sidney’s never makes a mistake, he said to himself. We know that, too. What else can we depend on?
I’ll be all right,” he said, and thought, And I’m going to die. Both those are true, too.
What a job to have to do, Rick thought. I’m a scourge, like famine or plague. Where I go the ancient curse follows. As Mercer said, I am required to do wrong. Everything I’ve done has been wrong from the start. Anyhow, now it’s time to go home. Maybe after I’ve been there awhile with Iran, I’ll forget.
He felt the craving within him, the need to be entertained. And they all felt this way; the settlement yearned for the bizarre.
But what I’ve done, he thought; that’s become alien to me. In fact everything about me has become unnatural; I’ve become an unnatural self.
It’s a fact. I can’t get faith or enthusiasm by willing it. Deciding to.
It makes living a funny joke with nobody around to laugh.
It sounds like they’re saying passive life is good, he thought. But there is no such thing as passive life. That’s a contradiction.
What he did not know then is that it is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane. To listen to Gloria rationally ask to die was to inhale the contagion. It was a Chinese finger trap, where the harder you pull to get out, the tighter the trap gets.
Pascal said, “All history is one immortal man who continually learns.
If you dial’, Iran said, eyes open and watching, ‘for greater venom, then I’ll dial the same. I’ll dial the maximum and you’ll see a fight that makes every argument we’ve had up to now seem like nothing. Dial and see; just try me!’ She rose swiftly, loped to the console of her own mood organ, stood glaring at him, waiting.
It meant that you were seeing into absolute reality. The essence beyond the mere appearance.” In your terminology, he thought, what you saw is called – stigmata.
Kill the Spartan runners,” I said. Furiously, Kirsten lashed at me, “Is that one of your Berkeley educated remarks?
Everyone dwelt in it without realizing it. The Black Iron Prison was their world.
The deeds of the heroes, in the sacred dream-time... the only time, according to the bushmen, that was real.
She scrutinized him with a mixture of pleasure and pity; or so he read her expression.
You can’t go back, he thought. You can’t go from people to nonpeople. In panic he thought, I’m dependent on them. Thank god they stayed.
We can travel anywhere we want, even to other planets. And for what? To sit day after day, declining in morale and hope. Falling into an interminable ennui.
It strikes me as an interesting paradox that a Buddha-an enlightened one-would be unable to figure it out, even after four-and-a-half years, that he had become enlightened. Fat had become totally bogged down in his enormous exegesis, trying futilely to determine what had happened to him. He resembled more a hit-and-run accident victim than a Buddha.