Exhausted, hardly knowing what she was doing, she came the last three steps and sat, took the man in her arms, actually held him, gazing out of her smudged eyes down the stairs, back into the morning. She felt wetness against her breast and saw that he was crying again. He hardly breathed but tears came as if being pumped. “I can’t help,” she whispered, rocking him, “I can’t help.” It was already too many miles to Fresno.
You came to talk about the play,” he said. “Let me discourage you. It was written to entertain people. Like horror movies. It isn’t literature, it doesn’t mean anything. Wharfinger was no Shakespeare.” “Who was he?” she said. “Who was Shakespeare? It was a long time ago.
Now everybody-.
The fifth act, entirely an anticlimax, is taken up by the bloodbath Gennaro visits on the court of Squamuglia. Every mode of violent death available to Renaissance man, including a lye pit, land mines, a trained falcon with envenom’d talons, is employed. It plays, as Metzger remarked later, like a Road Runner cartoon in blank verse.
What happens to men sometimes,′ his father wants to tell Charlie, ‘is that one day all at once they’ll understand how much they love their children, as absolutely as a child gives away its own love, and the terrible terms that come with that, – and it proves too much to bear, and they’ll not want it, any of it, and they’ll back away in fear.
Even though there is a villain here, serious as death. It is this typical American teenager’s own Father, trying episode after episode to kill his son. And the kid knows it. Imagine that.
Sure, she knew folks who had no problem at all with the past. A lot of it they just didn’t remember. Many told her, one way and another, that it was enough for them to get by in real time without diverting precious energy to what, face it, was fifteen or twenty years dead and gone. But for Frenesi the past was one her case forever, the zombie at her back, the enemy no one wanted to see, a mouth wide and dark as the grave.
Here was world of simplicity and certainty no acidhead, no revolutionary anarchist would ever find, a world based on the one and zero of life and death. Minimal, beautiful. The patterns of life and deaths...
As a courtesy I’m taking you out to the impound garage to get your vehicle. We’ve been over it with the best tools available to forensic science, and except for enough cannabis debris to keep an average family of four stoned for a year, you’re clean. No blood or impact evidence we can use. Congratulations.
No, this is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into –.
It’s wrong because if you pick up a rifle, the Man picks up a machine gun, by the time you find some machine gun he’s all set up to shoot rockets, begin to see a pattern?
But in the dynamic space of the living Rocket, the double integral has a different meaning. To integrate here is to operate on a rate of change so that time falls away: change is stilled... ‘Meters per second ’ will integrate to ‘meters.’ The moving vehicle is frozen, in space, to become architecture, and timeless. It was never launched. It never did fall.
But as we all know, rock ‘n’ roll will never die, and education too, as Henry Adams always sez, keeps going on forever.
He gazed at Reef in almost unconcealed envy, failing completely to recognize the darker thing, the desire, the desperate need to create a radius of annihilation that, if it could not include the ones who deserved it, might as well include himself. Webb.
Out the window in the distance, contradicting the prairie, a mirage of downtown Chicago ascended to a kind of lurid acropolis, its light as if from nightly immolation warped to the red end of the spectrum, smoldering as if always just about to explode into open flames.
The smartest kid Justin ever met, back in kindergarten, had told him to pretend his parents were characters in a television sitcom. ‘Pretend there’s a frame around ’em like the Tube, pretend they’re a show you’re watching. You can go into it if you want, or you can just watch and not go into it.
You could fall in love with me, you can talk to my shrink, you can hide a tape recorder in my bedroom, see what I talk about from wherever I am when I sleep. You want to do that? You can put together clues, develop a thesis, or several, about why characters reacted to the Trystero possibility the way they did, why the assassins came on, why the black costumes. You could waste your life that way and never touch the truth.
She faced that possibility as she might the toy street from a high balcony, roller-coaster ride, feeding-time among the beasts in a zoo – any death-wish that can be consummated by some minimum gesture.
It’s nothing he can see or lay hands on – sudden gases, a violence upon the air and no trace afterward... a Word, spoken with no warning into your ear, and then silence forever. Beyond its invisibility, beyond hammerfall and doomcrack, here is its real horror, mocking, promising him death with German and precise confidence, laughing down all of Tantivy’s quiet decencies... no, no bullet with fins, Ace... not the Word, the one Word that rips apart the day...
Oedipa stood in the living room, stared at by the greenish dead eye of the TV tube, spoke the name of God, tried to feel as drunk as possible. But this did not work.