A couple of years I taught in graduate programs at NYU and Columbia, in the early eighties.
It’s a way of living with tragedy, I guess, to claim after it happens that you saw it coming, as if somehow you had already made the necessary adjustments beforehand.
Mourning can be very selfish. When someone you love has died, you tend to recall best those few moments and incidents that helped clarify your sense, not of the person who has died, but of your own self.
If you yourself are not a victim, you cannot claim to see the world as the victim does.
It was like a dream, a beautiful, soothing dream of late autumn: low, gray skies, smell of woodsmoke, fallen leaves crackling beneath my feet, and somewhere out there, in the farmsteads and plantations ahead of me, swift retribution! Freedom! The bloody work of the Lord!
You must not obey a majority, no matter how large, if it opposes your principles and opinions.′ He said this to each new volunteer and repeated it over and over to him, until it was engraved on his mind. ‘The largest majority is often only an organized mob whose noise can no more change the false into the true than it can change black into white or night into day. And a minority, conscious of its rights, if those rights are based on moral principles, will sooner or later become a just majority.
Father argued that society as a whole must come to be organized on a different basis than greed, for while material interests gained somewhat by the institutionalized deification of pure selfishness, ordinary men and women lost everything by it.
For instance, a man generally doesn’t even know how small a woman is until he holds an article of her clothing up in front of him, one of her nightgowns, say, and sees how small and flimsy it is and how like a child’s and unlike his own, and how thick and heavy his hands seem.
He can’t quite picture God except as a huge ball of light with an old man’s deep voice like in the pickup truck ads on TV coming out of the ball of light dictating the way everything in Eden is supposed to work.
One minute he was moving securely through time and space, in perfect coordination with other people; then, with no warning, he was out of step, was somehow removed from everyone else’s sense of time and place, so that the slightest movement, word, facial expression or gesture contained enormous significance. The room filled with coded messages that he could not decode, and he slipped quickly into barely controlled hysteria.
Because it’s anger that drives us and delivers us. It’s not any kind of love either-love for the underdog or the victim, or whatever you want to call them. Some litigators like to claim that. The losers.
It’s a landscape that controls you, sits you down and says, Shut up, pal, I’m in charge here.
A tattoo does that, it makes you think about your body like it’s this special suit that you can put on or take off whenever you want and a new name if it’s cool enough does the same thing. To have both at once is power. It’s the kind of power as all those superheroes who have secret identities get from being able to change back and forth from one person into another. No matter who you think he is, man, the dude is always somebody else.
In some countries, I said to myself, the only life you can properly desire is that of destroyer.
I kept driving straight on toward what we called home and could not say aloud the words that were thrashing me, as if somehow by remaining silent I could keep the terrible thing from having occurred.
We pass between sea and sky with unaccountable, humiliating ease, as if there were no firmament between the firmaments, no above or below, here or there, now or then, with only the feeble conventions of language, our contrived principles, and our love of one another’s light to keep our own light from going out; abandon any one of them, and we dissolve in darkness like salt in water.
Photographs of them alive and smiling would have made me cry and fall down and beat the earth with my fists; their actual dead faces only sealed me off from myself.
The only way I could go on living was to believe I was not living.
I thought that if could bring back the memory, I could bring back the feeling, and I would know for the first time what I truly wanted for myself, and then I would go and find it. That was my plan. But memories are always of things lost and gone and never returning.
Father took race to be the central and inescapable fact of American life and character, and thus he did not apologize for its being the central fact of his own life and character.
I remember thinking you live from moment to moment and the moments all flow into one another forwards and backwards and you almost never catch one like this that’s separate from the rest.