false 90916 1933368608 9781933368603 155 48 Jamestown: A Novel http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171224925m/90916.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/90916.Jamestown_A_Novel 52249 Matthew Sharpe 328 82 4 0 false Wed Jun 18 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Sun Jun 08 17:16:50 -0700 2008 Wed Jun 18 19:16:22 -0700 2008
I'll be very interested to see what he does next.

***

"All right let me take a guess as to what a guy like you could possibly want when you steal into my tent at midnight, give me back my wireless device, and sing a song of love, and by the way don't ever sing. And move your mouth away from mine, your breath is foul, it's hot in here. You know what love is because you've studied it, not because you've felt it. You never will. You know what love is? It's this insidious thing that infects your eyes and ears, spreads to every inch of skin, the follicles of hair on the skin, the lips, the tongue, a hundred million microscopic organisms crawling on you. They commandeer the hollow of your thorax and your guts, your arms, your legs, your head, and other extremities. You cease to be yourself. You are now a vessel of impressions and thoughts of the person you love, of wishes for her, of dreams of her. You're jealous of the air she breathes because she takes it inside her all day and needs it to live; it becomes her, as you want to. You case your thoughts of her and you an hour, a day, a week, a year, a hundred years into the future. No thought has the power to push itself as far into the future as the thought of love--not even thoughts of fame, or wealth, or death. You with me so far, Smith?"

"No."

"Of course you're not, but listen. It can happen--and this is what you want to happen--that this same love is extracted from the bodies of the ones it has possessed, and is used as an expedient to link one family to another, one town to another, one corporation to another, and then it follows not the paths of thought and flesh but those of trade and law, and is meant to replace but really just precedes and facilitates the theft, murder, and rape of one swarm of men by another that goes by the name of history. That's why you're giving this back to me."]]>