Jerry Stratton

Even now, five months afterwards, my forefinger is still numb—a queer effect for a neck wound to have.

You had all the while a hateful feeling that someone hitherto your friend might be denouncing you to the secret police.

Some of the newspapers produced a tale that he had escaped to Fascist territory.

If there is one thing I hate more than another it is a rat running over me in the darkness.

The essential point of Nineteen Eighty-Four is just this, the danger of the ultimate and absolute power which mind can develop when it frees itself from conditions, from the bondage of things and history.

The scenery was stupendous, if you could forget that every mountain-top was occupied by troops and was therefore littered with tin cans and crusted with dung.

With the Spanish goat-skin water-bottles you can squirt a jet of wine right across a railway carriage into your friend’s mouth, which saves a lot of trouble.

One morning it was announced that the men in my ward were to be sent down to Barcelona today. I managed to send a wire to my wife, telling her that I was coming, and presently they packed us into buses and took us down to the station. It was only when the train was actually starting that the hospital orderly who traveled with us casually let fall that we were not going to Barcelona after all, but to Tarragona. I suppose the engine-driver had changed his mind. ‘Just like Spain!’ I thought. But it was very Spanish, too, that they agreed to hold up the train while I sent another wire, and more Spanish still that the wire never got there.

From this you would gather that it is usual to wait for your enemy to build a barricade before beginning to shoot at him.

No one I met at this time—doctors, nurses, practicantes, or fellow-patients—failed to assure me that a man who is hit through the neck and survives it is the luckiest creature alive. I could not help thinking that it would be even luckier not to be hit at all.

According to Stories in Stone by Douglas Keister, Christianity began as an outlawed cult, and Christians drew anchors—really just a cross with a curved bottom—on walls to identify places where their religion was secretly practiced. Then… Christianity no longer had to exist underground. The anchor symbol then came to represent Hope, one of the three theological virtues…

Today, a sepia-colored photograph of a dead child appears gruesome, but that picture might have been the only one the parents owned and would be treasured by them. The monuments they erected for their children also may appear overly dramatic to today’s society, but we rarely experience the amount of death nineteenth-century society experienced on a regular basis.

The snails, accompanied by a bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé, and followed up with chateaubriand béarnaise, pomes soufflées, and a fine Bordeaux—perhaps a Haut-Brion—make an auspicious beginning for a night in Les Halles, especially for those with a fondness for the atmosphere of bygone days.

It was a world of grace and drama few of us had ever expected to see; most likely we would never see its equal. The roistering, jolly, earthy loveliness of Les Halles belongs to such not-to-be-forgotten and sadly lamented lost worlds.

With its outdoor market and absence of motor traffic, the Cité Berryer was an astonishing bit of old Paris that managed to survive almost into the twenty-first century. Almost, but not quite. Developers found it, stole its soul, and rendered it banal at great expense.

“Ah, France is a rich country,” sighs Monsieur Alex. “Only the French do not realize what they have.”

Curiously, there were no books visible except on the worktable or the night table. Apparently, it was a conviction. Books were for reading, not for decoration.

In her memories, California was a glamorous place where everyone who was at all brought up knew how to whack off the top of a Champagne bottle at the neck. “You had to know for picnics.” There were many French people in San Francisco, and she always claimed that France was a bit of a letdown because no one was as marvelously French as those people she knew in San Francisco.

To savor each day and still revel in the past is a rare talent. Except in Paris.