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That is my principal objection to life, I think: It is too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.
EGREGIOUS. Most people think that word means terrible or unheard of or unforgivable. It has a much more interesting story than that to tell. It means “outside the herd.” Imagine that—thousands of people, outside the herd.
“It’s a widely accepted principle,” he says, “that you can claim a piece of land which has been inhabited for tens of thousands of years, if only you will repeat this mantra endlessly: ‘We discovered it, we discovered it, we discovered it. . . .’”
I identified a basic mistake my parents had made about life: They thought that it would be very wrong if anybody ever laughed at them.
CELIA: I would gladly walk over glowing coals for you. I love you. I need you so. (RUDY considers this declaration, comes to a cynical conclusion, which makes him tired.) RUDY (emptily): Pills. CELIA: What a team we’d make—the crazy old lady and Deadeye Dick. RUDY: You want pills from me—without a prescription. CELIA: I love you. RUDY: Sure. But it’s pills, not love, that make people walk over broken glass at midnight. What’ll it be, Celia—amphetamine?
Celia had gone after the watches, too, but they were still okay. It is virtually impossible to harm a Timex watch. For some reason, the less you pay for a watch, the surer you can be that it will never stop.
“Everybody here is fake.” “That’s a nice thing to say about your own hometown,” I said. “Your father was a fake. He couldn’t paint good pictures. I’m a fake. I can’t really play the piano. You’re a fake. You can’t write decent plays. It’s perfectly all right, as long as we all stay home. That’s where your brother made his mistake. He went away from home. They catch fakes out in the real world, you know. They catch ’em all the time.”
How comical that I, a single cell, should take my life so seriously!
W E all see our lives as stories, it seems to me, and I am convinced that psychologists and sociologists and historians and so on would find it useful to acknowledge that. If a person survives an ordinary span of sixty years or more, there is every chance that his or her life as a shapely story has ended, and all that remains to be experienced is epilogue. Life is not over, but the story is. Some people, of course, find inhabiting an epilogue so uncongenial that they commit suicide. Ernest Hemingway comes to mind. Celia Hoover, née Hildreth, comes to mind.
