The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

by Michael Chabon

Every universe, our own included, begins in conversation. Every golem in the history of the world, from Rabbi Hanina’s delectable goat to the river-clay Frankenstein of Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, was summoned into existence through language, through murmuring, recital, and kabbalistic chitchat—was, literally, talked into life.

The elegant black-and-white ship, all 24,170 tons of it, loomed like a mountain in a dinner jacket.

Sammy felt, that morning, with his ribs bruised and a wan flavor of chlorine at the back of his mouth, that he would rather not love at all than be punished for loving. He had no idea of how long his life would one day seem to have gone on; how daily present the absence of love would come to feel.

A GREAT FEAT OF ENGINEERING is an object of perpetual interest to people bent on self-destruction.

He wished he could tell him how the churned-up sidewalk, the hectoring crows on the bare Virginia creeper, and the irritable buzzing of Mr. Spiegelman’s neon sign made him feel a kind of premonitory sadness for adult life, as if Bloomtown, with its swimming pools, jungle gyms, lawns, and dazzling sidewalks, were the various and uniform sea of childhood itself, from which this senescent hunk of the village of Manticock protruded like a wayward dark island.

As with many lonely children, his problem was not solitude itself but that he was never left free to enjoy it.

Nobody was smiling or laughing, though with children, entertainment often seemed to be a grave business.

He allowed the world to wind him in the final set of chains, and climbed, once and for all, into the cabinet of mysteries that was the life of an ordinary man.

She gave him her hand then, and he took it in his own. For an instant, his felt much drier and more callused than she remembered, and then it felt exactly the same.

The newspaper articles that Joe had read about the upcoming Senate investigation into comic books always cited “escapism” among the litany of injurious consequences of their reading, and dwelled on the pernicious effect, on young minds, of satisfying the desire to escape. As if there could be any more noble or necessary service in life.

Joe put an arm across Sammy’s shoulders. On the other side of Sammy, Rosa leaned against him, and laid her head on Joe’s hand, and sighed. They sat that way for a while, propping one another up.

Sammy could not have known that one day he would come to regard all the things that their loving each other had seemed to put at so much risk—his career in comic books, his relations with his family, his place in the world—as the walls of a prison, an airless, lightless keep from which there was no hope of escape.

The fundamental purpose of storytelling is to pass the time, which is infinite, slow, and weighs heavy on our hands.