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Another instant flickering past — going, going, gone. Time.
They would laugh at earth men, to whom time was a one-way street with a dead end in sight.
“And if one’s life happens to stink through no fault of his own?” “Then he can settle for a trip back to the womb. Some don’t want any more than that.”
He could not see that time — not cancer or heart disease or any other disease in his books — was the most frightening, crippling plague of mankind.
The boy was seventeen, tall, still growing — as graceless as a homemade stepladder.
highlighted this quote because the comparison just struck me as odd. what a weird way of writing.
Into the night went Arlene, her face simply one more pale pie in a river of pale pies.
another weird quote that I very much like.
we would be wise to quit treating this planet as though, in case we wrecked it, there were plenty of spares out there.
if it weren’t for Columbus, we Europeans still wouldn’t know about the Western Hemisphere, and General Motors wouldn’t now be laying off 70,000 workers, and Los Angeles wouldn’t be running out of water, and we wouldn’t have killed a high-school teacher while trying to put her into orbit, and so on.
But making a spine for history out of memorized dates has the side effect of teaching that human destiny is governed by sudden and explosive events, strictly localized in space and time. The truth is that we are the playthings of systems as complex and turbulent as the weather systems pondered by my big brother Bernard.
We like to pretend that so many important discoveries have been made on a certain day, unexpectedly, by one person rather than by a system seeking such knowledge, I think, because we hope that life is like a lottery, where simply anyone can come up with a winning ticket.
Who knows? Tomorrow morning, some absolute nobody, maybe you or I, might fall into an open manhole, and return to street level with a concussion and a cancer cure.
“Behind every great fortune lies a great crime,” said Balzac, alluding to European aristocrats who imagined themselves to be descended from anything other than sociopaths.
And while I and my children and grandchildren are entitled to say, as aftershocks of old atrocities continue to be felt by Indians and blacks, that our family never killed an Indian or owned a black, we can scarcely opine that Germans are gentler, kinder, saner than other Europeans. Would we dare? Does anybody perchance remember World War II? For those who never heard of it and its gruesome preamble, there are movies they can see. Word of honor, it really happened. All of it.
The Second Amendment, written by the Anglo James Madison, a slave owner, says, “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” As long as the poor people in this country kill each other, which is what so many of them are doing day after day, the federal government, obviously, is content to regard them, as Columbus might have done, as a well-regulated militia.
If I were worth my salt as an anthropologist, which I am not and never was, I would be writing now about the intermingling of Christianity and Native American religions instead of opossums and raccoons.
AIDS, I read somewhere, was probably brought into this country by a Canadian flight attendant on an international flight. And what had his crime been? Nothing but love, love, love. That’s life sometimes.
I was a mere youth then, who kept a bowl of human eyes on his desk. It was common for visitors to at first mistake them for hard-boiled eggs.
The smallest state in Hughes’s Australia, the island of Tasmania, is the only place on Earth where the entire native population was dead soon after the first white people arrived, and whose genes are no longer to be found even in crossbreeds, since the settlers found Tasmanians so loathsome that they would not have sex with them.
I can’t help thinking that it is somehow symbolically significant that, on the five hundredth anniversary of the end of Europe’s non-discovery of America, each hemisphere had thought it might become necessary to kill the other one, but had suddenly changed its mind about that.
His advice on how to behave at a funeral, I remember, included, “Do not bring your dog.”
We are incorrigibly the nastiest of all animals, as our history attests, and that is that.
He has gathered together enough money to make a documentary film about the destruction by Homo sapiens of the planet, of “Space Ship Earth,” as a life-support system.
I had written, among other things, that we were “a new sort of glacier, warm-blooded and clever, unstoppable, about to gobble up everything and then make love — and then double in size again.”
“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”
