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The doctor studied him curiously. “What’s it like to be dead? In a word: dead. That’s what it’s like.”
“Logic, my boy,” said Dr. Boyle patiently, between his teeth. “It doesn’t make sense. You could go back in time, kill a man, and wipe out God-knows-how-many descendants. Knock off Charlemagne, and you kill about every white man on earth. Ridiculous! Why don’t you go into gunrunning, and sell the ancient Athenians a couple of machine guns so they can win the Peloponnesian War? Why not go back and invent the lightbulb, the telephone, and the airplane before Edison, Bell, and the Wrights get around to it? Think of the royalties!”
“Look, my friend,” said Boyle with exasperation, “a week ago, I hardly knew you. Now I find you dogging me like my Siamese twin. Telephone calls, interminable conversations — all about time, time, time. I’m not interested, do you understand? Why don’t you attach yourself to someone who would be? A close friend, maybe a minister or a psychologist, or some kind of ologist who would go big for this sort of monkey business. I’m a general practitioner, and a damned busy one.”
“Excuse me, Miss St. Coeur, but what’s a streetwalker?” “Hold your hats,” John whispered to me. “A streetwalker, dear?” said Sally. “Why, that’s a — that’s a woman who takes money.” “Oh,” said Melody. “There goes the reputation of every decent female cashier in the world,” whispered John.
“My Daddy says kissing folks in public is the most disgusting thing there is.” The man who had told her that was under indictment for swindling his neighbors and his country out of six million dollars.
She came running to her Daddy, threw her arms around him. I wondered what she would say when she smelled all that booze on him. “Oh, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy — ” she said, “you’ve got too much aftershave lotion on again.”
the cowed husband of a woman as massive and unyielding as a war memorial.
Eddie was able to prove that she was impudent, vain, easily distracted, and a slow and inaccurate typist. She was unable to read her own shorthand, had no loyalty toward the Ceramics Department, held the company record for tardiness and absenteeism, and was as amenable to routines as a one-eyed black cat.
“I’m tired of doing things I have to do. From now on I’m going to do what I want to do.”
“It’s supposed to be the most beautiful city in the world,” said Marie. “The most beautiful city in the world is Indianapolis, Indiana,” said old Futz.
About 20 years ago I wrote an essay that was printed by The New York Times about how inhospitable the moons and asteroids and other planets in the solar system were, so that we would be wise to quit treating this planet as though, in case we wrecked it, there were plenty of spares out there.
“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. Count Dracula comes to mind.
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.
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. It is not certain that the Tasmanians had even domesticated fire.
Twain’s was about etiquette. His advice on how to behave at a funeral, I remember, included, “Do not bring your dog.”
As Bertolt Brecht said, “Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral,” or, freely translated, “As long as we’re hungry, all we can think about is food.”
As consolation, I offer this prayer attributed to the great German-American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), possibly as early as 1937, in the depths of the planetary economic depression before this one: “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.”
