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Death is a debt to nature due, Which I have paid, and so must you.
Because I could not stop for Death He kindly stopped for me
Shit, money, and the Word, the three American truths, powering the American mobility, claimed the Slothrops, clasped them for good to the country’s fate.
It is marginal, hungry, chilly—most times they’re too paranoid to risk a fire—but it’s something they want to keep, so much that to keep it they will take on more than propaganda has ever asked them for. They are in love. Fuck the war.
Will Postwar be nothing but “events,” newly created one moment to the next? No links? Is it the end of history?
Don’t forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals.
Our history is an aggregate of last moments.
She is the British warm that protects his stooping shoulders, and the wintering sparrow he holds inside his hands. She is his deepest innocence in spaces of bough and hay before wishes were given a separate name to warn that they might not come true, and his lithe Parisian daughter of joy, beneath the eternal mirror, forswearing perfumes, capeskin to the armpits, all that is too easy, for his impoverishment and more worthy love.
It is the parabola.
Proverbs for Paranoids, 1: You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.
Proverbs for Paranoids, 2: The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master.
Proverbs for Paranoids, 3: If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.
Proverbs for Paranoids, 4: You hide, they seek.
We of all magical precipitates out of Europe’s groaning, clouded alembic, we are the thinnest, the most dangerous, the handiest to secular uses. . . . We tried to exterminate our Indians, like you: we wanted the closed white version of reality we got—but even into the smokiest labyrinths, the furthest stacked density of midday balcony or courtyard and gate, the land has never let us forget. . . .
when everything has been taken care of, when nothing can go wrong, or even surprise us . . . something will.
Paranoids are not paranoids (Proverb 5) because they’re paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.
