More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
the easy, revisionist deification of the “greatest generation” took hold and the GIs of World War II became officially unassailable. But most of those who
was something far more daring: the book’s pervasive gayness. It
incoherence as a contemporary social characteristic.
between them and the Irish. But the Irish stayed hurt all their lives; the Italians had a bounce-back in them. All his life he’d been silent, waiting
sentences! But he couldn’t talk to himself. Nor
bursting to be released to someone, someone who would really listen to him. Words
have no idea of how alone it is. And while I was there last month, I dreamed of
with me. Like a disease when you stop
swooning texture like tried gold melting. The vermouth was now well into his
potentialities in himself. But when he talked to others, something in him went limp and kept sneering at him that he was alone alone alone and wrapped in some inaccessible womb, that nobody else
of others like him, whom no one had heard of or thought about. For all the sick wretchedness of a world that no one could, or tried to, understand.
There’s something festering here, something hermetically sealed. With the exception of the indigenous Ayrabs, all Caucasians here seem to be corpse intruders, animated by a squeaking desire to be somewhere else. The restlessness of Casablanca is of the damned. It’s a
saw the cancer of the world outside of the United States, where we put nice sterile bandages over any open sores, and signs of Men Working by sewers.
malade. I remember
than which there is no more cathartic
for the language, which made her think of gooey kisses pressed by some greaser on the neck of his sweating mistress. And she saw no good reason to learn it because the
much too effeminate. And they had the kind of cringing good manners of a Negro, when he’s afraid you’ll push him off the sidewalk—which you won’t if he
Galleria Umberto.
They didn’t have the finished peace
surprised them in the orgasm of life. There was something of unfinished business
the Casablanca area, a crescent without
remember the center of the beach town of Fedhala. It was a lush and classic park with geometrical walks and
as they were in the States. And
been hypnotized. I said to myself: That’s my boy, and I’m proud of him. . . .
it is. I don’t dare go to the beach at Fire Island. —That’s his Li’l Abner pose, Lyle screeched and
they scuttled around inside his head squeaking in furry voices of doubt and doom. They played with one another like a litter of kittens, but it was the calculated play
big business has. So they’re at war with nearly everybody else in the world. The rest of the world hates Americans because they’re so
International carpetbaggers. . . .
geometric as cones. Her nipples seemed to see.
power for him, that her therapy was only a breathing spell in the denouement. Even now at
given him was a sip of life, for which he
the column and crossed his bare legs. He was wearing his old Italian khaki shorts, but his shirt was American suntan P/W issue, with stars attached to the
rough edges in your relations with others to be lubricated with the grape. I envy you.
and the sickening mirage of eternity. There
sliced by the French perfection of detail, but soundlessly, as glass under water can be sheared by a scissors.
normal in most men—numbness and resignation—used to wonder what he’d find in Italy. Perhaps
people, he said to himself, are all in search of
Umberto had so many nuances on their lips as the Americans Hal saw there.
You think of yourself as the center of the universe. . . . And anything that doesn’t fit into your scheme of things gets rationalized away like a piece of rock found
lover never feels he must love, because he does. Only the half-arsed poets invented love as a force that
That’s the way civilizations die, gradually. A premium is put on physical courage in wartime which kills off the gentle,
. . . Death to them is terrible. And it’s just another of those things to people who aren’t aware of life, except as a current of vitality that carries them along.
the dance with a capital D. . . . I pity you for all your struggling and whining to yourself. For I’m free, free! . .
trying to conceal that your soul is a perfumed jellyfish. You’ve tried to wrestle with the larger issues when you’re not sure whether you can read and write. . . . Wise up
You have no right to seek God directly. You must do it through other people. They’re all small pieces of Him. If you know and love all the people of your time, you know
the sorrowing world
eye. He wanted so to help, to help, to help. . . .
the world isn’t American, and that not everything American is good, we’d all perish together, and in this twentieth century. . . . My mind kept reverting to the captain of the Bersaglieri. And under different circumstances he’d have ordered me to my death. . . . Something
cling to, she offered them only the lacy traceries of an old theology. The twentieth century was too rapid for
wrestle with that impulse, Chaplain Bascom cried in triumph, slapping the table so that the glasses jumped to attention. We must marry if we don’t
