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“Love may fail, but courtesy will prevail.” This seems true to me—and complete. So I am now in the abashed condition, five days after my fifty-sixth birthday, of realizing that I needn’t have bothered to write several books. A seven-word telegram would have done the job.
Bullies would chase him and catch him and take off his pants and underpants and throw them down the mouth of hell. The mouth of hell looked like a sort of wishing well, but without a bucket and windlass.
It insisted on being a very unfriendly story, so I quit writing it.
Like all of Father’s stories, it was as neatly packaged and self-contained as an egg.
Labor history was pornography of a sort in those days, and even more so in these days. In public schools and in the homes of nice people it was and remains pretty much taboo to tell tales of labor’s sufferings and derring-do.
A fighter plane leaped up from the top of a nearby runway, destroyed enough energy to heat one hundred homes for a thousand years, tore the sky to shreds.
A newspaper photograph was taken of me as I sat in the back of the federal marshal’s green sedan, right after I was sentenced to prison. It was widely interpreted as showing how ashamed I was, haggard, horrified, unable to look anyone in the eye. It was in fact a photograph of a man who had just set his pants on fire.
I was placed in charge of a team of civilian engineers, which was winnowing mountains of captured German technical documents for inventions and manufacturing methods and trade secrets American industry might use. It did not matter that I knew no math or chemistry or physics—any more than it had mattered when I went to work for the Department of Agriculture that I had never been near a farm, that I had not even tended a pot of African violets on a windowsill. There was nothing that a humanist could not supervise—or so it was widely believed at the time.
“I knew God would never come near such a place. So did the Nazis. That was what made them so hilarious and unafraid. That was the strength of the Nazis,” she said. “They understood God better than anyone. They knew how to make Him stay away.”
“Here’s to God Almighty, the laziest man in town.”
He had a cold pipe clamped in his teeth, even when he sat on a witness stand. I got close enough to him one time to discover that he made music on that pipe. It was like the twittering of birds.
the harrowing thing that Jesus, according to Saint Matthew, had promised to say in the Person of God to sinners on Judgment Day. This is it: “Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” These words appalled me then, and they appall me now. They are surely the inspiration for the notorious cruelty of Christians. “Jesus may have said that,” I told Larkin, “but it is so unlike most of what else He said that I have to conclude that He was slightly crazy that day.”
The judge from Vicuna in the story tells us that the way the people on his native planet said “hello” and “goodbye,” and “please” and “thank you,” too. It was this: “ting-a-ling.”
no musical instruments on Vicuna, he said, since the people themselves were music when they floated around without their bodies.
Transico Division of The RAMJAC Corporation. Transico has limousine services and taxicab fleets and car-rental agencies and parking lots and garages all over the Free World. You can even rent furniture from Transico. Many people do.
His voice is between Richard Brautigan and David Byrne
the Chinese major in charge of his prison had been a Harvard man. The major would have been about my age, and possibly even a classmate, but I had never befriended any Chinese. According to Lawes, he had studied physics and mathematics, so I would not have known him in any case. “His daddy was a big landlord,” said Lawes. “When the communists came, they made his daddy kneel down in front of all his tenants in the village, and then they chopped off his head with a sword.” “But the son could still be a communist—after that?” I said. “He said his daddy really had been a very bad landlord,” he
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“I was too ignorant then to know how hard it was to learn Chinese. I thought it was like imitating birds. You know: You hear a bird make a sound, then you try to make a sound just like that, and see if you can’t fool the bird.”
I had studied French for four years in a Cleveland public high school, by the way, but I never found anyone who spoke the dialect I learned out there. It may have been French as it was spoken by Iroquois mercenaries in the French and Indian War.
discovered that the bottom drawer contained seven incomplete clarinets—without cases, mouthpieces, or bells. Life is like that sometimes.
I walked out into a city stunned by its own innocence.
Sounds like Timothy Levitch stole this!
So I did sit down, and everywhere I looked I saw customers of every description being received with love. To the waitress everybody was “honeybunch” and “darling” and “dear.” It was like an emergency ward after a great catastrophe. It did not matter what race or class the victims belonged to. They were all given the same miracle drug, which was coffee. The catastrophe in this case, of course, was that the sun had come up again.
The young man did not appear to be listening to his own radio. He may not even have understood English. The newscaster spoke with a barking sort of hilarity, as though life were a comical steeplechase, with unconventional steeds and hazards and vehicles involved. He made me feel that even I was a contestant—in a bathtub drawn by three aardvarks, perhaps. I had as good a chance as anybody to win.
The shopping-bag lady seemed to be scolding strangers for their obesity, calling them, as I understood her, “stuck-up fats,” and “rich Tats,” and “snooty fats,” and “fats” of a hundred other varieties. The thing was: I had been away from Cambridge, Massachusetts, so long that I could no longer detect that she was calling people “farts” in the accent of the Cambridge working class.
Noses are merciful that way. They will report that something smells awful. If the owner of a nose stays around anyway, the nose concludes that the smell isn’t so bad after all. It shuts itself off, deferring to superior wisdom. Thus is it possible to eat Limburger cheese—or to hug the stinking wreckage of an old sweetheart at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street.
“I’ve heard that you can always tell a Harvard man,” he said, “but you can’t tell him much.”
How else could he ever amount to anything if he did not use loaded dice? How has he used loaded dice with you? The laws that say he can fire anybody who stands up for the basic rights of workers—those are loaded dice. The policemen who will protect his property rights but not your human rights—those are loaded dice.”
Anarchists are persons who believe with all their hearts that governments are enemies of their own people.
Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested for dangerous radical activities before the meeting could take place. Their crime was the possession of leaflets calling for the meeting. The penalities could be stiff fines and up to a year in jail. But then they were suddenly charged with two unsolved murders, too.
Was Vanzetti guilty of this lesser crime? Possibly so, but it did not matter much. Who said it did not matter much? The judge who tried the case said it did not matter much. He was Webster Thayer, a graduate of Dartmouth College and a descendent of many fine New England families. He told the jury, “This man, although he may not have actually committed the crime attributed to him, is nevertheless morally culpable, because he is the enemy of our existing institutions.” Word of honor: This was said by a judge in an American court of law. I take the quotation from a book at hand: Labor’s Untold
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Who was the wisest man in the Bible, supposedly—wiser even, we can suppose, than the president of Harvard? He was King Solomon, of course. Two women claiming the same baby appeared before Solomon, asking him to apply his legendary wisdom to their case. He suggested cutting the baby in two. And the wisest men in Massachusetts said that Sacco and Vanzetti should die.
So into heaven Einstein went, carrying his beloved fiddle. He thought no more about the audit. He was a veteran of countless border crossings by then. There had always been senseless questions to answer, empty promises to make, meaningless documents to sign.
