More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
I like them, I trust them, I can’t think of anyone else I like better, but right now I wish they weren’t here. Though they’re necessary: David’s and Anna’s car was the only way I could make it, there’s no bus and no train and I never hitch. They’re doing me a favour, which they disguised by saying it would be fun, they like to travel. But my reason for being here embarrasses them, they don’t understand it. They all disowned their parents long ago, the way you are supposed to: Joe never mentions his mother and father, Anna says hers were nothing people and David calls his The Pigs.
It’s an imitation of other places, more southern ones, which are themselves imitations, the original someone’s distorted memory of a nineteenth century English gentleman’s shooting lodge,
stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results,
I’m trying to decide whether or not I love him. It shouldn’t matter, but there’s always a moment when curiosity becomes more important to them than peace and they need to ask; though he hasn’t yet.
When he suggested we should live together I didn’t hesitate. It wasn’t even a real decision, it was more like buying a goldfish or a potted cactus plant, not because you want one in advance but because you happen to be in the store and you see them lined up on the counter.
A divorce is like an amputation, you survive but there’s less of you.
Dead people’s clothes ought to be buried with them.
but I recall the feeling, puzzled, baffled, when I found out some words were dirty and the rest were clean. The bad ones in French are the religious ones, the worst ones in any language were what they were most afraid of and in English it was the body, that was even scarier than God.
learned about religion the way most children then learned about sex, not in the gutter but in the gravel and cement schoolyard, during the winter months of real school. They would cluster in groups, holding each others’ mittened hands and whispering. They terrified me by telling me there was a dead man in the sky watching everything I did and I retaliated by explaining
The sound of love in the north, a kiss, a slap.
The trees will never be allowed to grow that tall again, they’re killed as soon as they’re valuable, big trees are scarce as whales.
said he loved me, the magic word, it was supposed to make everything light up, I’ll never trust that word again.
have to behave as though it doesn’t exist, because for me it can’t, it was taken away from me, exported, deported. A section of my own life, sliced off from me like a Siamese twin, my own flesh cancelled. Lapse, relapse, I have to forget.
of searching the island for him, it’s two miles long. It would take twenty or thirty men at least, strung out at intervals and walking straight through the forest, and even then they could miss him, dead or alive, accident or suicide or murder. Or if for some unfathomable reason he’s chosen this absence and is hiding, they’d never find him: there would be nothing easier in this country than to let the searchers get ahead of you and then follow at a distance, stopping when they stop, keeping them in sight so that no matter which way they turned you would always be behind them. That’s what I
...more
It’s like the times he used to play hide and seek with us in the semi-dark after supper, it was different from playing in a house, the space to hide in was endless; even when we knew which tree he had gone behind there was the fear that what would come out when you called would be someone else.
I’ve finished what I came for and I don’t want to stay here, I want to go back to where there is electricity and distraction. I’m used to it now, filling the time without it is an effort.
ersatz Eskimo for the home market.
this isn’t a country of princesses,
My father didn’t approve, he reacted as though I’d asked to go to a pool hall: Christianity was something he’d escaped from, he wished to protect us from its distortions. But after a couple of years he decided I was old enough, I could see for myself, reason would defend me.
Perhaps it’s not only his body I like, perhaps it’s his failure; that also has a kind of purity.
She is sorting her thoughts about Joe while working
He didn’t dislike people, he merely found them irrational; animals, he said, were more consistent, their behaviour at least was predictable. To him that’s what Hitler exemplified: not the triumph of evil but the failure of reason.
Even the village had too many people for him, he needed an island, a place where he could recreate not the settled farm life of his own father but that of the earliest ones who arrived when there was nothing but forest and no ideologies but the ones they brought with them. When they say Freedom they never quite mean it, what they mean is freedom from interference.
I don’t want to leave her alone. What I’m afraid of is my father, hidden on the island somewhere and attracted by the light perhaps, looming up at the window like a huge ragged moth; or, if he’s still at all lucid, asking her who she is and ordering her out of his house. As long as there are four of us he’ll keep away, he never liked groups.
Indian way, if there’s no bait try a chunk of your flesh.
Eisenhower.
Talks about Americans
Being here feels right to me for the first time, and I know it’s because we’re leaving tomorrow. My father will have the island to himself; madness is private, I respect that, however he may be living it’s better than an institution.
Mineral rights, that’s what he explores, for one of the big international companies, a prospector; but I can’t believe in that, nothing he’s done since we grew up is real to me.
Division in family
Being socially retarded is like being mentally retarded, it arouses in others disgust and pity and the desire to torment and reform.
How have I been able to live so long in the city, it isn’t safe. I always felt safe here, even at night. That’s a lie, my own voice says out loud. I think hard about it, considering it, and it is a lie: sometimes I was terrified, I would shine the flashlight ahead of me on the path, I would hear a rustling in the forest and know it was hunting me, a bear, a wolf or some indefinite thing with no name, that was worse.
The trouble is all in the knob at the top of our bodies. I’m not against the body or the head either: only the neck, which creates the illusion that they are separate. The language is wrong, it shouldn’t have different words for them. If the head extended directly into the shoulders like a worm’s or a frog’s without that constriction, that lie, they wouldn’t be able to look down at their bodies and move them around as if they were robots or puppets; they would have to realize that if the head is detached from the body both of them will die.
Love without fear, sex without risk, that’s what they wanted to be true; and they almost did it, I thought, they almost pulled it off, but as in magicians’ tricks or burglaries half-success is failure and we’re back to the other things. Love is taking precautions. Did you take any precautions, they say, not before but after.
After the first I didn’t ever want to have another child, it was too much to go through for nothing, they shut you into a hospital, they shave the hair off you and tie your hands down and they don’t let you see, they don’t want you to understand, they want you to believe it’s their power, not yours. They stick needles into you so you won’t hear anything, you might as well be a dead pig, your legs are up in a metal frame, they bend over you, technicians, mechanics, butchers, students clumsy or sniggering practising on your body, they take the baby out with a fork like a pickle out of a pickle
...more
It’s like death, I thought, the bad part isn’t the thing itself but being a witness. I suppose they could hear us too, the times before. But I never say anything.
When you can’t tell the difference between your own pleasure and your pain then you’re an addict.
But marriage was like playing Monopoly or doing crossword puzzles, either your mind worked that way, like Anna’s, or it didn’t; and I’d proved mine didn’t. A small neutral country.
They’re running out of water, clean water, they’re dirtying up all of theirs, right? Which is what we have a lot of, this country is almost all water if you look at a map. So in a while, I give it ten years, they’ll be up against the wall. They’ll try to swing a deal with the government, get us to give them the water cheap or for nothing in exchange for more soapflakes or something, and the government will give in, they’ll be a bunch of puppets as usual. But by that time the Nationalist Movement will be strong enough so they’ll force the government to back down; riots or kidnappings or
...more
if the Movement guerillas were anything like David and Joe they would never make it through the winters. They couldn’t get help from the cities, they would be too far, and the people there would be apathetic, they wouldn’t mind another change of flag. If they tried at the outlying farms the farmers would take after them with shotguns. The Americans wouldn’t even have to defoliate the trees, the guerillas would die of starvation and exposure anyway.
My Brother’s Keeper always reminded me of zoos and insane asylums.
I didn’t feel awful; I realized I didn’t feel much of anything, I hadn’t for a long time. Perhaps I’d been like that all my life, just as some babies are born deaf or without a sense of touch; but if that was true I wouldn’t have noticed the absence. At some point my neck must have closed over, pond freezing or a wound, shutting me into my head; since then everything had been glancing off me, it was like being in a vase, or the village where I could see them but not hear them because I couldn’t understand what was being said.
I was civilized at last, the finished product.
Woman sawn apart in a wooden crate, wearing a bathing suit, smiling, a trick done with mirrors, I read it in a comic book; only with me there had been an accident and I came apart. The other half, the one locked away, was the only one that could live; I was the wrong half, detached, terminal.
We didn’t need it, our proper food was tin cans. We were committing this act, violation, for sport or amusement or pleasure, recreation they call it, these were no longer the right reasons. That’s an explanation but no excuse my father used to say, a favourite maxim.
The innocents get slaughtered because they exist, I thought, there is nothing inside the happy killers to restrain them, no conscience or piety; for them the only things worthy of life were human, their own kind of human, framed in the proper clothes and gimmicks, laminated.
But they’d killed the heron anyway. It doesn’t matter what country they’re from, my head said, they’re still Americans, they’re what’s in store for us, what we are turning into. They spread themselves like a virus, they get into the brain and take over the cells and the cells change from inside and the ones that have the disease can’t tell the difference.
The trouble some people have being German, I thought, I have being human. In a way it was stupid to be more disturbed by a dead bird than by those other things, the wars and riots and the massacres in the newspapers. But for the wars and riots there was always an explanation, people wrote books about them saying why they happened: the death of the heron was causeless, undiluted.
My country, sold or drowned, a reservoir; the people were sold along with the land and the animals, a bargain, sale, solde. Les soldes they called them, sellouts, the flood would depend on who got elected, not here but somewhere else.
Whether it died willingly, consented, whether Christ died willingly, anything that suffers and dies instead of us is Christ; if they didn’t kill birds and fish they would have killed us. The animals die that we may live, they are substitute people, hunters in the fall killing the deer, that is Christ also. And we eat them, out of cans or otherwise; we are eaters of death, dead Christ-flesh resurrecting inside us, granting us life. Canned Spam, canned Jesus, even the plants must be Christ. But we refuse to worship; the body worships with blood and muscle but the thing in the knob head will not,
...more
them, a retirement hobby; but then he found out about them. The Indians did not own salvation but they had once known where it lived and their signs marked the sacred places, the places where you could learn the truth.
the animals learned what to eat without nouns.
The gods, their likenesses: to see them in their true shape is fatal. While you are human; but after the transformation they could be reached.
