Carrion Comfort

by Dan Simmons

Walpurgis Night

Even as the handsome man answered, Aaron felt his mind skid like an automobile on black ice, felt his point of view shift so that he was looking down at all this, not accepting what would happen next but knowing what would happen, feeling—in his total inability to change one second of the past or future—the incredible, total unrelenting wave of helplessness that a hundred generations of Jews had felt before him, felt at the lip of the oven, felt at the door to the showers, felt while watching the flames rise from the old cities and while listening to the shouts of the goyim rise in ferocity and nearness.

This is a deep truth, and also a masterclass in composing a sentence.

Nina once told me that an archaeologist had discovered the voice of a potter, dead thousands of years, recorded in the grooves of his pot, the iron in his clay and the vibrations of his fingertips acting like record disk and stylus. I do not know if this was true, but it is the same concept that I have come to believe in.

he would have given all of their lives to strike back at the Oberst, at any of the arrogant bastards who ran the world and sneered at the pain of human beings they used as pawns.

“Natalie, this entire century has been a miserable melodrama written by third-rate minds at the expense of other people’s souls and lives. We can’t stop it. Even if we put an end to these…these aberrations, it will only shift the spotlight to some other carrion-eating actor in this violent farce. These things are done every day by people with no shred of this absurd psychic ability…people exercising power in the form of violence by right of their place, position, by bullet or ballot or the point of their knife blade…but by God these sons of bitches hurt our family, our friends, and we’re going to stop them.”