From Here to Eternity

by James Jones

A man who ate too much got fat, and the only way to keep from getting fat was not to eat too much. There was no short cut in elastic trusses for ex-athletes, or in the patented rowing machines, or in synthetic diet; not if you ate too much. When you cut with life you had to use the house deck, not your own.

watch the stars and your eye consciously spans that distance and you wonder if you’re sitting on an electron that revolves around a proton in a series of infinite universes, and you suddenly see how strange a tree would look to one who had never lived upon the earth.

Uncle John would tell about the Moro juramentados, how their native Moslem datu would call the single volunteer up before the tribe and anoint him and consecrate him to the heaven he was getting ready to attend and then, practically, bind his balls and pecker with wet rawhide before he ran amok, so that the pain of the contraction of the drying leather would keep him going. That was why, said Uncle John, the Army first adopted the .45. Because six slugs from a .38 Special would not knock a juramentado down. And, in his condition, obviously, you had to knock him down to stop him. The .45 was guaranteed to knock any man off his feet, if it only hit the tip of his little finger, or your money back.

“I decided to not believe in mortal sin, since obviously no Creator who was Just would condemn His creations to eternal hellfire and brimstone for possessing hungers He created in them. He might penalize them fifteen yards for clipping, but He wouldnt stop the ball game. Now would He?”

But since you believe the conscious waste of energy is a sin, dont you believe the loss of semen is a sin? unless accompanied by impregnation?”

“You really fucked her?” Warden asked, then felt ashamed, because he used that word which was a good word, one of the best words, strong and powerful and coming straight from life into the language, like all the best words come; but still a word that was also private, intimate, a word to be whispered

at the right time and in the right ear, but not a word he should have used, here and now, with Stark.

Conviction and intensity are not the coin of truth,

“But whenever a man likes somethin, he caint take cover. You got a cut on your eye, thats what the other man tries to hit. If you love the kitchen like I loved the kitchen, then you ought to get out of it and do straight duty. If you liked straight duty, then you ought to get in the kitchen. If clerkin’s what you hate, then thats what you ought to do. That way you’re safe, you’ll be a success then, you’ll get the ratings and you’ll keep them, because you wont have no weak spot where they can hurt you.”

It grows dark quickly on islands, or anywhere near the sea. Sunset is a matter of minutes. One minute it is clear up and still full daylight, the next its down and it is night.

You never get nervous, do you?” “Never,” Andy said. “Then you aint got no goddam sensitivity,” Prew said angrily. “Nor sympathy, nor understanding.”

“Day is done … Gone the sun … From-the-lake From-the-hill From-the-sky Rest in peace Sol jer brave God is nigh

Do you want to be just a unremembered body? When we come here and then go away we need to know at least that we’re remembered. Maybe we seem all alike but none of us is ever all alike. Men are killed by being always all alike, always unremembered. They die inside. Wives earn their money that way just as much as whores do, with this crappy imitation that aint no good but has to work because usually its all there is. But it dries up the well and leaves it nothing but a mudhole, makes it just rich blood poured down a strawy rathole that stinks afterwards, unless you are remembered. We dont ask to be needed, all we ask is to be remembered. Just to be remembered is

I’ve always wondered what it feels like, to a man. What does it feel like, to you?” “To me? Did you ever burn your finger, bad? And then smear it with Unguentine?” “Yes.” “And the Unguentine enfolds it softly? How it soothes it? How it stops the burning? Is warm and cool and stops the itching, burning, red hot pain?” “Yes, yes.”

“Thats how it feels, with me. How does it feel to you?” “With me? With a woman? Oh, did you ever have your ear itch? deep down inside? And you put a twist of cotton on a toothpick to get at it?” “Yes.” “And how you try to reach it with it? But you are afraid to go too deep, somehow? You want to, but you are afraid it is a thing you ought not to do, somehow?” “Yes? Yes, tell me. Tell me all of it. I want to hear.” “So then, you go as deep as you dare go in there. You go clear deep down inside after it. But you never get quite deep enough to touch it, oh, never quite to the bottom of it. The ear keeps right on itching, away inside. You relieve it some, a little, and the relief is very satisfying. But still it only tantalizes you, a pleasant torture.”

“I would like to look at the stark white skin,” he said to her, “against the deep brown tan. Then I would think about how on the beach the white was all covered up and hidden, so no one could see it, and of how I was going to look at what no one else got to look at.”

Did you ever hear the one about how every living woman dies three times? Once when she is seduced of her virginity, once when she is seduced of her freedom (I believe they call it marriage), and once when she is seduced of her husband. Did you ever hear that one?”

Hysteria and womb and women are synonymous in the medical profession, you know. Thats where they get their biggest source of income, you see.

“God knows what the medical profession would do if it didnt have its hysterectomies and their hystero-derivatives. Probably all go broke and vote for socialized medicine after all, I guess.

“But the advent of materialism and the machine age changed all that, see? We have seen the world change,” he said, “in our time.

He had noted in the past that the nearness of women’s bodies had a tendency to upset his mental processes, and he could not control it, sometimes they even stupefied him more than sunsets, a reaction which he had found over a period of years was usually not reciprocal, giving them a certain initial advantage over men.

“She has to marry a man,” Georgette, who knew Alma’s plans, explained to Prew, “who is above suspicion and has so much position and prestige that it would be impossible for his wife to have ever been a whore.

“It wont kill you. You’ll just think it will.”

What she likes is to have you near her, the personality interest, the warmth of the companionship and understanding, the being loved, the not being lonely.

We have become a nation of cop haters, he thought sadly, we have taken for our hero a Robin Hood myth that never existed except in the history books, and only then 500 years after, when it was safe to print it. It must be hard on a man, being a cop. I’m glad I’m not a cop.

“The Malloy says you can beat all that if you can control your mind. I never can,” Angelo Maggio said. “The Malloy can control his mind to stop thinkin. I cant do that. I’ve pick up a few little tricks that help some, but I cant do that other. One way I learn myself was count your breaths off: pull in eight, hold four, let out eight, hold four; that way helps

He says if he dont eat nothing he dont get hungry after the first day; also, he says, that helps you to control your mind.)

“What the hell do you think about?” Prew said tightly, “for Christ’s sake?” “Well,” Angelo Maggio said, “thats the catch. According to The Malloy you dont think about nothing.

he can lay in there for three or four or five days, or however long he’s in, without thinkin a single thing. He says he read it in some Yogi books when he was a lumberjack up in Oregon one time, how to do it. Some old guy working up there had them who use to be a Wobbly. Malloy says he tried it but he never could do it until he got in the Black Hole. You concentrate on a black spot inside your head in front of your eyes and whenever a thought starts to come in your mind, you kind of push it away from you, sort of, and dont think it. After a while, you do it long enough, they stop coming and all you see is just light, kind of.”

Its just mind control. A way to control your mind.”

That was one of the virtues of being a pessimist: nothing was ever as bad as you thought it would be.

“Its funny,” Angelo said, trying reluctantly. “How a guy dies and then he’s gone and isnt there any more. Even if you dont like him. All the things he’s done in his life, and been, all gone just like that.”

The old Anglo-Saxon term of ‘freedom’ came from that: ‘free’ and ‘doom,’ with the idea that every man always had that last final resort that nobody could take away from him, if he wanted to avail himself of it. “But like everything else,” the big man said gently, “it has its price, too: its price is its own absoluteness and irrevocableness and inviolableness. ‘Doom’ is the only thing thats ever ‘free,’

Everything you swear you will not do you always end by doing,

“What I said is its stupid to live all your life in the future when there may not be any. I say plan for the future, sure. But dont let the plans for the future that there may not be any of, displace what little life you can live now.”

“I’ve never laid a woman that I didnt love. Maybe she made me dislike her afterwards, for some other reason. But at the moment of screwing her, I was in love with her. I offer that as an observed fact, without attempts at explanation or justification. It is a thing that I have found true of most men, if you can get them to talk and admit it.”

You dont have to forgive something you love. You forgive the ones you dont love.

Jack Malloy was able to love the human race because he expected ahead-of-time to be let down by his friends and hurt by his enemies and betrayed by his leaders. He saw these things as natural reactions to be anticipated, instead of perfidies to be decried.

come here in America, because it is here in America, the home of the most hated race,

shot to death by a Utah firing squad for a murder he did not commit after asking that his body be transported to the Montana State Line because he “didnt want to be found dead in Utah,”

Because a man loves God he must not expect God to love him in return.

“It seems like,” Prew said contortedly, “it seems like life is made up of saying hello to people we dont like and good-by to people we do.”

Work without purpose, work without end, work without pride.

Two whores who finally found something to mother. A guy could write a book about it, he thought bitterly, call it From Hair to Maternity. It would probly be a very long book.

(Georgette belonged to the Book of the Month Club, “just for the hell of it,” she grinned, “after all, I do live on Maunalani Heights, and the books look good in the livingroom even if I dont read them”)

The enjoyment of the radio-bar and the record-player and the rest of the furnishings had thinned with the knowledge that he was not going to leave them. He did not enjoy having his own key any more because he never left the house so he could use it.

Being a bugler was like being an actor; you had to depend on too many other people just to get a chance to work at it. But a writer, he had it all to himself.

It was while he was reading Martin Eden that he got the idea to start writing down titles of other books to read, like Martin had done.

“In the Stockade it was easy, it was simple. You had somebody over you that you hated and plenty of time to hate them, and plenty of help hating them, and you did what they told you and just hated them, without having to worry about hurting them any because you couldnt have hurt them anyway.”

“I’ve always liked neon signs. I like to stand at one end of a street and look at them all strung out down along it.