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Nevertheless he doesn’t want to be put to the inconvenience of lying, however plausibly.
Aren’t you hungry? Hunger. Hunger.” He’s a madman. “Oh Harry, you can’t understand an old man’s hunger, you eat and eat and it’s never the right food. You can’t understand that.”
A dread of marring his freedom blocks the easy gesture of
Help me, Christ. Forgive me. Take me down the way. Bless Ruth, Janice, Nelson, my mother and father, Mr. and Mrs. Springer, and the unborn baby. Forgive Tothero and all the others. Amen.
Eccles’ handshake, eager and practiced and hard, seems to symbolize for him an embrace. For an instant Rabbit fears he will never let go. He feels caught, foresees explanations, embarrassments, prayers, reconciliations rising up like dank walls; his skin prickles in desperation. He senses tenacity in his captor.
“Well, I’m not going back to that little soppy dope no matter how sorry you feel for her. I don’t know what she feels. I haven’t known for years. All I know is what’s inside me. That’s all I have. Do you know what I was doing to support that bunch?
Funny, the world just can’t touch you once you follow your instincts.
“Were you really a hooer?” To his surprise she turns hard under his arm and twists away and stands beside the railing menacingly. Her eyes narrow; her chin changes shape. In his nervousness he notices three Boy Scouts staring at them across the asphalt. She asks, “Are you really a rat?” He feels the need of care in his answer. “In a way.” “All right then.” They take a bus down.
She probably wouldn’t’ve married me if she hadn’t been in such a hurry to get away from ’em.”
“If you have the guts to be yourself,” he says, “other people’ll pay your price.”
so when the call comes you can go out and tell them, ‘Yes, he is dead, but you will see him again in Heaven. Yes, you suffer, but you must love your pain, because it is Christ’s pain.’
She hates them, all those clinging quaint quavering widows and Young People for Christ—the one good thing if the Russians take over is they’ll make religion go extinct. It should have gone extinct a hundred years ago. Maybe it shouldn’t have, maybe our weakness needs it, but let somebody else carry it on.
It’s like when she was fourteen and the whole world trees sun and stars would have swung into place if she could lose twenty pounds just twenty pounds what difference would it make to God Who guided every flower in the fields into shape?
stops stark on his small scrabbled shadow on the asphalt to look up toward the heavenly stone that mirrors with metallic brightness the stone that has risen inside his hot skin. Make it be all right, he prays to it, and goes in the rear entrance.
“Well Jesus Janice. All you did was watch television and drink all the time. I mean I’m not saying I wasn’t wrong, but it felt like I had to. You get the feeling you’re in your coffin before they’ve taken your blood out.
That’s what you have, Harry: life. It’s a strange gift and I don’t know how we’re supposed to use it but I know it’s the only gift we get and it’s a good one.”
Harry is happy to go to Eccles’ church. Not merely out of uneasy affection for Eccles, though there’s that; but because he considers himself happy, lucky, blessed, forgiven, and wants to give thanks.
People who know God rustle and stir about him, upholding him in the dark.
Christians. Its larger significance, its greater meaning, Eccles takes to be this: suffering, deprivation, barrenness, hardship, lack are all an indispensable part of the education, the initiation, as it were, of any of those who would follow Jesus Christ.
She had talked with Peggy and Reverend Eccles and prayed and had come to understand that marriage wasn’t a refuge it was a sharing and she
You couldn’t bear to love anybody who might return it. You’re afraid of that, aren’t you? Aren’t you afraid?”
He thinks how easy it was, yet in all His strength God did nothing. Just that little rubber stopper to lift.
she gave him life she can take it away and if he feels that withdrawal it will be the grave itself.
Eccles reads. “I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die.”
