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Mr. Harrigan also promised this, but I suppose men who understand business also understand that promises are easy to discard, being as how giving them is free.
Sex is hard to figure out—something I learned even before I got to college—but crazy is even harder.
“Youth is a wonderful thing,” said Mr. Harrigan. “What a shame it’s wasted on children.”
Henry Thoreau said that we don’t own things; things own us. Every new object—whether it’s a home, a car, a television, or a fancy phone like that one—is something more we must carry on our backs. It makes me think of Jacob Marley telling Scrooge, ‘These are the chains I forged in life.’
Films are ephemeral, while books—the good ones—are eternal, or close to it.
I have total recall of what followed. I have no idea why the bad memories of childhood and early adolescence are so clear, I only know they are. And this is a very bad memory.
Meaningless. It scared the hell out of me.
I started to write short stories. They were okay line by line, but the lines of a story have to add up to a whole, and mine didn’t.
I believe you hear a click, not in your head but in your soul, when you find the place where you belong. You can ignore it, but really, why would you?
As that August burned away, I sometimes thought of an African proverb I’d read in one of my classes: When an old man dies, a library burns.
A person shouldn’t call out unless they want an answer. That day I wanted one.
We’d been like a couple of kids with Del Monte cans connected by a length of waxed string. Which is what most of our modern communications amount to, when you stop to think of it; chatter for the sake of chatter.
In the twenty-first century, I think our phones are how we are wedded to the world. If so, it’s probably a bad marriage.
“The world is going down the drain, and all we can say is ‘that sucks.’ So maybe we’re going down the drain, too.”
“That’s terrible.” It was, of course, but instead of horror and terror and grief, all Marty felt was a kind of benumbed dismay.
We told each other all this would blow over, but that doesn’t seem to be happening, does it?” “No,” Marty agreed. Although he’d just gotten up, he felt tired. Very. “Not blowing over, blowing harder.” “Then there’s the suicides.” Marty nodded. “Felicia sees them every day.” “I think the suicides will slow down,” Gus said, “and people will just wait.” “For what?” “For the end, pal. The end of everything. We’ve been going through the five stages of grief, don’t you get it? Now we’ve arrived at the last one. Acceptance.” Marty said nothing. He could think of nothing to say.
“Mister? Is everything going to be all right?” Although he had no kids of his own, he’d taught them for twenty years and felt that, although you should tell them the truth once they reached the age of sixteen, a kind-hearted lie was often the right way to go when they were as young as this girl. “Sure.”
“The human brain is finite—no more than a sponge of tissue inside a cage of bone—but the mind within the brain is infinite. Its storage capacity is colossal, its imaginative reach beyond our ability to comprehend. I think when a man or woman dies, a whole world falls to ruin—the world that person knew and believed in. Think of that, kiddo—billions of people on earth, and each one of those billions with a world inside. The earth their minds have conceived.”
And what makes you think you’re a main character in anything but your own mind?”
He was overwhelmed with the thought of a whole world inside the fragile bowl of his skull.
“I believe memories are ghosts. But spooks flapping along the halls of musty castles? I think those only exist in books and movies.”
The universe is large, he thought. It contains multitudes. It also contains me, and in this moment I am wonderful. I have a right to be wonderful.
I will live my life until my life runs out. I am wonderful, I deserve to be wonderful, and I contain multitudes.
Killing children for God, or ideology, or both—no hell could be hot enough for those who’d do such things.
‘Behind every great fortune there is a crime.’
“It’s not, because black people can never be American in the same way Italian and Irish people can. Black skin withstands the melting pot. I want to say . . .” He pauses. “I want to say that discrimination is the father of crime. I want to say that Alton Robinson’s tragedy was that he thought that through crime he could achieve some sort of equality, and that turned out to be a chimera. In the end he wasn’t killed because he got crossways with Paulie Ricca, who was Capone’s successor, but because he was black. Because he was a nigger.”
It’s liking that got lost, and love without liking is like a chain with a manacle at each end.
“Now I think I could believe in anything from flying saucers to killer clowns. Because there really is a second world. It exists because people refuse to believe it’s there.”
He said that most people like pain, as long as it’s not theirs.
News people have a saying: If it bleeds, it leads. That’s because the stories people are most interested in are bad news stories. Murders. Explosions. Car crashes. Earthquakes. Tidal waves. People like that stuff, and they like it even more now that there’s cell phone video. The security footage recorded inside Pulse, when Omar Mateen was still rampaging? That has millions of hits. Millions.”
Love is a gift; love is also a chain with a manacle at each end.
He had said that the peak of the novel-writing experience actually came before the writer began, while everything was still in his or her imagination. “Even the clearest part of what was in your mind gets lost in translation,”
He supposed Franzen had had a point about the time before writing a novel actually began. It was a good time, because everything you saw and heard was possible grist for the mill. Everything was malleable. The mind could build a city, remodel it, then raze it, all while you were taking a shower or shaving or having a piss. Once you began, however, that changed. Every scene you wrote, every word you wrote, limited your options a little more. Eventually you were like a cow trotting down a narrow chute with no exit, trotting toward the—
Reality was deep, and it was far. It held many secrets and went on forever.
“The act of writing fiction or poetry has been compared to dreaming,” he told his students, “but I don’t think that’s entirely accurate. I think it’s more akin to hypnosis. The more you ritualize the preparation, the easier you’ll find it to enter that state.”
He often thought of a story—probably apocryphal—he had read about James Joyce. A friend had come into Joyce’s house and found the famous writer at his desk with his head in his arms, a picture of abject despair. When the friend asked what was wrong, Joyce told him he’d only managed seven words all morning. “Ah, but James, that’s good for you,” the friend said. To which Joyce replied, “Perhaps, but I don’t know what order they go in!”
“When you’re writing, the book is the boss,” and it was true. If you slowed down the story began to fade, as dreams did on waking.
Here is something interesting, he thought. When I first saw it, I thought “he.” Now that I’ve decided to kill the damn thing, it’s “it.”
“That’s how they get you with magic wishes,” he said. “They’re tricky. Lots of fine print. All the best fairy tales make that clear. I thought we discussed that.”
