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Work harder. The most unfair part of it, Wallace thinks, is that when you tell white people that something is racist, they hold it up to the light and try to discern if you are telling the truth. As if they can tell by the grain if something is racist or not, and they always trust their own judgment. It’s unfair because white people have a vested interest in underestimating racism, its amount, its intensity, its shape, its effects. They are the fox in the henhouse. Wallace does not talk about it anymore. He learned his lesson
It is why he does not trust memory. Memory sifts. Memory lifts. Memory makes due with what it is given. Memory is not about facts. Memory is an inconsistent measurement of the pain in one’s life.
I didn’t know much about God and the devil except what you shouldn’t do to invite one or the other, but I knew that I wanted to be full of one, and if it couldn’t be the one I wanted, then I would take the other. That if God wanted nothing to do with me, then I’d take the devil.
When he sees a good body going around in the world, he finds he’s unable to look away from both it and himself. The truly awful thing about beauty is that it reminds us of our limits. Beauty is a kind of unrelenting cruelty. It takes the truth, hones it to a terrifying keenness, and uses it to slice us to the bone.
Cruelty, Wallace thinks, is really just the conduit of pain. It conveys pain from one place to another—from the place of highest concentration to the place of lowest concentration, in the same way heat flows. It is a delivery system, as in the way that certain viruses convey illness, disease, irreparable harm. They’re all infected with pain, hurting each other.
Life is less terrible when you can just rest for a moment, put everything down and wait without having to worry about being washed away. People take each other’s hands and they hold on as tight as they can, they hold on to each other and to themselves, and when they let go, they can because they know that the other person will not.
