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I don’t know if my being there in that place and at that time makes me a bad person, but on most days I think it means I do not get to claim to be a good one.
I don’t know if my being there in that place and at that time makes me a bad person, but on most days I think it means I do not get to claim to be a good one.
I’ve often thought that the book you are about to read is a variation on this kind of thought experiment; it has few if any equals in creating the kind of distance that can offer insight into the mass insanity of modern warfare.
Its lessons are so simple that by adulthood most of us have forgotten or taken them for granted only to be stunned upon being reacquainted with their fundamental gravity.
It is concerned with and dedicated to the alleviation and prevention of human suffering in the face of its inevitability,
Few among us will ever write something so plainly and undeniably true that its honesty feels provocative even fifty years after it first appears in print,
But things were much better now. He had a pleasant little apartment, and his daughter was getting an excellent education. His mother was incinerated in the Dresden fire-storm. So it goes.
And I thought, too, that it would be a masterpiece or at least make me a lot of money, since the subject was so big.
“I say, ‘Why don’t you write an anti-glacier book instead?’ ”
What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too.
“The irony is so great. A whole city gets burned down, and thousands and thousands of people are killed. And then this one American foot soldier is arrested in the ruins for taking a teapot. And he’s given a regular trial, and then he’s shot by a firing squad.”
I used my daughter’s crayons, a different color for each main character. One end of the wallpaper was the beginning of the story, and the other end was the end, and then there was all that middle part, which was the middle.
Sometimes I try to call up old girl friends on the telephone late at night, after my wife has gone to bed. “Operator, I wonder if you could give me the number of a Mrs. So-and-So. I think she lives at such-and-such.”
At that time, they were teaching that there was absolutely no difference between anybody. They may be teaching that still.
We were connected to the institutions that supported us by means of pneumatic tubes which ran under the streets of Chicago.
Not many Americans knew how much worse it had been than Hiroshima, for instance. I didn’t know that, either. There hadn’t been much publicity.
The nicest veterans in Schenectady, I thought, the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who’d really fought.
I read the letter out loud to my wife, and I said, “Secret? My God—from whom?”
Mary O’Hare is a trained nurse, which is a lovely thing for a woman to be.
“It’s all right,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. It doesn’t have anything to do with you.” That was kind of him. He was lying. It had everything to do with me.
“Well, I know,” she said. “You’ll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you’ll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we’ll have a lot more of them. And they’ll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs.”
“I tell you what,” I said, “I’ll call it ‘The Children’s Crusade.’ ” She was my friend after that.
And then O’Hare read this: Now what was the grand result of all these struggles? Europe expended millions of her treasures, and the blood of two million of her people; and a handful of quarrelsome knights retained possession of Palestine for about one hundred years!
“Hooray for the good people of Genoa,” said Mary O’Hare.
how it expanded musically, through the genius of a few men, to its present bloom; and it calls attention to certain permanent landmarks in art that make its Gallery the resort of those seeking lasting impressions.
And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.
I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee.
After that he couldn’t sleep, and there were noises in his head. He became a doctor, and he treated poor people in the daytime, and he wrote grotesque novels all night. No art is possible without a dance with death, he wrote.
The truth is death, he wrote. I’ve fought nicely against it as long as I could…danced with it, festooned it, waltzed it around…decorated it with streamers, titillated it…
There, make them freeze…once and for all!…So that they won’t disappear anymore!
Everybody was killed but Billy. So it goes.
He said, too, that he had been kidnapped by a flying saucer in 1967. The saucer was from the planet Tralfamadore, he said. He was taken to Tralfamadore, where he was displayed naked in a zoo, he said. He was mated there with a former Earthling movie star named Montana Wildhack.
“The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die.
“When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is ‘So it goes.’ ”
What made them so hot was Billy’s belief that he was going to comfort so many people with the truth about time. His door chimes upstairs had been ringing and ringing. It was his daughter Barbara up there, wanting in. Now she let herself in with a key, crossed the floor over his head, calling, “Father? Daddy, where are you?” And so on.
senile because of damage to his brain in the airplane crash.
Billy first came unstuck while World War Two was in progress.
He was a valet to a preacher, expected no promotions or medals, bore no arms, and had a meek faith in a loving Jesus which most soldiers found putrid.
He didn’t look like a soldier at all. He looked like a filthy flamingo.
It was fresh and astonishing to Billy, who had never fucked anybody—and it did its job. It woke him up and got him off the road.
It was a crazy, sexy, murderous relationship Weary entered into with people he eventually beat up.
“You stake a guy out on an anthill in the desert—see? He’s facing upward, and you put honey all over his balls and pecker, and you cut off his eyelids so he has to stare at the sun till he dies.” So it goes.
Billy’s Christ died horribly. He was pitiful.
Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.
Le Fèvre argued that the picture was fine art, and that his intention was to make Greek mythology come alive. He said the columns and the potted palm proved that.
He was sentenced to six months in prison. He died there of pneumonia. So it goes.
whereas the true war story was still going on.
Little Billy was terrified, because his father had said Billy was going to learn to swim by the method of sink-or-swim. His father was going to throw Billy into the deep end, and Billy was going to damn well swim.
“How did I get so old?”
He dug it out, discovered that it was a book, The Execution of Private Slovik, by William Bradford Huie. It was a true account of the death before an American firing squad of Private Eddie D. Slovik, 36896415, the only American soldier to be shot for cowardice since the Civil War. So it goes.
