A Strange Habit of Mind (Cameron Winter #2)

by Andrew Klavan

But each man’s suffering is his own, you know, which gives it a special flavor, the taste of reality that other men’s suffering can never have, no matter how much worse it may be.

You keep slipping these subtle little racial woe-is-me signals into the conversation and what am I supposed to do about it? Watch my tongue? Curb my ideas? Tiptoe through the minefield of your sensitivities? That would give you control over what I’m allowed to think or say, wouldn’t it? I have no interest in that. All God’s children have troubles in this world.”

These young people didn’t live in a world of ladies and gentlemen. They were allowed to dress like slobs and curse like gangsters. To drink like tosspots. To tattoo and pierce their bodies like primitives. To listen to songs with animal rhythms and vulgar lyrics. They had no curfews, no chaperones, no guidance that applied to real-life male and female behavior. Indeed, they were told that gender was mutable and sex an irrelevance. And then the young men—only the men—were held to rules of behavior that would have been restrictive when Victoria was queen.

Cameron Winter had a strange habit of mind. He sometimes slipped without warning into a silent state akin to meditation.

gnomic

Expressing pithy, unclear, maxims

unctuously

Excessively or ingratitingly flattering

exegeses

Critical explanation or interpretation of a text

There is something that lessens the horror of a crime when one sees the criminal—who has been depicted as a monster—is just like any other man.

Cynicism and irony were our superpowers. They protected us from testing ourselves in the real world.

You know how there’s always a shape in your head, a shape of something you’re supposed to be, something you were born to be. There’s that shape, and then there’s the shape of who you actually are, a different shape. And the distance between the two shapes, between who you are and who you were born to be, that’s where all the discomfort is, all the shame, all the sense of being not quite right, never quite good enough. The

Men and women—they were no good for one another. Ladies and gentlemen—they were nowhere to be found. The world was out of whack. The time was out of joint. Did it matter to anyone but him, living in the literary past? Was something really wrong with the world, or was he just a mummy shaking his wrapped fist at the chaos he found outside his pyramid?

née

Originally called

manfully

In a manful way

stultifying.

Cause to lose enthusiasm or initative

hyperreality

Exaggerated in comparison

akimbo,

Hands on hips, elbows pointing outwards

gibbous

Convex\protuberent

insipid.

Lacking favor or vigor

garrote

Kill by strangulation

It was the Recruiter who had made me into a secret soldier, who had given me a purpose and a cause. And more than that he had taught me—I don’t know what you’d call it exactly—he’d taught me a way to be in the world.

“You can’t decide whether the universe was fashioned in the Mind of Eternal Wisdom or whether it was farted randomly out of the Asshole of Nothingness. You’re not willing to take a position on that question. Do I understand you correctly?

casbahs.

Citadel of a north african city

stolid

Calm, dependable, showing little emotion

forlorn

Pitifully sad

pellucid

Translucently clear

disgust. “It’s the original sin, Poetry Boy. The sin of Eden reenacted like a childhood trauma. It’s the old mental illness of princes and kings. His fellow princes won’t stop him. They share his delusion. So the Lord has appointed a judge from among the people, and behold, in the winter of our republic, Winter is his name.”

“I’m heartened to hear it. Good women are important. And rare. Like good men. They make manifest the feminine aspect of God, who made us in his image, male and female. Oh, I’m sorry, I forgot I was speaking into the echo chamber of a hollow soul, emptied of that spirit only faith can animate.”

The people assigned to manifest God in our lives fail us and we think that God has failed.

Tyrolean.

Relating to the austrian area of Tyrol

The triumph of Desire over Reality.

that a good woman was the manifestation of some essential thing.

The yin of the pleroma, as the literary Winter put it to himself, the feminine aspect of the totality of God.

Eros and Thanatos—sex and death