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All low-income or Basic Support families, and they aren’t getting protein. And what the hell am I supposed to do about it? I’ve put in five different reqs for Minimal Protein Ration for those kids and they don’t come, it’s all red tape and excuses. People on Basic Support can afford to buy sufficient food, they keep telling me. Sure, but what if the food isn’t there to buy? Ah, the hell with it. I go give ’em Vitamin C shots and try to pretend that starvation is just scurvy.…”
The insistent permissiveness of the late twentieth century had produced fully as much sex-guilt and sex-fear in its heirs as had the insistent repressiveness of the late nineteenth century.
I miss the races, it’s a shame the way the lower species get crowded out by our food problems.
Orr had a tendency to assume that people knew what they were doing, perhaps because he generally assumed that he did not.
I am living in a nightmare, from which from time to time I wake in sleep.
My God, he thought, what has Orr done?
He had never known what to do.
No wonder Haber uses me. How could he help it? I haven’t any strength, I haven’t any character, I’m a born tool. I haven’t any destiny. All I have is dreams. And now other people run them.
The goose. Precisely. That describes me perfectly, Orr thought. A damned white vapid stupid goose.
The United States was heavily committed to the Israeli-Egyptian side in weapons, munitions, planes, and “military advisers” by the regiment. China was in equally deep on the Iraq-Iran side, though she hadn’t yet sent in Chinese soldiers, only Tibetans, North Koreans, Vietnamese, and Mongolians. Russia and India were holding uneasily aloof; but now that Afghanistan and Brazil were going in with the Iranians, Pakistan might jump in on the Isragypt side. India would then panic and line up with China, which might scare the USSR enough to push her in on the U.S. side. This gave a lineup of twelve
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So went the speculations. Meanwhile Jerusalem was rubble, and in Saudi Arabia and Iraq the civilian population was living in burrows in the ground while tanks and planes sprayed fire in the air and cholera in the water, and babies crawled out of the burrows blinded by napalm.
Things don’t have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What’s the function of a galaxy? I don’t know if our life has a purpose and I don’t see that it matters. What does matter is that we’re a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.”
But I guess I can’t, or my subconscious can’t, even imagine a warless world. The best it can do is substitute one kind of war for another.
The dream is the aquarium of Night. —VICTOR HUGO,
She had French diseases of the soul.
The infinite possibility, the unlimited and unqualified wholeness of being of the uncommitted, the nonacting, the uncarved: the being who, being nothing but himself, is everything.
Are there really people without resentment, without hate? she wondered. People who never go cross-grained to the universe? Who recognize evil, and resist evil, and yet are utterly unaffected by it?
We are all dead, and we spoiled the world before we died.
But now, never to have known a woman with brown skin, brown skin and wiry black hair cut very short so that the elegant line of the skull showed like the curve of a bronze vase—no, that was wrong. That was intolerable. That every soul on earth should have a body the color of a battleship: no!
And to do any good at all, just believing you’re right and your motives are good isn’t enough.
He stood and endured reality.
