Hard Rain Falling (New York Review Books Classics)

by Don Carpenter

He was legally a fugitive from the orphanage, and in that sense “wanted.” He did not feel “wanted”—he felt very unwanted.

He had desires, and nobody was going to drop out of the sky to satisfy them. He tried to milk a little self-pity out of this thought, but it did not work: he had to recognize that he preferred his singularity, his freedom.

Maybe they started out by tolerating him, but they ended up respecting him, because the only thing that counts in a poolhall is how well you shoot.

How do you wake up? It was one thing to know that you had been asleep all your life, but something else to wake up from it, to find out you were really alive and it wasn’t anybody’s fault but your own. Of course that was the problem. All right. Everything is a dream. Nothing hangs together. You move from one dream to another and there is no reason for the change. Your eyes see things and your ears hear, but nothing has any reason behind it. It would be easier to believe in God. Then you could wake up and yawn and stretch and grin at a world that was put together on a plan of mercy and death, punishment for evil, joy for good, and if the game was crazy at least it had rules. But that didn’t make sense. It had never made any sense. The trouble was, now that he was not asleep and not awake, what he saw and heard didn’t make sense either.

Maybe in the cells they would learn the truth as he had, and know that nothing existed but a single spark of energy, and that spark could die for no reason, and existed for no reason. Then they would understand that it does no good to cry out, because a spark of energy has no ears; the ears are a lie, a joke, a dream, to keep the spark going, and there is no reason to keep the spark going. And more than there is a reason for letting it go out.

Maybe they would learn not to hate the guards, either, because the guards and everybody else on earth were prisoners in dark cells like themselves and just did not know it, and in fact they were in a worse prison than Jack was, because they were imprisoned by their own limits, and he was only imprisoned by them.

You didn’t go to jail for what you did; you went because they caught hold of you and didn’t know what else to do, and so they put you in jail.

to most of them this man represented their chief enemy, respectability, and cruelly they wanted to see him come up before the sanitary court and have his pants pulled down and his ass whacked, to watch him silently while he discovered that his dignity could be taken away from him so easily, and that for once he was at the mercy of the underdogs.

justice is based on the idea that we all got a right to live our lives any way we fuckin please, so long as we don’t fuck up anybody else.

When you lose you lose forever, an when you win it only lasts a second or two. That’s life. I aint lyin. I

The idea of prison is punishment, an any reforming done is strictly incidental. Society don’t give a fuck what happens to you, and you know it. Society is an animal, just like the rest of us.”

And he thought about hate; it was a kind of passion, not altogether dishonorable in itself but, like love, capable of the most awful sorts of injustice.

Society was a criminal because it committed crimes.

By then he would realize that the freedom he had always yearned for and never understood was beyond his or any man’s reach, and that all men must yearn for it equally; a freedom from the society of mankind without its absence; a freedom from connection, from fear, from trouble, and above all from the loneliness of being alive.