Steve

“The last thing he learned was that death is the end of pain.”
― C.M. Kornbluth, The Marching Morons

“With means, if more than a little diminished means, of his own Ethan had done what his father before him, likewise a lawyer, had done, and had once in days past counselled him to do before it was too late, before this might spell an irrevocable retirement. He made a Retreat. (To be sure he had not been bidden so far afield as had his father, who’d spent the last year of peace before the First World War as a legal adviser on international cotton law in Czarist Russia, whence he brought back to his young son in Wales, or so he announced, lifting it whole out of a mysterious deep-Christmas-smelling wooden box, a beautiful toy model of Moscow; a city of tiny magical gold domes, pumpkin- or Christmas-bell-shaped, sparkling with Christmas tinsel-scented snow, bright as new silver half-crowns, and of minuscule Byzantine chimes; and at whose miniature frozen street corners waited minute sleighs, in which Ethan had imagined years later lilliputian Tchitchikovs brooding, or corners where lurked snow-bound Raskolnikovs, their hands stayed from murder evermore: much later still he was to become unsure whether the city, sprouting with snow-freaked onions after all, was intended to be Moscow or St. Petersburg, for part of it seemed in memory built on little piles in the water, like Eridanus; the city coming out of the box he was certain was magic too—for he had never seen it again after that evening of his father’s return, in a strange astrakhan-collared coat and Russian fur cap—the box that was always to be associated also with his mother’s death, which had occurred shortly thereafter; the magic bulbar city going back into the magic scented box forever, and himself too afraid of his father to ask him about it later—though how beautiful for years to him was the word city, the carilloning word city in the Christmas hymn, Once in Royal David’s City, and the tumultuous angel-winged city that was Bunyan’s celestial city; beautiful, that was, until he saw a city—it was London—for the first time, sullen, in fog, and bloodshot as if with the fires of hell, and he had never to this day seen Moscow—so that while this remained in his memory as nearly the only kind action he could recall on the part of either of his parents, if not nearly the only happy memory of his entire childhood, he was constrained to believe the gift had actually been intended for someone else, probably for the son of one of his father’s clients: no, to be sure he hadn’t wandered as far afield as Moscow; nor had he, like his younger brother Gwyn, wanting to go to Newfoundland, set out, because he couldn’t find another ship, recklessly for Archangel; he had not gone into the desert nor to sea himself again or entered a monastery, and moreover he’d taken his wife with him; but retreat it was just the same.)”
― Malcolm Lowry, October Ferry to Gabriola

“I’ve been sitting here and thinking about God. I don’t think I believe in God any more. It is not only
me, I think of all the millions who must have lived like this in the war. The Anne Franks. And back
through history. What I feel I know now is that God doesn’t intervene. He lets us suffer. If you pray for
liberty then you may get relief just because you pray, or because things happen anyhow which bring
you liberty. But God can’t hear. There’s nothing human like hearing or seeing or pitying or helping
about him. I mean perhaps God has created the world and the fundamental laws of matter and
evolution. But he can’t care about the individuals. He’s planned it so some individuals are happy,
some sad, some lucky, some not. Who is sad, who is not, he doesn’t know, and he doesn’t care. So he
doesn’t exist, really.
These last few days I’ve felt Godless. I’ve felt cleaner, less muddled, less blind. I still believe in a
God. But he’s so remote, so cold, so mathematical. I see that we have to live as if there is no God.
Prayer and worship and singing hymns—all silly and useless.
I’m trying to explain why I’m breaking with my principles (about never committing violence). It is
still my principle, but I see you have to break principles sometimes to survive. It’s no good trusting
vaguely in your luck, in Providence or God’s being kind to you. You have to act and fight for
yourself.
The sky is absolutely empty. Beautifully pure and empty.
As if the architects and builders would live in all the houses they built! Or could live in them all. It’s
obvious, it stares you in the face. There must be a God and he can’t know anything about us.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“For reasons I can only guess, my mother always instructed me that it was impolite to tell the truth...Whatever she lacked in versimilitude, she more than made up for in stealth.”
― Phillip DePoy