Status Updates From Sleepers Awake

So I finally read something where I was able to “crack a code.” On page 124 and 125, some of the words on the list should be read backwards, and in that way it makes more “sense.”
Which now complicates my reading because now I’m going to think there are more “tricks” I need to spot.
My my.

Then how could you tell that Ed was home just because of some shoes on the cellar steps?

Because I could smell them, I said. And a cold shoe never smelled like that. Ed just had to be around somewhere near because those were what I call the five-minute shoe.

😂

“We passed a man munching on an orange.”

I looked up the word “munch.”
I had never looked up the word munch, before.
I was suspicious of its usage here, I felt the word more suitable for apple.
But why, why do I feel this way? Is it because it sounds like crunch? Does the word contain an auditory component, or do I assume it does because of the rhyme?
It contains an auditory component.

What was the value of a life? a life which had gathered love and pain and a grandeur unto it—-only to have an outside thing destroy and to make mock of its dearest intentions. How was the soul of man to withstand the adventure into that outsideness?

A description of what happens to the soul in times of war. It withers.

Men who cry out to God because they are stricken of spirit, seek not Him but an image of their own soft wishing.

“We don’t see the sun…
this puny gang—to look at the sun! Have you come far? We see what we think.”

What a blazing way to drive the point home, by comparing reality to the sun we cannot look at too long without dire consequences, to call humanity a “puny gang,” puny for it cannot behold the sight!

He took one of my eyes out and squeezed it into a deep oval before putting it back. I admire you, he said, wiping his fingers off on his cartridge belt.
And I you, sir—(particularly through the eye that made him about twelve feet taller than he was in the other)—

Well now what fun is this, mister Patchen!

Somebody once said that if you take a
tree out of the ground you’ll leave a hole.
Same thing
you take a man out of his life.

Picked it up last night: no idea what had occurred in the first 30 pages. A vague sense of remembered feelings, which seemed to me had happened in my subconscious during the day, not the prior night's read. Thats it. Like trying to remember a dream gone by, which ironically, or not, is the form of narrative of the book: a stream of consciousness dreamscape. I re-read from the beginning. Its pretty trippy stuff.

👍🏻

*****Put this book aside a couple hours and go out and do something nice for somebody.*****