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The world had six trillion trees, when people showed up. Half remain. Half again more will disappear, in a hundred years.

Even while working two jobs I’ve surprised myself by taking advantage of every single idle moment to read this book. It is that powerful. On to the third and final section.

...all trying to bail out the ocean of capitalism with an acorn cap.

They were too dazed, they were in shock from repeated episodes of terror. Each dive brought every man, cornered and cowering, to face his execution. When it did not come, the trial had to be lived through all over again and the fear did not diminish. For the living, the end of a Stuka attack was the paralysis of shock, of repeated shocks...they were drained and, for a good while, useless as troops.

They said that if you heard the noise stop before the explosion, your time was up.

How guilt refined the methods of self-torture, threading the beads of detail into an eternal loop, a rosary to be fingered for a lifetime.

The envelope felt heavy and hot to the touch and it contained ten illegible pages, each word a barbed hook. I skimmed it, careful not to let any words catch in me, before I tore it up and flushed it down the toilet.

LOL ---- The Fluctuation of the Sizes of Left Feet among the Assyrians during the Ninth Century before Christ.

LOL - The Fluctuation of the Sizes of Left Feet among the Assyrians during the Ninth Century before Christ.

Chromatic Emancipation

...mops and recipes and cotton sacks and spirituals sticking out of their mouths. The Dutch children should all stumble in their wooden shoes and break their necks. The French should choke to death on the Louisiana Purchase (1803) while silkworms ate all the Chinese with their stupid pigtails. As a species, we were an abomination. All of us.

It was awful to be Negro and have no control over my life. It was brutal to be young and already trained to sit quietly and listen to charges brought against my color with no chance of defense. We should all be dead, one on top of the other. A pyramid of flesh with the whitefolks on the bottom as the broad base, then the Indians with their silly tomahawks and teepees and wigwams and treaties, the Negros with their...

Then I wished Gabriel Prosser and Nat Turner had killed all whitefolks in their beds and that Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated before the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, and that Harriet Tubman had been killed by that blow on her head and Christopher Columbus had drowned in the Santa Maria.

[on the prospect of Joe Louis losing fight against white opponent] My race groaned. It was our people falling. It was another lynching, yet another Black man hanging on a tree. One more woman ambushed and raped. A Black boy whipped and maimed. It was hounds on the trail of a man running through slimy swamps. It was a white woman slapping her maid for being forgetful.

I find it interesting that the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God’s will, but as human beings become more affluent, as their living standard and style begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of responsibility at a commensurate speed.

The dead turn to shit. And even if Abdel Latif’s corpse had literally turned to shit, they still wouldn’t be able to just wipe him away. Their memories were like acid inside them, boring eternally down into their depths and covering their hearts with pockmarks ~ just as the sight of Layla burning like a corncob ate at Abdel Latif’s heart until the day he died.

...despite how bad life had become, death could still seem terribly cruel.