Jim > Recent Status Updates

Of all the cities I have lived in, Los Angeles demands the most skills. My first literacy students all needed to improve their reading or their English for automotive reasons. LA is short on taxis, buslines, and landmarks—or, with its chain hotels, has dozens of duplicates, and so has high expectations of its guests. As a result, its natives are not mellow airheads, but strivers.

I am not meant to tell anyone where to go in Marseille, nor even why I myself went where I did there, and saw and smelled and felt as I did. All I can do in this explanation about my being there is to write something about the town itself, through my own senses.

A bath cost about ten cents. The few people who used it evidently felt that this price included full maid service, but the two overworked slaveys in the hotel did not, so that I usually cleaned the tub in self-protection. I decided then that many people are latently swinish and that I would rather work anywhere than in a hotel.

As to where [the Gobi caravans] go and why, we cannot be sure of such things. There are no tracks in such a barren waste. The sandstorms blow, the sun sinks, rivers disappear, and their camels are lost in darkness. Therefore the truth must be that the routes of such men are untraceable, their ultimate destinations as invisible as the wind.

He recited Manchurian telephone numbers and Chinese addresses, changed costumes, sang circus songs, beat a drum and played a flute, consumed bowls of horseradish and mounds of turnips, sneaked through the black-market district of Mukden ..., brought out all the peeling props and threadbare disguises of an aging clown working his way around the ring.

Remembering now, at parties, Alice and Edie huddled in a corner, smoking conspiratorially, giggling and flashing glances, legs swinging, rocking as they shared an ottoman, so close they were like one grinning, dangerous thing.

I've found that all weak people share a basic obsession—they fixate on the idea of satisfaction. Anywhere you go men and women are like crows drawn by shiny objects. For some folks, the shiny objects are other people, and you'd be better off developing a drug habit.

Thus far, African travel recalled the dreariest aspects of war. Always up in the middle of the night, always exhausted, always deep in discomfort varying from fierce to nasty, and always preyed on by boredom. The one fine, loved aspect of war was missing: I had met no companions of the road. War is full of them, a shifting population of men made extraordinary by circumstance. Nobody to laugh with.

I feel that man is a brief event on this continent [Africa]; no place has ever felt older to me, less touched or affected by the human race. But the blacks and the wild animals belong here. In the mud huts that any rain will wash away, or behind their mat walls that any wind will knock down, the blacks have lasted and know their place in the land, and fit.

I think we are all forever looking for costumes. We are naked and fearful fools in search of disguises, with pockets to hide our sins in. Actor's rags.

Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand?

Well, there it was. I got out fast then, before anyone could say 'serenity' again, for it is a word I associate with death, and for several days after that meeting I wanted only to be in places where the lights were bright and no one counted days.

And since I am now free to express my own opinion I will say openly that [the Emperor] Valentinian was the first emperor to foster the arrogance of the military to the detriment of the state by advancing them notably in standing and wealth.

Experience had taught [the Emperor Julian] that no wild beasts are such dangerous enemies to man as Christians are to one another.

He carried a clear conscience about with him and was cherished and loved by people of all classes, whereas in general men of his kind look out for a secret retreat in which to enjoy their ill-gotten wealth, and hide like creatures who hate the light from the eyes of the multitude of those they have wronged.

In this state of things the few houses which once had the reputation of being centres of serious culture are now given over to the trivial pursuits of passive idleness, and echo with the sound of singing accompanied by wind instruments or the twangling of strings.

It is easy to understand why he longed to find land at the North Pole. How could you give a name to an indeterminate area of ocean? How could you plant the flag of your country in the middle of the waves?

Hatteras's companions felt their strength return as they listened to his invigorating words. And yet the situation was terrible for these four people, in the company of a dying man. They were without resources, lost and alone at the eightieth degree [of latitude]. in the heart of the Arctic!

Thus there is a certain four o'clock in the morning in the confused roar of a blac-and-white world when coming on deck to take charge of my watch, I received the instantaneous impression that the ship could not live for another hour in such a raging sea.

It is three months to-day since we left the Fram [Nansen's ship]. A quarter of a year have we been wandering in this desert of ice, and here we are still. When we shall see the end of it I can no longer form any idea; I only hope whatever may be in store for us is not very far off, open water or land.

It is impossible to reach the [North] Pole itself or its immediate vicinity over such ice as this and with these dogs. If only we had more of them! We must turn, sooner or later.

Unseen and untrodden under their spotless mantle of ice the rigid polar regions slept the profound sleep of death from the earliest dawn of time. Wrapped in his white shroud, the mighty giant stretched his clammy ice-limbs abroad, and dreamed his age-long dreams.

Protect them, oh gods of the scarlet light
who love us fiercely despite our acts of stupidity
our utter failings.

[Rousseau to Boswell] Do not be guided by men's judgments, or you will find yourself tossed to and fro perpetually. Do not base your life on the judgments of others; first, because they are as likely to be mistaken as you are, and further, because you cannot know that they Are telling you their true thoughts....

At night indolence made me think, why give myself so much labour to write this journal, in which I do not insert much that can be called useful? Beg your pardon. Does it not contain a faithful register of my variations of mind?

Horsemen and theologians are both intolerant. Believe my faith, and ride my horse after my fashion, for no Nonconformist, Cossack, Anglican, Gaucho, Roman Catholic, or Mexican can see the least redeeming point about his fellows' creed, his saddle, horse, ox, ass, or any other thing belonging to him.

The people of the village called him mad, but, looking at the thing impartially, madness and faith are the same thing, the only difference being as to the mountain which the believer wishes to remove.