Jim > Recent Status Updates

Seriously, when you read a book called NIETZSCHE ON HIS BALCONY, for example, you have to have faith in he fiction they're telling you, and you take for granted that there have been and will be many different readers of the same book.

To be a revolutionary is to be in opposition. Always. The revolutionary's triumph is intellectual. To be opposed. To be critical. With no official position. Opposed to any official position.

No, I've lost my faith in pure coincidence. Everything in life tends to hang together in a pattern. Of course the clearest pattern so far in this case is death repeating itself.

The poverty he sensed [in the United States] was not unwashed and in rags, it was poverty with bathrooms, and it seemed harsher to him, more desperate, more pitiless.

To Elizabeth courtship had been a present help in time of trouble, and she was not averse to using it again. If she could keep [the Duke of] Alençon dangling as her suitor, she would be able to put off, perhaps even to avoid, the evil day of war with Spain.

Elizabeth never revealed her gift of statesmanship more clearly; and if proof were needed, she had only to point to Scotland, where Mary's tragic mistake in marriage had culminated in horror and in ruin. The supreme need of the country was not a royal child to settle the vexed question of the succession, but salvation from civil and religious war.

The sale of monastic and chantry lands had converted the Reformation into a colossal business interest in which everyone, yeoman, merchant, gentleman, and nobleman, with any free capital, had invested.

I always assume everything is perfectly simple and obvious, and that I am the only one who doesn't understand what's going on, and so I tend to say nothing, ask nothing, but keep quiet, for fear of being laughed at for a dullard. It's my essential character to lie low and let the hounds go hullabalooing past. It used to serve me well, that prudent policy; not any more, alas.

I was penniless, hungry, and mostly miserable, passing my days in that state, one that is peculiar to the young, I believe, of torpid boredom mixed with thrashing desperation.

It has always seemed to me that one of the more deplorable aspects of dying, aside from the terror, pain and filth, is the fact that when I'm gone there will be no one here to register the world in just the way that I do.

The desert is not a place where much dignity can be held. Old San Jacinto Mountain cuts all men down to a reasonable size. You can shout at San Jacinto, or swear at it and the weather, but there is no response. It cannot be threatened by force nor impressed by money or reputation. In the desert all men are equal in importance.

If the article is not used at least three times a day, it should be disposed of with no regrets.

There's nothing worse than resentful masses, militias with their armbands and faux-military insignias, young people caught up in false dilemmas, squandering their passions on awful causes. [MAGA caps, anyone?]

Maigret seldom talked to his wife about an inquiry when it was under way. In fact he avoided discussing it with his closest collaborators, to whom he would merely give instructions. This was all part of his way of working, his attempt to understand, to immerse himself gradually in the way of life of people unknown to him the previous day.

He says a single map for life is all you need. It's a saying of his. The world is a forest, a woods, full of wild beasts and poisonous insects. You should go only through places where everyone goes, places that are absolutely safe, he says.

There is a time in one's life for that, a crossroads where one can still choose from several paths. The age of encounters, as it said on the cover of a book I once found on the quays.

Inside the window stood a small round table on which was a bowl of goldfish; and [Gabriel] Gale stopped abruptly and stared at it as if he had never seen such a thing before. He had always maintained that the main object of a man's life was to see a thing as if he had never seen it before.

... nor Kubla's Xanadu which was not e ven a poet's rounded and completed dream but a drug-sodden English one's lightning bolt which electrocuted him with the splendor he could not even face long enough to describe it down ....

Because they endured, as only endurance can, firmer than rock, more invincible than folly, longer than grief, the darkling and silent city rising out of the darkling and empty twilight to lower like a tumescent thunderclap, since it was the effigy and the power, rising tier on inviolate tier out of the mazed chiaroscuro like a tremendous beehive whose crown challenged by day the sun and stemmed aside by night ....

Oh yes, three more years and we will have exhausted Europe. Then we—hun and allies together—will transfer the whole business intact to the fresh trans-Atlantic pastures, the virgin American stage, like a travelling minstrel troupe.

... the thump of a single gun, a big one, with no following burst at all, as though it were firing at the Channel, the North Sea itself fifty miles away, or perhaps at some target even vaster and more immune than that: at Cosmos, space, infinity, lifting its voice against the Absolute, the ultimate I-am, harmless: the iron maw of Dis, toothless, unwearyable, incapable, bellowing.

The attack was already doomed in its embryo, and whoever commanded it, delivered it, along with it.... It was because that same trained judgment saw at once that this particular attack was condemned to fail: a sacrifice already planned and doomed in some vaster scheme, in which it would not matter either way, whether the attack failed or not.

There was a violent thunderstorm. A big red ball of lightning struck the plane. That's what a farmer said who saw it happen. Said there was a loud bang, like a rifle shot, as a fireball collided with the Cessna. Broke the damn plane apart, my mother and father and Mr Herbert, too. They all of 'em rained down from the sky in pieces.

The king had been introduced into a makeshift, perhaps a temporary tomb, with inexplicable haste. The objects themselves were magnificent, the proper rituals had been duly carried out, but the tomb itself was a paltry place in comparison with the sumptuous royal tomb nearby, and it looked as if the poor little king had been thrust beneath the ground with the express intention of forgetting his existence....

Aimee's mother had been jailed and brought to trial, not for terrorism, but for the theft of Laborde's paintings. There was no proof of her participation in the kidnapping and murder of Laborde. So that's why she'd only been in prison a year.

Her dreams were filled with bright-hued iguanas, scales swollen and pulsating, trampling through the artists' squat. Then the nightmare again. This time ... her father crawling over the cobblestones, his face melted, her hands bloodied from the explosion, only this time the doors led to bricked-in walls ... doors to nowhere.

Aimee leaned against the wall. It was as if Jutta Hald had struck her. Over the years, she'd imagined various scenarios. But never a mother in league with the notorious seventies Haader-Rofmein radicals, who kidnapped people, bombed jails, and robbed banks.

Most Maya archeologists now agree that three factors were paramount in the downfall: endemic internecine warfare, overpopulation (and accompanying environmental collapse), and drought. All three probably played their part, but not necessarily simultaneously.

The Maya are hardly a vanished people, for they number around five million souls, the largest single block of American Indians north of Peru.