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“He inches forward, pounds the walk, roars reports of weather for the middle of the night. “Know what it was at one? Eighty-seven. June, not hell we’re in, but eighty-seven. I ain’t even eighty-seven.”

Excerpt From
In the Heart of the Heart of the Country
William H. Gass
This material may be protected by copyright.

“It was like I was setting out to do something special and big—like a knight setting out—worth remembering. I dreamed”

Excerpt From
In the Heart of the Heart of the Country
William H. Gass
This material may be protected by copyright.

now and then his writing will take on this rushing momentum and it will be so masterful

being wrapped in the dough, there's something comforting, romantic even, about it.

jawed greeds, dartingly vivid intuitions, old crusty-shelled rock-gripping
obstinacies, deep-down sparkling undiscovered secrets, ominous protean
organisms motioning mysteriously, perhaps warningly, toward the surface
light.

Just as George and the
others are thought of, for convenience, as individual entities, so you may
think of a rock pool as an entity; though, of course, it is not. The waters of
its consciousness – so to speak – are swarming with hunted anxieties, grim-

‘Well, never mind. . . . There’s another thing about going back Home –
it’s the Past; and that’s all tied up with Nan, too. Sort of going back to the
place where I turned off the road, do you see?’

I’ve always thought of her as being sort of like a
road – I mean, she leads somewhere. With her, I’ll never lose my way. . . .
Do you know what I’m trying to say?’

a narrow uphill street which at night is
packed so tight with cars parked on both sides of it that two drivers can
scarcely squeeze past each other.

parallelism to the narrowness of his house

But Jim was lucky at the end; the only time when luck really
counts.

We’ve reduced the things of
the material plane to mere symbolic conveniences. And why? Because
that’s the essential first step. Until the material plane has been defined and
relegated to its proper place, the mind can’t ever be truly free.

And what’s our way of life? A building code which demands
certain measurements, certain utilities and the use of certain apt materials;
no more and no less. Everything else you’ve got to supply for yourself. But
just try telling that to the Europeans! It scares them to death. . . . The truth
is, our way of life is far too austere for them.

what was terrible was the fear
of annihilation. Now we have with us a far more terrible fear, the fear of
survival. Survival into a Rubble Age,

Isn’t it something to
know that you belong to one of the few professions in this country which
isn’t hopelessly corrupt?

‘And I’ll tell you something else. A minority has its own kind of
aggression. It absolutely dares the majority to attack it. It hates the majority
– not without a cause, I grant you.

But, the worst of it is, we now run into another liberal heresy. Because
the persecuting majority is vile, says the liberal, therefore the persecuted
minority must be stainlessly pure. Can’t you see what nonsense that is?
What’s to prevent the bad from being persecuted

Because a minority is only thought of as a minority
when it constitutes some kind of a threat to the majority, real or imaginary.
And no threat is ever quite imaginary. Anyone here disagree with that? If
you do, just ask yourself: what would this particular minority do if it
suddenly became the majorit

prudendy, permanendy, quirky spelling