cycads and ferns’s Reviews > The Tunnel > Status Update

The bigot believes in details…So let me get to the teachings of my father…They were America, damn it, and Americans should come first…what had been offered them, what was their birthright…why, all that one had…scraped from the present, as if all one had been…something left uneaten on a soiled plate, and was thus swept into that pit that holds the forgetfulness and ingratitude of their country….

Thus, on January 26, 1944…Himmler told 260 high-ranking army and navy officers of the "all but" completion of the Final Solution…we shall understand Himmer's project as another application of the Roman-solution-to-the-Carthage-question. Since the Nazis intended to occupy Jewish property, they didn't salt the soil.
I understand my students are opposed to the napalming of babies. What délicatesse!

I am adding to the tangency of the judge,who orders the execution,that of the dreamer who merely wishes…for the demise of an enemy…prays for it,possibly aloud…in the presence of murderous minions,men who know how to measure their eventual reward…who therefore move its reality.What I refuse to do is accept…that the dreamer is thereby more of a damnable fellow than the guy who dumped the corpse in the river.

You know, Whiff, sometimes, in a marriage, only one side hears the other cough.
Yeah? Well. What of it? Are we married to them, then? Is that the situation?
One side is cold, sometimes, in a marriage, she said. One eye does all the weeping….
We'd remain married. I would see to that. One life would not be long enough for my revenge.

The work is hard,hot;I'm fat,old,out of shape. So I shall have to get a set at Sears:shovels, picks,hoes…I might as well make digging this tunnel as easy as possible…Someday…I shall want to commemorate with plaque or song…the day I began to dig…I instinctively understood why Alice went after the rabbit or melted in her mirror:the tunnel,all the other side,was more attractive than either glass or rabbit.

…this much is true of it…namely that reality permits us to believe anything or its opposite, as we wish, even both at the same time; it allows us to be stupid and willful and perverse and blind without any special penalty….Reality suffers fools….No, reality does not punish wickedness….the point is, Kohler, reality really doesn't give a shit; the truth plainly doesn't matter a damn.

My mother...she drank to the point of suicide, because a life which not only lacked love, but couldn't even catch a little indifference...was intolerable...produced...a monster upon whom she nevertheless pinned her hopes with exactly the same chance for success as anyone would who tried to drive a nail into a passing cloud- a son to whom she threw her soul at considerable peril, like a stone into a paper boat.

And what do I do? I stumble to my desk and try....when I write about myself, is it truly the truth I want? What do I want? to find out who I am? What is the good of that? I want to feel a little less uneasy.
We drag our acts behind us like a string of monsters.

Though I trip myself up, what skins when I fall? Nice….How many were engaged in that dispute? How many of me were there in those days? in the streets of my youth? in the slow soft life....When young I multiplied (x]. Now I divide [÷]. I am a two [2], a twelve [12], a twenty [201, hung beneath that skimpy horizontal rod I-] with its skinny upright line [I], and there I sway like a rack of out-of-season clothes.

So I wonder why I've lived so much of my life in a chair…because loneliness is unendurable elsewhere…that loneliness may be shaped the way the first dumb lump of clay was slapped to speech in the divine grip. We were late among the living…by the time God got to us…Haven't I always maintained that our several ribs were the incriminating print of a bedeviled and embittered fist?