The division of one day from the next must be one of the most profound peculiarities of life on this planet. It is, on the whole, a merciful arrangement. We are not condemned to sustained flights of being, but are constantly refreshed by little holidays from ourselves. We are intermittent creatures, always falling to little ends and rising to little new beginnings. Our soon-tired consciousness is meted out in chapters, and that the world will look quite different tomorrow is, both for our comfort and our discomfort, usually true.
Over my right shoulder I see four nuns who sit like a bridge club, their faces poked out from under their habits, as good as good babies who have sunk into their carriages. Without discrimination the wind pulls the skirts of their arms. Almost undressed, I see what remains: that holy wrist, that ankle, that chain.
Oh God, although I am very sad, could you please let these four nuns loosen from their leather boots and their wooden chairs to rise out over this greasy deck, out over this iron rail, nodding their pink heads to one side, flying four abreast in the old-fashioned side stroke; each mouth open and round, breathing together as fish do, singing without sound…
It is curious but significant that “gnostic” and “agnostic” are both dirty words in the Christian tradition: wisdom is not identified either with knowledge or with the denial of knowledge.
Developed to re-empower the victim, the Zero Approach gun worked on a principle of etheric consent and only fired when the target was asking for it. Since its introduction, the homicide rate had risen by four hundred per cent.
As I used to tell my American friends at the time, Canadian activists have an outlet that your students don’t have, namely the American Embassy. If all else fails they can go down and demonstrate there.
A HOT RAIN blew in from the sea. It hit Ocean Avenue in sticky washes of reflected neon that took the colored light from the hotels and stores and ran it into the gutters with the trash. In Palisades Park a fat tramp stood staring down at something by his feet. The way he held his head made him look like a hanged man. He swayed slightly and I imagined a rope stretching from his neck to the sky. I pulled over, wondering if he’d found what I was looking for.
Many is the good man I’ve known who has ruined himself by expecting too much justice. Now, I ask you, what sane man in this world really expects to get what he properly deserves?
Vladimir Nabokov famously stated that the great novels of the realist tradition are great fairy tales: whatever their acuity as social truth, no matter the intensity with which they create detailed environments and mentalities, they are not descriptions or accounts of anything but themselves, and their “poetry,” he says, is of a kind that provokes “not laughter and not tears—but a radiant smile of perfect satisfaction, a purr of beatitude.”
[Alfred] Bester’s extravaganza lies in the other pan of the scales from Austen and Tolstoy, but the measure is the same; it provides (as Nabokov said Gogol’s writing did) “the sensation of something ludicrous and at the same time stellar, lurking constantly around the corner.”
The drive back to Santa Monica was blank. My eyes felt charred and the cigarettes had eaten into my throat. I bought a cold coke from a machine outside a motel and chugged it till my eyes watered. Coke and damp night air, and the slowed pulse of the city around me. For that moment, for that snap-shot, micron-thin slice of time, I was free of the past, free even of the present - just the sweet caustic singe in my mouth and the loose quietness of being up and alone when most other people were asleep.
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