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[...] I said, as I had said before: 'Don't you think it's extraordinary that we are both people whose personalities, whatever that word may mean, are large enough to include all sorts of things, politics and literature and art, but now that we're mad everything concentrates down to one small thing, that I don't want you to go off and sleep with someone else, and that you must lie to me about it?' For a moment he was himself, thinking about this, and then he faded away or dissolved and the furtive antagonist said: 'You're not going to trap me that way, don't you think it.' [...]
'As I crack up out of that 100 per cent revolutionary, I notice I crack up into aspects of everything I hate. That's because I've never lived with my eye on becoming what is known as mature. I've spent all my life, until recently, preparing myself for the moment when someone says: "Pick up that rifle"; or, "run that collective farm"; or, "organise that picket line." I always believed I'd be dead by the time I was thirty.'
'All young men believe they are going to be dead by the time they're thirty. They can't stand the compromise of ageing. And who am I to say they're not right?'
'I'm not all men. I'm Saul Green. No wonder I had to leave America. There's no one left who speaks my kind of language. What happened to them all-I used to know plenty once. We were all world-changers. Now I drive across my country, looking up my old friends, and they're all married or successful and having drunken private conversations with themselves because American values stink.'
A short story: or a short novel: comic and ironic: A woman, appalled by her capacity for surrendering herself to a man, determines to free herself. She determinedly takes two lovers, sleeping with them on alternate nights-the moment of freedom being when she would be able to say to herself that she has enjoyed them both equally. The two men become instinctively aware of each other's existence; one, jealous, falls in love with her seriously; the other becomes cool and guarded. In spite of all her determination, she cannot prevent herself loving the man who has fallen in love with her; freezing up with the man who is guarded. Nevertheless, although she is in despair that she is as 'unfree' as ever, she announces to both men that she has now become thoroughly emancipated, she has at last achieved the ideal of full sexual and emotional pleasure with two men at once. The cool and guarded man is interested to hear it, makes detached and intelligent remarks about female emancipation. The man she is in fact in love with, hurt and appalled, leaves her. She is left with the man she does not love and who does not love her, exchanging intelligent psychological conversation.
'Very well then. I can't write that short story or any other, because at that moment I sit down to write, someone comes into the room, looks over my shoulders, and stops me.'
'Who? Do you know?'
'Of course I know. It could be a Chinese peasant. Or one of Castro's guerrilla fighters. Or an Algerian fighting in the F. L. N. Or Mr. Mathlong. They stand here in the room and they say, why aren't you doing something about us, instead of wasting your time scribbling?'
'You know very well that's not what any of them would say.'
'No. But you know quite well what I mean. I know you do. It's the curse of all of us.'
'You're part of the team.'
'I don't feel that. I hate teams.'
'You think about it then. There are a few of us around in the world, we rely on each other even though we don't know each other's names. But we rely on each other all the time. We're a team, we're the ones who haven't given in, who'll go on fighting. I tell you, Anna, sometimes I pick up a book and I say: Well, so you've written it first, have you? Good for you. O. K., then I won't have to write it.'
'They said you were a left-winger,' said Anna, in appeal; interested that this was what she instinctively said in explanation of the state of affairs.
'Vintage, post-war.'
'I'm waiting for you to say: I and the other three socialists in the States are going to...'
'The other four.' [...]
cute
He had lost me. In the shadowy room, a single blade of sun pierced between the curtains and struck across the room, where it caught and blazed up in a tray of cut glass decanters, casting prisms that flickered and shifted this way and that and wavered high on the walls like paramecia under a microscope. Though there was a strong smell of wood smoke, the fireplace was burnt-out and black looking and the grate choked with ashes, as if the fires hadn’t been lit in a while.
i dont think 'pierced between' really feels right but this is pretty nonetheless
“No, not really,” I said curtly. Better wasn’t even the word for how I felt. There wasn’t a word for it. It was more that things too small to mention—laughter in the hall at school, a live gecko scurrying in a tank in the science lab—made me feel happy one moment and the next like crying. Sometimes, in the evenings, a damp, gritty wind blew in the windows from Park Avenue, just as the rush hour traffic was thinning and the city was emptying for the night; it was rainy, trees leafing out, spring deepening into summer; and the forlorn cry of horns on the street, the dank smell of the wet pavement had an electricity about it, a sense of crowds and static, lonely secretaries and fat guys with bags of carry-out, everywhere the ungainly sadness of creatures pushing and struggling to live. For weeks, I’d been frozen, sealed-off; now, in the shower, I would turn up the water as hard as it would go and howl, silently. Everything was raw and painful and confusing and wrong and yet it was as if I’d been dragged from freezing water through a break in the ice, into sun and blazing cold.
Abruptly, my father said: “Your mother wasn’t so easy to live with either, you know.” He picked up something that looked like an old math test from my desk, examined it, and then threw it back down. “She played her cards way too close to the vest. You know how she used to do. Clamming up. Freezing me out. Always had to take the high road. It was a power thing, you know—really controlling. Quite honestly, and I really hate to say this, it got to the point where it was hard for me to even be in the same room with her. I mean, I’m not saying she was a bad person. It’s just one minute everything’s fine, and the next, bam, what did I do, the old silent treatment…”
honestly this makes me have empathy for him
[...] I myself had come upstairs unexpectedly on the day in question to find a gym-toned, casually dressed mom who looked like she’d just come from a Pilates class slipping a paperweight in her bag.
“That’s eight hundred and fifty dollars,” I said, and at my voice she froze and looked up in horror. Actually it was only two fifty, but she handed me her credit card without a word and let me ring up the sale—probably the first profitable transaction that had taken place since Welty’s death; for Hobie’s friends (his main customers) were only too aware that they could talk Hobie down to criminal levels on his already too-low prices. Mike, who also helped in the shop on occasion, hiked up the prices indiscriminately and refused to negotiate and in consequence sold very little at all.
lol