Despair

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 153 of 267 · 20 per page

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  If he left me here, I felt I would soon die of sorrow. “You must absolutely carry me up,” I repeated five or six times in my short letter, using an idiom that I translated word for word from our dialect. This somewhat ridiculous wording expressed clearly my childish despair, but was subsequently quoted to me often as a joke: “Do you remember the time when you wrote to us: ‘You must absolutely carry me up’?” These jokes contributed to make me learn, the hard way, how personal one’s anguish must always be, how difficult to communicate at all. As soon as my appeal had been sent, I became sure of my imminent rescue. Once solicited, my father couldn’t possibly leave me in this state of despair. Nor did this delay, so full of hopes that already made me feel less disturbed, last very long. Every day we were obliged to rest during a siesta that lasted from one-thirty until four in the afternoon. We were expected to sleep at that time, and absolute quiet was obligatory, though I cannot remember having slept once in that period. The heat and the crudely bright sunlight caused adults and all of nature to be overcome by a silent torpor that was broken only by the shrill chirping of the cicadas, but all of this had no effect on our vitality. We lay beneath our blankets, whispering from bed to bed and swapping well-thumbed comic books. As soon as I ceased to move, the world was no longer real and, since I could not exert my body, I began to play with my imagination. The terrifying brightness that confuses all colors in a dazzling white still failed to inspire in me any fear, so that I could abandon myself fully to the magic of light, enjoying to the utmost this invasion in the course of which my body seemed to faint and fail me as I forgot, without any anguish, all of the world that has mass. I gladly stared at the blinding light of the window and soon the stone and the woodwork both vanished, leaving me alone in the midst of the sky, propelling myself with great strokes of the arms in a sea of clouds. Then colors came back to life, long streaks of flickering greens, glistening drops of pink crystal that I found it delightful to turn off and on like lights, with a flicker of my eyelid, and that left behind them, in spite of my efforts, their tracings of darkness. Suddenly, in the course of this interplanetary trip, I saw my father: his head stood out clearly against one of the panes of the window. This apparition in the general drowsiness of the universe, in the gratuitous world of my joy-riding in the skies, seemed to me quite miraculous, an extraordinary confirmation of his omnipotence.

• From Bluets (2009)

  82. I have made efforts, however fitful, to live within other beads. During one particularly despondent New York City winter, I bought a huge can of bright yellow paint at the hardware store on Allen Street, imagining that I might buoy my soul with its cheer. When I got home and pried off the lid I realized they’d given me the wrong color, or maybe it was the right one, but at home it looked garish—like “death warmed over,” as they say. It was a terrible yellow, a yellow of utter rage. Later I learned that nearly all cultures have considered yellow in isolation one of, if not the least attractive of all colors. I painted everything with it. 83. I tried to go with the theme: I bought a yellow journal. On its cover sheet I wrote a slogan of penetration: Do not tell lies and do not do what you hate, for all things are manifest in the sight of heaven . 84. I hated that time and I hated that apartment and soon after I painted everything yellow I moved out. I looked at dozens of apartments and when I entered the hallway of the one I moved into next I knew I could live there because it was cheap and the hallway was baby blue. My friends all told me it smelled as bad there as it did in the last one but I found a heads-up penny on the threshold and anyway I don’t live there anymore. 85. One afternoon in 2006, at a bookstore in Los Angeles. I pick up a book called The Deepest Blue . Having expected a chromatic treatise, I am embarrassed when I see the subtitle: How Women Face and Overcome Depression . I quickly return it to its shelf. Eight months later, I order the book online. 86. The implication of the title is that men get blue, but women get the deepest blue . Another form of aggrandizement, to be sure—one which brings to mind a night I spent in an emergency room in Brooklyn years ago—some mystery ailment, a burning in my lower left side—a woman wailing in the waiting room about having gas from fried chicken, though she looked riddled with crack and sadness, not gas from fried chicken—a young doctor inside asked me to rate my pain on a scale of 1 to 10—I was flummoxed, I felt as though I shouldn’t be there at all—I said “6”—he said to the nurse, Write down “8,” since women always underestimate their pain. Men always say “11,” he said. I didn’t believe him, but I supposed he might know. 87. “suffering, joy, exertion, is not for [woman]; her life should flow by more quietly, trivially, gently than the man’s without being essentially happier or unhappier,” wrote Schopenhauer. What women, one would like to ask, did he know? At any rate, would that it were so .

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I am not trying to pride myself on my decision, and perhaps I behaved like a fool. But I do not remember the details of my argument. I only know that the action I took seemed necessary to me, and I refuse to discuss the matter today. I asked to go because it seemed intolerable to stay. Painfully but definitely, I was discovering that others really existed, and moreover that I would never be content merely with my own happiness. I was simple enough to think that I could be of help to them. I was fortunate to enjoy some culture and a few ideas; I would go to the camps to help the others live. I believe that, in the midst of the despair of those days, my move was optimistic. I wanted to go out toward men and thought I could help them. For myself, my decision was certainly a happy one: I immediately felt better. ~ 7. EXAMINATION ~ I have now come to the point where I began my narrative. Here I am in the examination hall, in the huge university library. All around me, as far as the distant shelves on the walls, my comrades are feverishly at work. The early morning sun begins to warm us through the stained glass. The first beads of sweat are tickling my forehead and forming heavy drops in my eyebrows. On my desk there are a thermos flask, a package of sandwiches, cigarettes, and a bottle of ink, as on all the other desks. But as I face these white sheets of paper and long hours that call for an effort, I must admit at last how impossible my whole life has become. The buzzing in my ears has started again these last few days. At first, I tried to ignore it: it was nothing but a slight fatigue that would leave me after the exams. But now it sounds like the incessant ringing of a bell. Come, it’s high time! My chest aches too; to tell the truth, it has always ached, but I would not let it worry me. Now I cannot but admit it: my ears are buzzing and my chest is aching. I might uncork the flask full of such strong coffee and it would bring the dead back to life, and drink a cupful and perhaps even finish this paper. But again I have to admit that I can work only with lots of coffee, while my hands tremble and my heart beats fast. The truth is that I am a wreck. I have wasted too much energy and for too long. I paid a far higher price than the others for my smallest success because I always had to fight under impossible conditions.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  He said he was sick of working for her because she was sleeping with everybody in the neighborhood. The kids weren’t his because he couldn’t make a kid any more even if he wanted to. The very next day, while Lena was out marketing, he took the kids up to the roof and with the blackjack he had shown me he beat their brains out. Then he jumped off the roof head first. When Lena came home and saw what happened she went off her nut. They had to put her in a strait jacket and call for the ambulance. . . . There was Schuldig, the rat who had spent twenty years in prison for a crime he had never committed. He had been beaten almost to death before he confessed; then solitary confinement, starvation, torture, perversion, dope. When they finally released him he was no longer a human being. He described to me one night his last thirty days in jail, the agony of waiting to be released. I have never heard anything like it; I didn’t think a human being could survive such anguish. Freed, he was haunted by the fear that he might be obliged to commit a crime and be sent back to prison again. He complained of being followed, spied on, perpetually tracked. He said “they” were tempting him to do things he had no desire to do. “They” were the dicks who were on his trail, who were paid to bring him back again. At night, when he was asleep, they whispered in his ear. He was powerless against them because they mesmerized him first. Sometimes they placed dope under his pillow, and with it a revolver or a knife. They wanted him to kill some innocent person so that they would have a solid case against him this time. He got worse and worse. One night, after he had walked around for hours with a batch of telegrams in his pocket, he went up to a cop and asked to be locked up. He couldn’t remember his name or address or even the office he was working for. He had completely lost his identity. He repeated over and over—“I’m innocent. . . . I’m innocent.” Again they gave him the third degree. Suddenly he jumped up and shouted like a madman—“I’ll confess . . . I’ll confess”—and with that he began to reel off one crime after another. He kept it up for three hours. Suddenly, in the midst of a harrowing confession, he stopped short, gave a quick look about, like a man who has suddenly come to, and then, with the rapidity and the force which only a madman can summon he made a tremendous leap across the room and crashed his skull against the stone wall. . . .

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  We have need of new beings still. We can do without the telephone, without the automobile, without the high- class bombers—but we can’t do without new beings. If Atlantis was submerged beneath the sea, if the Sphinx and the Pyramids remain an eternal riddle, it is because there were no more new beings being born. Stop the machine a moment! Flash back! Flash back to 1914, to the Kaiser sitting on his horse. Keep him sitting there a moment with his withered arm clutching the bridle rein. Look at his mustache! Look at his haughty air of pride and arrogance! Look at his cannon fodder lined up in strictest discipline, all ready to obey the word, to get shot, to get disemboweled, to be burned in quicklime. Hold it a moment, now, and look at the other side: the defenders of our great and glorious civilization, the men who will war to end war. Change their clothes, change their uniforms, change horses, change flags, change terrain. My, is that the Kaiser I see on a white horse? Are those the terrible Huns? And where is Big Bertha? Oh, I see—I thought it was pointing toward Notre-Dame? Humanity, me lads, humanity always marching in the van. . . . And the strong works we were speaking of? Where are the strong works? Call up the Western Union and dispatch a messenger fleet of foot—not a cripple or an octogenarian, but a young one! Ask him to find the great work and bring it back. We need it. We have a brand-new museum ready waiting to house it—and cellophane and the Dewey decimal system to file it. All we need is the name of the author. Even if he has no name, even if it is an anonymous work, we won’t kick. Even if it has a little mustard gas in it we won’t mind. Bring it back dead or alive—there’s a twenty-five thousand dollar reward for the man who fetches it. And if they tell you that these things had to be, that things could not have happened otherwise, that France did her best and Germany her best and that little Liberia and little Ecuador and all the other allies also did their best, and that since the war everybody has been doing his best to patch things up or to forget, tell them that their best is not good enough, that we don’t want to hear any more this logic of “doing the best one can,” tell them we don’t want the best of a bad bargain, we don’t believe in bargains good or bad, nor in war memorials.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  “This is all I can do,” she said. “The police won’t help me. The government won’t protect me. Only my God can protect me. But what I can do is use against him the one thing that he cherishes, and that is his pride. By me living outside in a shack, everyone is going to ask him, ‘Why does your wife live in a shack outside your house?’ He’s going to have to answer that question, and no matter what he says, everyone will know that something is wrong with him. He loves to live for the world. Let the world see him for who he is. He’s a saint in the streets. He’s a devil in this house. Let him be seen for who he is.” When my mom had decided to keep Isaac, I was so close to writing her off. I couldn’t stand the pain anymore. But seeing her hit with a bicycle, living like a prisoner in her own backyard, that was the final straw for me. I was a broken person. I was done. “This thing?” I told her. “This dysfunctional thing? I won’t be a part of it. I can’t live this life with you. I refuse. You’ve made your decision. Good luck with your life. I’m going to live mine.” She understood. She didn’t feel betrayed or abandoned at all. “Honey, I know what you’re going through,” she said. “At one point, I had to disown my family to go off and live my own life, too. I understand why you need to do the same.” So I did. I walked out. I didn’t call. I didn’t visit. Isaac came and I went, and for the life of me I could not understand why she wouldn’t do the same: leave. Just leave. Just fucking leave. I didn’t understand what she was going through. I didn’t understand domestic violence. I didn’t understand how adult relationships worked; I’d never even had a girlfriend. I didn’t understand how she could have sex with a man she hated and feared. I didn’t know how easily sex and hatred and fear can intertwine. I was angry with my mom. I hated him, but I blamed her. I saw Abel as a choice she’d made, a choice she was continuing to make. My whole life, telling me stories about growing up in the homelands, being abandoned by her parents, she had always said, “You cannot blame anyone else for what you do. You cannot blame your past for who you are. You are responsible for you. You make your own choices.”

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  The room had to be darkened, the candles lit, the windows tightly shut to prevent the noise of the street from penetrating the room. She moved about naked with a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth. Her toilet was an affair of great preoccupation; a thousand trifling details had to be attended to before she could so much as don a bathrobe. She was like an athlete preparing for the great event of the day. From the roots of her hair, which she studied with keen attention, to the shape and length of her toe-nails, every part of her anatomy was thoroughly inspected before sitting down to breakfast. Like an athlete I said she was, but in fact she was more like a mechanic overhauling a fast plane for a test flight. Once she slipped on her dress she was launched for the day, for the flight which might end perhaps in Irkutsk or Teheran. She would take on enough fuel at breakfast to last the entire trip. The breakfast was a prolonged affair: it was the one ceremony of the day over which she dawdled and lingered. It was exasperatingly prolonged, indeed. One wondered if she would ever take off, one wondered if she had forgotten the grand mission which she had sworn to accomplish each day. Perhaps she was dreaming of her itinerary, or perhaps she was not dreaming at all but simply allowing time for the functional processes of her marvelous machine so that once embarked there would be no turning back. She was very calm and self-possessed at this hour of the day; she was like a great bird of the air perched on a mountain crag, dreamily surveying the terrain below. It was not from the breakfast table that she would suddenly swoop and dive to pounce upon her prey. No, from the early morning perch she would take off slowly and majestically, synchronizing her every movement with the pulse of the motor. All space lay before her, her direction dictated only by caprice. She was almost the image of freedom, were it not for the Saturnian weight of her body and the abnormal span of her wings. However poised she seemed, especially at the take-off, one sensed the terror which motivated the daily flight. She was at once obedient to her destiny and at the same time frantically eager to overcome it. Each morning she soared aloft from her perch, as from some Himalayan peak; she seemed always to direct her flight toward some uncharted region into which, if all went well, she would disappear forever. Each morning she seemed to carry aloft with her this desperate, last-minute hope; she took leave with calm, grave dignity, like one about to go down into the grave. Never once did she circle about the flying field; never once did she cast a glance backward toward those whom she was abandoning.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  She had the marmoreal stare of a faun embedded in lava. The time has come, I thought, to wander back from the periphery. I made a move toward the center, only to find the ground shifting from under my feet. The earth slid rapidly beneath my bewildered feet. I moved again out of the earth belt and behold, my hands were full of meteoric flowers. I reached for her with two flaming hands but she was more elusive than sand. I thought of my favorite nightmares, but she was unlike anything which had made me sweat and gibber. In my delirium I began to prance and neigh. I bought frogs and mated them with toads. I thought of the easiest thing to do, which is to die, but I did nothing. I stood still and began to petrify at the extremities. That was so wonderful, so healing, so eminently sensible, that I began to laugh way down inside the viscera, like a hyena crazed with rut. Maybe I would turn into a rosetta stone! I just stood still and waited. Spring came, and fall, and then winter. I renewed my insurance policy automatically. I ate grass and the roots of deciduous trees. I sat for days on end looking at the same film. Now and then I brushed my teeth. If you fired an automatic at me the bullets glanced off and made a queer tat-a-tat ricocheting against the walls. Once up a dark street, felled by a thug, I felt a knife go clean through me. It felt like a spritz bath. Strange to say, the knife left no holes in my skin. The experience was so novel that I went home and stuck knives into all parts of my body. More needle baths. I sat down, pulled all the knives out, and again I marveled that there was no trace of blood, no holes, no pain. I was just about to bite into my arm when the telephone rang. It was long distance calling. I never knew who put in the calls because no one ever came to the phone. However, the skeleton dance. . . . Life is drifting by the show window. I lie there like a floodlit ham waiting for the ax to fall. As a matter of fact, there is nothing to fear, because everything is cut neatly into fine little slices and wrapped in cellophane. Suddenly all the lights of the city are extinguished and the sirens sound their warning. The city is enveloped in poison gas, bombs are bursting, mangled bodies flying through the air. There is electricity everywhere, and blood and splinters and loudspeakers. The men in the air are full of glee; those below are screaming and bellowing. When the gas and the flames have eaten all the flesh away the skeleton dance begins. I watch from the show window which is now dark. It is better than the sack of Rome because there is more to destroy.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  It’s as though my mother fed me a poison, and though I was weaned young the poison never left my system. Even when she weaned me it seemed that I was completely indifferent; most children rebel, or make a pretense of rebelling, but I didn’t give a damn. I was a philosopher when still in swaddling clothes. I was against life, on principle. What principle? The principle of futility. Everybody around me was struggling. I myself never made an effort. If I appeared to be making an effort it was only to please someone else; at bottom I didn’t give a rap. And if you can tell me why this should have been so I will deny it, because I was born with a cussed streak in me and nothing can eliminate it. I heard later, when I had grown up, that they had a hell of a time bringing me out of the womb. I can understand that perfectly. Why budge? Why come out of a nice warm place, a cosy retreat in which everything is offered you gratis? The earliest remembrance I have is of the cold, the snow and ice in the gutter, the frost on the window panes, the chill of the sweaty green walls in the kitchen. Why do people live in outlandish climates in the temperate zones, as they are miscalled? Because people are naturally idiots, naturally sluggards, naturally cowards. Until I was about ten years old I never realized that there were “warm” countries, places where you didn’t have to sweat for a living, nor shiver and pretend that it was tonic and exhilarating. Wherever there is cold there are people who work themselves to the bone and when they produce young they preach to the young the gospel of work—which is nothing, at bottom, but the doctrine of inertia. My people were entirely Nordic, which is to say idiots. Every wrong idea which has ever been expounded was theirs. Among them was the doctrine of cleanliness, to say nothing of righteousness. They were painfully clean. But inwardly they stank. Never once had they opened the door which leads to the soul; never once did they dream of taking a blind leap into the dark. After dinner the dishes were promptly washed and put in the closet; after the paper was read it was neatly folded and laid away on a shelf; after the clothes were washed they were ironed and folded and then tucked away in the drawers. Everything was for tomorrow, but tomorrow never came. The present was only a bridge and on this bridge they are still groaning, as the world groans, and not one idiot ever thinks of blowing up the bridge.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  I have broken the wall created by birth and the line of voyage is round and unbroken, even as the navel. No form, no image, no architecture, only concentric flights of sheer madness. I am the arrow of the dream’s substantiality. I verify by flight. I nullify by dropping to earth. Thus moments pass, veridic moments of time without space when I know all, and knowing all I collapse beneath the vault of the selfless dream. Between these moments, in the interstices of the dream, life vainly tries to build up, but the scaffold of the city’s mad logic is no support. As an individual, as flesh and blood, I am leveled down each day to make the fleshless, bloodless city whose perfection is the sum of all logic and death to the dream. I am struggling against an oceanic death in which my own death is but a drop of water evaporating. To raise my own individual life but a fraction of an inch above this sinking sea of death I must have a faith greater than Christ’s, a wisdom deeper than that of the greatest seer. I must have the ability and the patience to formulate what is not contained in the language of our time, for what is now intelligible is meaningless. My eyes are useless, for they render back only the image of the known. My whole body must become a constant beam of light, moving with an ever greater rapidity, never arrested, never looking back, never dwindling. The city grows like a cancer; I must grow like a sun. The city eats deeper and deeper into the red; it is an insatiable white louse which must die eventually of inanition. I am going to starve the white louse which is eating me up. I am going to die as a city in order to become again a man. Therefore I close my ears, my eyes, my mouth. Before I shall have become quite a man again I shall probably exist as a park, a sort of natural park in which people come to rest, to while away the time. What they say or do will be of little matter, for they will bring only their fatigue, their boredom, their hopelessness. I shall be a buffer between the white louse and the red corpuscle. I shall be a ventilator for removing the poisons accumulated through the effort to perfect that which is imperfectible. I shall be law and order as it exists in nature, as it is projected in dream. I shall be the wild park in the midst of the nightmare of perfection, the still, unshakeable dream in the midst of frenzied activity, the random shot on the white billiard table of logic, I shall know neither how to weep nor protest, but I shall be there always in absolute silence to receive and to restore.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  I was still working on the best way to talk to condemned people about how to respond to news of an execution date. I wanted to say something reassuring like, “Don’t worry,” but of course that would be a remarkable request to make of anyone—news of a scheduled execution was nothing if not unimaginably worrisome. “Sorry” didn’t seem quite right either, but it tended to be the best I could think of. “I don’t have a volunteer lawyer, Mr. Stevenson. I don’t have anyone. My volunteer lawyer said he couldn’t do any more to help me over a year ago. I need your help.” We still didn’t have computers or law books, and I didn’t have other lawyers on staff. I had hired a classmate of mine from Harvard Law School who agreed to join our staff and moved to Alabama from his home in Boston. I was thrilled to finally have some help. He had been in Montgomery for a few days when I had to leave town for a fundraising trip. When I returned, he was gone. He left a note explaining that he didn’t realize how challenging it would be for him to live in Alabama. He hadn’t been there a week. Trying to stop an execution would mean nonstop work eighteen hours a day for a month, desperately trying to get a stay order from a court. Only an all-out effort would get it done, and it was still wildly improbable that we’d succeed in blocking the execution. When I could think of nothing to fill the silence, Richardson continued: “Mr. Stevenson, I have thirty days. Please say you’ll help me.” I didn’t know what else to do but be truthful. “Mr. Richardson, I’m so sorry, but I don’t have books, staff, computers, or anything we need to take on new cases yet. I haven’t even hired lawyers. I’m trying to get things set up—” “But I have an execution date. You have to represent me. What’s the point of all that other stuff if you’re not going to help people like me?” I could hear his breath growing ragged. “They’re going to kill me,” he said. “I know what you’re saying, and I’m trying to figure out how to help. We’re just so overextended—” I didn’t know what to say, and a long silence fell between us. I could hear him breathing heavily on the phone, and I could imagine how frustrated he must be. I was bracing myself for him to say something angry or bitter, steeling myself to absorb his understandable rage. But then the phone suddenly went silent. He’d hung up. I was unnerved by the call for the rest of the day and couldn’t find sleep that night. I was haunted by my helpless bureaucratic demurrals in the face of his desperation and the silence of his response.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  The lives and the suffering of the women got tangled together at Tutwiler. For Marsha, it was impossible not to notice that some women never got visits. She tried at first but couldn’t remain indifferent to the people around her who seemed in acute distress—those who cried more than usual or who suffered the greatest anxiety about the children or parents they’d left behind or who seemed especially down or depressed. Knitted together as they were, a horrible day for one woman would inevitably become a horrible day for everyone. The only consolation in such an arrangement was that joyous moments were shared as well. A grant of parole, the arrival of a hoped-for letter, a visit from a long-absent family member would lift everyone’s spirits. If the struggles of the other women had been Marsha’s biggest challenge at Tutwiler, her years there would have been difficult but manageable. But there were bigger problems, coming from the correctional staff itself. Women at Tutwiler were being raped by prison guards. Women were being sexually harassed, exploited, abused, and assaulted by male officers in countless ways. The male warden allowed the male guards entry into the showers during prison counts. Officers leered at the naked women and made crude comments and suggestive threats. Women had no privacy in the bathrooms, where male officers could watch them use the toilet. There were dark corners and hallways—terrifying spaces at Tutwiler where women could be beaten or sexually assaulted. EJI had asked the Department of Corrections to install security cameras in the dorms, but they refused. The culture of sexual violence was so pervasive that even the prison chaplain was sexually assaulting women when they came to the chapel. Shortly after Marsha arrived at Tutwiler, we won the release of Diane Jones, who had been wrongly convicted and sentenced to die in prison for a crime she had not committed. Diane had been wrongly implicated in a drug-trafficking operation that involved her former boyfriend. She was convicted of multiple charges that triggered a sentence of mandatory life imprisonment without parole. We challenged her conviction and sentence and ultimately won her release. The release of Diane Jones, a condemned lifer, gave hope to all of the other lifers at Tutwiler. I received letters from women I’d never met thanking me for helping her. While working on her case, I’d go to Tutwiler to meet with Diane, who would tell me how the women were desperate for help. “Bryan, I have about nine notes people want me to pass to you. It was too many to get past the guards so I didn’t bring them, but these women want your help.” “Well, don’t try to smuggle notes. They can write us.” “Well, some say they have written.” “We’re swamped, Diane. I’m sorry, but we’ll try to reply.” “I’m mostly worried about the lifers. They’re the ones who will die in here.” “We’re trying—there is only so much we can do.”

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Why do the skeletons dance so ecstatically, I wonder. Is it the fall of the world? Is it the dance of death which has been so often heralded? To see millions of skeletons dancing in the snow while the city founders is an awesome sight. Will anything ever grow again? Will babes come out of the womb? Will there be food and wine? There are men in the air, to be sure. They will come down to plunder. There will be cholera and dysentery and those who were above and triumphant will perish like the rest. I have the sure feeling that I will be the last man on earth. I will emerge from the show window when it is all over and walk calmly amidst the ruins. I will have the whole earth to myself. Long distance calling! To inform me that I am not utterly alone. Then the destruction was not complete? It’s discouraging. Man is not even able to destroy himself; he can only destroy others. I am disgusted. What a malicious cripple! What cruel delusions! So there are more of the species about and they will tidy up the mess and begin again. God will come down again in flesh and blood and take up the burden of guilt. They will make music and build things in stone and write it all down in little books. Pfui! What blind tenacity, what clumsy ambitions! I am on the bed again. The old Greek world, the dawn of sexual intercourse—and Hymie! Hymie Laubscher always on the same level, looking down on the boulevard across the river. There is a lull in the nuptial feast and the clam fritters are brought in. Move over just a little , he says. There, like that, that’s it! I hear frogs croaking in the swamp outside my window. Big cemetery frogs nourished by the dead. They are all huddled together in sexual intercourse; they are croaking with sexual glee. I realize now how Hymie was conceived and brought into being. Hymie the bullfrog! His mother was at the bottom of the pack and Hymie, then an embryo, was hidden away in her sac. It was in the early days of sexual intercourse and there were no Marquis of Queensbury rules to hinder. It was fuck and be fucked—and the devil take the hindmost. It has been that way ever since the Greeks—a blind fuck in the mud and then a quick spawn and then death. People are fucking on different levels but it’s always in a swamp and the litter is always destined for the same end. When the house is torn down the bed is left standing: the cosmosexual altar. I was polluting the bed with dreams. Stretched out taut on the ferroconcrete my soul would leave its body and roam from place to place on a little trolley such as is used in department stores for making change.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  What a town it would be, if only they could be gathered together! Would they want skyscrapers? Would they want museums? Would they want libraries? Would they too build sewers and bridges and tracks and factories? Would they make the same little cornices of tin, one like another, on, on, ad infinitum, from Battery Park to the Golden Bay? I doubt it. Only the lash of hunger could stir them. The empty belly, the wild look in the eye, the fear, the fear of worse, driving them on. One after the other, all the same, all goaded to desperation, out of the goad and whip of hunger building the loftiest skyscrapers, the most redoutable dreadnoughts, making the finest steel, the flimsiest lace, the most delicate glassware. Walking with O’Rourke and hearing nothing but theft, arson, rape, homicide was like listening to a little motif out of a grand symphony. And just as one can whistle an air of Bach and be thinking of a woman he wants to sleep with, so, listening to O’Rourke, I would be thinking of the moment when he would stop talking and say “what’ll you have to eat?” In the midst of the most gruesome murder I could think of the pork tenderloin which we would be sure to get at a certain place farther up the line, and wonder too what sort of vegetables they would have on the side to go with it, and whether I would order pie afterwards or a custard pudding. It was the same when I slept with my wife now and then; while she was moaning and gibbering I might be wondering if she had emptied the grounds in the coffee pot, because she had the bad habit of letting things slide—the important things, I mean. Fresh coffee was important—and fresh bacon with the eggs. If she were knocked up again that would be bad, serious in a way, but more important than that was fresh coffee in the morning and the smell of bacon and eggs. I could put up with heartbreaks and abortions and busted romances, but I had to have something under my belt to carry on, and I wanted something nourishing, something appetizing. I felt exactly like Jesus Christ would have felt if he had been taken down from the cross and not permitted to die in the flesh. I am sure that the shock of crucifixion would have been so great that he would have suffered a complete amnesia as regards humanity. I am certain that after his wounds had healed he wouldn’t have given a damn about the tribulations of mankind but would have fallen with the greatest relish upon a fresh cup of coffee and a slice of toast, assuming he could have had it. Whoever, through too great love, which is monstrous after all, dies of his misery, is born again to know neither love nor hate, but to enjoy.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  They believe that they are serving their fellowmen, and they are sincere in believing so, but they are heartless murderers and at moments, when they come awake, they realize their crimes and perform frantic, quixotic acts of goodness in order to expiate their guilt. The goodness of man stinks more than the evil which is in him, for the goodness is not yet acknowledged, not an affirmation of the conscious self. Being pushed over the precipice, it is easy at the last moment to surrender all one’s possessions, to turn and extend a last embrace to all who are left behind. How are we to stop the blind rush? How are we to stop the automatic process, each one pushing the other over the precipice? As I sat at my desk, over which I had put up a sign reading “Do not abandon all hope ye who enter here!”—as I sat there saying Yes, No, Yes, No, I realized, with a despair that was turning to white frenzy, that I was a puppet in whose hands society had placed a Gatling gun. If I performed a good deed it was no different, ultimately, than if I had performed a bad deed. I was like an equals sign through which the algebraic swarm of humanity was passing. I was a rather important, active equals sign, like a general in time of war, but no matter how competent I were to become I could never change into a plus or a minus sign. Nor could anyone else, as far as I could determine. Our whole life was built up on this principle of equation. The integers had become symbols which were shuffled about in the interests of death. Pity, despair, passion, hope, courage—these were the temporal refractions caused by looking at equations from varying angles. To stop the endless juggling by turning one’s back on it, or by facing it squarely and writing about it, would be no help either. In a hall of mirrors there is no way to turn your back on yourself. I will not do this. I will do some other thing! Very good. But can you do nothing at all? Can you stop thinking about not doing anything? Can you stop dead, and without thinking, radiate the truth which you know? That was the idea which lodged in the back of my head and which burned and burned, and perhaps when I was most expansive, most radiant with energy, most sympathetic, most willing, helpful, sincere, good, it was this fixed idea which was shining through, and automatically I was saying—“why, don’t mention it. . . . nothing at all, I assure you. . . . no, please don’t thank me, it’s nothing,” etc. etc. From firing the gun so many hundreds of times a day perhaps I didn’t even notice the detonations any more; perhaps I thought I was opening pigeon traps and filling the sky with milky white fowl.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  I know that this is death, but I am powerless to kill the knowledge of it, or the knower. Some tiny particle of me is alive, some speck of consciousness persists, and, as the inert carcass expands, this flicker of life becomes sharper and sharper and gleams inside me like the cold fire of a gem. It lights up the whole gluey mass of pulp so that I am like a diver with a torch in the body of a dead marine monster. By some slender hidden filament I am still connected with the life above the surface of the deep, but it is so far away, the upper world, and the weight of the corpse so great that, even if it were possible, it would take years to reach the surface. I move around in my own dead body, exploring every nook and cranny of its huge, shapeless mass. It is an endless exploration, for with the ceaseless growth the whole topography changes, slipping and drifting like the hot magma of the earth. Never for a minute is there terra firma, never for a minute does anything remain still and recognizable: it is a growth without landmarks, a voyage in which the destination changes with every least move or shudder. It is this interminable filling of space which kills all sense of space or time; the more the body expands the tinier becomes the world, until at last I feel that everything is concentrated on the head of a pin. Despite the floundering of this enormous dead mass which I have become, I feel that what sustains it, the world out of which it grows, is no bigger than a pinhead. In the midst of pollution, in the very heart and gizzard of death, as it were, I sense the seed, the miraculous, infinitesimal lever which balances the world. I have overspread the world like a syrup and the emptiness of it is terrifying, but there is no dislodging the seed; the seed has become a little knot of cold fire which roars like a sun in the vast hollow of the dead carcass. When the great plunder-bird returns exhausted from her flight she will find me here in the midst of my nothingness, I, the imperishable schizerino, a blazing seed hidden in the heart of death. Every day she thinks to find another means of sustenance, but there is no other, only this eternal seed of light which by dying each day I rediscover for her. Fly, O devouring bird, fly to the limits of the universe! Here is your nourishment glowing in the sickening emptiness you have created! You will come back to perish once more in the black hole; you will come back again and again, for you have not the wings to carry you out of the world. This is the only world you can inhabit, this tomb of the snake where darkness reigns.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  Cheese boys were in a uniquely fucked situation when apartheid ended. It is one thing to be born in the hood and know that you will never leave the hood. But the cheese boy has been shown the world outside. His family has done okay. They have a house. They’ve sent him to a decent school; maybe he’s even matriculated. He has been given more potential, but he has not been given more opportunity. He has been given an awareness of the world that is out there, but he has not been given the means to reach it. The unemployment rate, technically speaking, was “lower” in South Africa during apartheid, which makes sense. There was slavery—that’s how everyone was employed. When democracy came, everyone had to be paid a minimum wage. The cost of labor went up, and suddenly millions of people were out of work. The unemployment rate for young black men post-apartheid shot up, sometimes as high as 50 percent. What happens to a lot of guys is they finish high school and they can’t afford university, and even little retail jobs can be hard to come by when you’re from the hood and you look and talk a certain way. So, for many young men in South Africa’s townships, freedom looks like this: Every morning they wake up, maybe their parents go to work or maybe not. Then they go outside and chill on the corner the whole day, talking shit. They’re free, they’ve been taught how to fish, but no one will give them a fishing rod. — One of the first things I learned in the hood is that there is a very fine line between civilian and criminal. We like to believe we live in a world of good guys and bad guys, and in the suburbs it’s easy to believe that, because getting to know a career criminal in the suburbs is a difficult thing. But then you go to the hood and you see there are so many shades in between. In the hood, gangsters were your friends and neighbors. You knew them. You talked to them on the corner, saw them at parties. They were a part of your world. You knew them from before they became gangsters. It wasn’t, “Hey, that’s a crack dealer.” It was, “Oh, little Jimmy’s selling crack now.” The weird thing about these gangsters was that they were all, at a glance, identical. They drove the same red sports car. They dated the same beautiful eighteen-year-old girls. It was strange. It was like they didn’t have personalities; they shared a personality. One could be the other, and the other could be the one. They’d each studied how to be that gangster.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Title : Tropic of Capricorn Author: Henry Miller ASIN : B07GN5QTNN [image file=Image00000.jpg] Tropic of Capricorn HENRY MILLER Table of ContentsCover PageTitle PageCopyright PageChapter 1Chapter 2Caramna Corporation 2018 Tropic of Capricorn Once you have given up the ghost, everything follows with dead certainty, even in the midst of chaos. From the beginning it was never anything but chaos: it was a fluid which enveloped me, which I breathed in through the gills. In the substrata, where the moon shone steady and opaque, it was smooth and fecundating; above it was a jangle and a discord. In everything I quickly saw the opposite, the contradiction, and between the real and the unreal the irony, the paradox. I was my own worst enemy. There was nothing I wished to do which I could just as well not do. Even as a child, when I lacked for nothing, I wanted to die: I wanted to surrender because I saw no sense in struggling. I felt that nothing would be proved, substantiated, added or subtracted by continuing an existence which I had not asked for. Everybody around me was a failure, or if not a failure, ridiculous. Especially the successful ones. The successful ones bored me to tears. I was sympathetic to a fault, but it was not sympathy that made me so. It was a purely negative quality, a weakness which blossomed at the mere sight of human misery. I never helped any one expecting that it would do any good; I helped because I was helpless to do otherwise. To want to change the condition of affairs seemed futile to me; nothing would be altered, I was convinced, except by a change of heart, and who could change the hearts of men? Now and then a friend was converted: it was something to make me puke. I had no more need of God than He had of me, and if there were one, I often said to myself, I would meet Him calmly and spit in His face. What was most annoying was that at first blush people usually took me to be good, to be kind, generous, loyal, faithful. Perhaps I did possess these virtues but if so it was because I was indifferent: I could afford to be good, kind, generous, loyal, and so forth, since I was free of envy. Envy was the one thing I was never a victim of. I have never envied anybody or anything. On the contrary, I have only felt pity for everybody and everything. From the very beginning I must have trained myself not to want anything too badly. From the very beginning I was independent, in a false way. I had need of nobody because I wanted to be free, free to do and to give only as my whims dictated. The moment anything was expected or demanded of me I balked. That was the form my independence took. I was corrupt, in other words, corrupt from the start.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  But if you would laugh when others laugh and weep when they weep then you must be prepared to die as they die and live as they live. That means to be right and to get the worst of it at the same time. It means to be dead while you are alive and alive only when you are dead. In this company the world always wears a normal aspect, even under the most abnormal conditions. Nothing is right or wrong but thinking makes it so. You no longer believe in reality but in thinking. And when you are pushed off the dead end your thoughts go with you and they are of no use to you. In a way, in a profound way, I mean, Christ was never pushed off the dead end. At the moment when he was tottering and swaying, as if by a great recoil, this negative backwash rolled up and stayed his death. The whole negative impulse of humanity seemed to coil up into a monstrous inert mass to create the human integer, the figure one, one and indivisible. There was a resurrection which is inexplicable unless we accept the fact that men have always been willing and ready to deny their own destiny. The earth rolls on, the stars roll on, but men, the great body of men which makes up the world, are caught in the image of the one and only one. If one isn’t crucified, like Christ, if one manages to survive, to go on living above and beyond the sense of desperation and futility, then another curious thing happens. It’s as though one had actually died and actually been resurrected again; one lives a supernormal life, like the Chinese. That is to say, one is unnaturally gay, unnaturally healthy, unnaturally indifferent. The tragic sense is gone: one lives on like a flower, a rock, a tree, one with Nature and against Nature at the same time. If your best friend dies you don’t even bother to go to the funeral; if a man is run down by a streetcar right before your eyes you keep on walking just as though nothing had happened; if a war breaks out you let your friends go to the front but you yourself take no interest in the slaughter. And so on and so on. Life becomes a spectacle and, if you happen to be an artist, you record the passing show. Loneliness is abolished, because all values, your own included, are destroyed. Sympathy alone flourishes, but it is not a human sympathy, a limited sympathy—it is something monstrous and evil. You care so little that you can afford to sacrifice yourself for anybody or anything. At the same time your interest, your curiosity, develops at an outrageous pace. This too is suspect, since it is capable of attaching you to a collar button just as well as to a cause.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  He went to a screening of the South American film after work. It was a beautifully photographed political allegory, the kind he nearly always liked. But the frame that stayed with him had nothing to do with politics. The dark child, raped by her brutal first customer, turns her head to avoid his kiss, and a flat, brilliant fish swimming in imaginary water is superimposed, with rippling subtlety, over her face, a memory, perhaps, of the pretty fish tank in her grandmother’s demolished mansion. When he got home he called one of the women he dated. “Nothing special,” he said. “Just checking up on you. Seeing how you are.” She was pleased by his call, and told him she’d been depressed all week because of an agent’s reaction to her writing. He lost interest in the conversation sooner than he’d expected. He told her he had to go, but that he’d call her soon. Then he called the woman who hated telephones. She was depressed too. Her father had been calling to talk to her about how awful his life was, sometimes before she made it out of the apartment in the morning. That was a little more entertaining, but he cut that short too. He made himself a quick dinner of packaged vegetable-flavored Indian noodles with butter. Then he opened a can of sardines and took them into his bedroom to eat in front of the TV. The best thing that he found to watch was a talk show featuring a beautiful teenaged movie star who had recently performed an erotic nude scene in a box office hit. He liked to watch her. Her precise, careful manner would have seemed stiff in a grown woman, but was charming in a child sex star. Half-formed illusions about meeting and seducing her absorbed him as he ate his noodles. He went to bed early. When he woke up, he realized that he’d been dreaming. A fourteen-year-old girl had been given to him to take care of by some vague authority. She was a lovely tall child with wide solemn eyes and long dark hair. She hated clothes and walked around the apartment naked. He was not just excited by this, he was exhilarated and moved by her innocence. He remembered an image of her bicycling down the block in unconcerned leggy nakedness, her hair catching the sunlight. The dream then took an unfortunate turn. She was chased by a host of anxious neighbors, all trying to drape her with garments. They caught her and wrested her from his care with accusations of indecency and child molestation. The dream left him with a sense of irrational discouragement and a mosquito-bite feeling of loss. He moped as he brushed his teeth. He wished his roommate would come back from Italy. He had never been to Europe or anywhere else, and was sick of people going.