Olive

Olive had great courage. Perhaps it takes courage to raise children. And I must tell you what she did about the First World War. Her thinking was not international. Her first boundary was the geography of her family, second her town, Salinas, and finally there was a dotted line, not clearly defined, which was the county line. Thus she did not quite believe in the war, not even when Troop C, our militia cavalry, was called out, loaded its horses on a train, and set out for the open world.

Martin Hopps lived around the corner from us. He was wide, short, red-haired. His mouth was wide, and he had red eyes. He was almost the shyest boy in Salinas. To say good morning to him was to make him itch with self-consciousness. He belonged to Troop C because the armory had a basketball court.

If the Germans had known Olive and had been sensible they would have gone out of their way not to anger her. But they didn’t know or they were stupid. When they killed Martin Hopps they lost the war because that made my mother mad and she took out after them. She had liked Martin Hopps. He had never hurt anyone. When they killed him Olive declared war on the German empire.

—John Steinbeck, East of Eden (1952)

I Believe Everything Now

He could not convince himself then, he said, in those days and months after her death, that heaven was any more than a well-intentioned deception meant to ease our own sense of foolishness, to ease pain. Despite his own years of vigilant Catholicism, despite his own mother's deathbed conversion, despite the promises he and my mother had exchanged, he could no longer see death as anything other than the void that met a used-up body, a spent mind. Not a mere moment, over which you could sail, buoyed by love, by faith, but the abyss toward which you stumbled inevitably, part of the crowd. Put out a hand, if you like, to help someone along, surround yourself, if you like, to help someone along, surround yourself, if you like, with people who love you, who owe you, whose lives you've changed, but don't expect it to make a difference. It will make no difference; eventually one after the other, every one of you will fall. 

"And now?" I asked him, both of us standing, not sitting, aware that there had been enough talking today. "Do you still feel that way now?" Aware, too, that we were edging close to it, to that embarrassing profundity he and Dan had feared, to that point at which too much had been said, but amazed, I suppose much as my father had once been amazed when his mother told him to get Billy to go out there, he's avoided it for too long--amazed at this kind of conversation at this stage of the game. A conversation, it occurred to me, that Billy's life had spurred for us as much it had once spurred it for my father and his dying mother. 

My father's eyes were a deep brown. He smiled a little, shaking his head. "Oh no," he said. "Not now." 

How lonely they all seemed to me that night, my father's family and friends, lonely souls every one of them, despite husbands and children and cousins and friends, all their hopes, in the end, their pairings and procreation and their keeping in touch, keeping track, futile in the end, failing in the end of keep them from seeing that nothing they felt, in the end, has made any difference. 

"It was only a brief loss of faith," he said. "It happens. They say it's not uncommon." And then he turned to climb the stairs on the night of the day Billy Lynch was placed in his grave. "I believe everything now," he said, his back to me. "Again." 

Of course there was no way of telling if he lied.

--Alice McDermott, Charming Billy (1998)

'the thin shoots of some new desire'

Afterward, our protestations of love poured forth simultaneously, linguistically complex and metaphorically rich: I daresay we had become poets. We were allowed to lie there, limbs intermingled, for nearly an hour. It was bliss. It was perfection. It was that impossible thing: happiness that does not wilt to reveal the thin shoots of some new desire rising from within it.

—George Saunders, "Escape from Spiderhead," Tenth of December (2013)

'the cold compression of unruly human energies'

He looked past Chin toward streams of numbers running in opposite directions. He understood how much it meant to him, the roll and flip of data on a screen. He studied the figural diagrams that brought organic patterns into play, birdwing and chambered shell. It was shallow thinking to maintain that numbers and charts were the cold compression of unruly human energies, every sort of yearning and midnight sweat reduced to lucid units in the financial markets. In fact data itself was soulful and glowing, a dynamic aspect of the life process. This was the eloquence of alphabets and numeric systems, now fully realized in electronic form, in the zero-oneness of the world, the digital imperative that defined every breath of the planet's living billions. Here was the heave of the biosphere. Our bodies and oceans were here, knowable and whole.

—Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis (2003)

'information made sacred, ritually unreadable'

These were three tiers of data running concurrently and swiftly about a hundred feet above the street. Financial news, stock prices, currency markets. The action was unflagging. The hellbent sprint of numbers and symbols, the fractions, decimals, stylized dollar signs, the streaming release of words, of multinational news, all too fleet to be absorbed. But he knew that Kinski was absorbing it.

He stood behind her, pointing over her shoulder. Beneath the data strips, or tickers, there were fixed digits marking the time in the major cities of the world. He knew what she was thinking. Never mind the speed that makes it hard to follow what passes before the eye. The speed is the point. Never mind the urgent and endless replenishment, the way data dissolves at one end of the series just as it takes shape at the other. This is the point, the thrust, the future. We are not witnessing the flow of information so much as pure spectacle, or information made sacred, ritually unreadable. The small monitors of the office, home and car become a kind of idolatry here, where crowds might gather in astonishment.

—Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis (2003)

'The present is harder to find.'

"It's cyber-capital that creates the future. What is the measurement called a nanosecond?"

"Ten to the minus ninth power."

"This is what."

"One billionth of a second," he said.

"I understand none of this. But it tells me how rigorous we need to be in order to take adequate measure of the world around us."

"There are zeptoseconds."

"Good. I'm glad."

"Yoctoseconds. One septillionth of a second."

"Because time is a corporate asset now. It belongs to the free market system. The present is harder to find. It is being sucked out of the world to make way for the future of uncontrolled markets and huge investment potential. The future becomes insistent. This is why something will happen soon, maybe today," she said, looking slyly into her hands. "To correct the acceleration of time. Bring nature back to normal, more or less."

—Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis (2003)

'a fact she could not blast with her disbelief'

External realities of a frustrating nature she obliterated by refusing to believe in them, and when one resisted her disbelief she raged at it. It was told of her that she cried bitterly because she could not go to two dances on one Saturday night. One was in Greenfield and the other in San Lucas—twenty miles apart. To have gone to both and then home would have entailed a sixty-mile horseback ride. This was a fact she could not blast with her disbelief, and so she cried with vexation and went to neither dance.

—John Steinbeck, East of Eden (1952)

A Sinless Man

George was a sinless boy and grew to be a sinless man. No crime of commission was ever attributed to him, and his crimes of omission were only misdemeanors. In his middle life, at about the time such things were known about, it was discovered that he had pernicious anemia. It is possible that his virtue lived on a lack of energy.

—John Steinbeck, East of Eden (1952)

'the limitations of language'

"I am so tired," Yusra said. "In Saddam’s time, I knew that if I kept my mouth shut, if I did not say anything against him, I would be safe. But now it is different. There are so many reasons why someone would want to kill me now: because I am Shiite, because I have a Sunni son, because I work for the Americans, because I drive, because I am a woman with a job, because"—she picked up her abaya—"I don't wear my stupid hejab."

She took my notebook and flipped it to a blank page. This was Yusra's way of explaining her situation and, sensing the limitations of language, she would sometimes seize a reporter's notebook and diagram her predicament. She drew a large circle in the middle.

"This was Saddam," she said. "He is here. Big. During Saddam's time, all you had to do was stay away from this giant thing. That was not pleasant, but not so hard."

She flipped to another blank page. She drew a dozen circles, some of them touching, some overlapping. A small galaxy. She put her pen in the middle and made a dot.

"The dot in the middle, that is me—that is every Iraqi," she said. "From everywhere you can be killed, from here, from here, from here, from here." She was stabbing her pen into the notepad.

"We Iraqis," she said. "We are all sentenced to death and we do not know by whom.”

—Dexter Filkins, The Forever War (2008)

'all about words'

At the same time, a new bit of Arabic began slipping into the chatter of ordinary Iraqis: "allas." Literally, "one who chews." The word had come to denote an Iraqi who led a group of killers to their victim, a denouncer of sorts. Typically, the allas pointed out the Shiites living in the predominantly Sunni neighborhood for the gunmen who were hunting them.

"The allas is from the neighborhood, and he had a mask on," Haider Mohammed, a Shiite from Abu Ghraib, told me. "He pointed to my uncle." So the gunman chased his uncle, Hussein Khalil, who had been driving in his Daewoo sedan. The gunmen ran Khalil off the road and shot him twice in the back of the head. Mohammed found his uncle facedown in a garbage dump.

Allas came into use during the summer of 2005, at the same time that Iraq's leaders were gathering in the Green Zone to write the country's new constitution. The constitution, of course, was all about words: "Islam," "federalism," "nation." Words that empowered nobody, restrained no one. All the while, outside the Green Zone, men with masks were busy pointing, creating whole new vocabularies of their own.

—Dexter Filkins, The Forever War (2008)

The Hero of My Own Life

Ellen: "Those days you never seemed to get tired of David Copperfield."

Trond: "It's a long time since I last read that one." [...]

Ellen: "Then I think you should read it again," she says, and resting her chin in one hand with her elbow on the table she says:

"Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show."

She smiles again and says, "I always thought those opening lines were a bit scary because they indicated we would not necessarily be the leading characters of our own lives. I couldn't imagine how that could come about, something so awful; a sort of ghost-life where I could do nothing but watch that person who had taken my place and maybe hate her deeply and envy her everything, but not be able to do anything about it because at some point in time I had fallen out of my life, as if from an aeroplane, I pictured it, and out into empty space, and there I drifted about and could not get back, and someone else was sitting fastened into my seat, although that place was mine, and I had the ticket in my hand."

--Per Petterson, Stealing Horses (2005)

'their mighty parturition'

Is it the prophet's thought I speak, or am I raving?
What do I know of life? what of myself?
I know not even my own work past or present,
Dim ever-shifting guesses of it spread before me,
Of newer better worlds, their mighty parturition,
Mocking, perplexing me.

—Walt Whitman, "Prayer of Columbus" (1874/1881)

'unloving earth, without a throb to answer ours'

Down from the gardens of Asia descending radiating, Adam and Eve appear, then their myriad progeny after them,
Wandering, yearning, curious, with restless explorations,
With questionings, baffled, formless, feverish, with never-happy hearts,
With that sad incessant refrain, Wherefore unsatisfied soul? and Whither O mocking life?

Ah who shall soothe these feverish children?
Who justify these restless explorations?
Who speak the secret of impassive earth?
Who bind it to us? what is this separate Nature so unnatural?
What is this earth to our affections? (unloving earth, without a throb to answer ours,
Cold earth, the place of graves.)

—Walt Whitman, "Passage to India" (1868/1871)

The Way She Held the Cigarette

A week later she came to my door, and kept coming back and now she had been to my flat many times on her way home from school in the centre of Oslo and had drunk tea in my red kitchen, where I told her of things I knew something about, my books, Afghanistan; the crossroads of cultures, about Mao at his desk, about Edvard Munch and the Party, and she told me about her family, and why she hated going home from school. Once she came up from the city and did her homework at my kitchen table, and I sat down to help her and later we talked and smoked till late in the evening, and I think it was the way she held the cigarette between her fingers which touched me the most, how her palm unfolded in front of her chest with a slight bend of the wrist and the glowing tip pointing to the floor, and that night was the first night she did not go home.

--Per Petterson, I Curse the River of Time (2010)

'an unfinished newness'

Here I felt the throb of the great ocean that lay before me. I knew now that I had put a world behind me, and that I was opening out another world ahead. I had passed the haunts of savages. Great piles of granite mountains of bleak and lifeless aspect were now astern; on some of them not even a speck of moss had ever grown. There was an unfinished newness all about the land. On the hill back of Port Tamar a small beacon had been thrown up, showing that some man had been there. But how could one tell but that he had died of loneliness and grief? In a bleak land is not the place to enjoy solitude.

—Captain Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone Around the World (1900)

'it is a prosy life'

The time was when ships passing each other at sea backed their topsails and had a "gam," and on parting fired guns; but those good old days have gone. People have hardly time nowadays to speak even on the broad ocean, where news is news, and as for a salute of guns, they cannot afford the powder. There are no poetry-enshrined freighters on the sea now; it is a prosy life when we have no time to bid one another good morning.

—Captain Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone Around the World (1900)

Nothing Hung Together Any More

And then I entered the hall and walked into the kitchen, the living room, where everything was as it had been for almost ten years, the same posters on the walls, the same rugs on the floor, the same goddamn red armchairs, and yet not like that at all, not like it was in the beginning, when there were just the two of us against the world, just she and I, shoulder to shoulder, hand in hand, there is just you and me, we said to each other, just you and me, we said. But something had happened, nothing hung together any more, all things had spaces, had distances between them, like satellites, attracted to and pushed away at the same instant, and it would take immense willpower to cross those spaces, those distances, much more than I had available, much more than I had the courage to use.

-- Per Petterson, I Curse the River of Time (2010)

'snatching necklace after necklace from the sea'

The wind freshened, and the Spray rounded Deer Island light at the rate of seven knots.

Passing it, she squared away direct for Gloucester to procure there some fishermen's stores. Waves dancing joyously across Massachusetts Bay met her coming out of the harbor to dash them into myriads of sparkling gems that hung about her at every surge. The day was perfect, the sunlight clear and strong. Every particle of water thrown into the air became a gem, and the Spray, bounding ahead, snatched necklace after necklace from the sea, and as often threw them away. We have all seen miniature rainbows about a ship's prow, but the Spray flung out a bow of her own that day, such as I had never seen before. Her good angel had embarked on the voyage; I so read it in the sea.

—Captain Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone Around the World (1900)