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)