It was one of those Septembers when it seemed that the summer would never end.

The five-mile promenade of Royale-les-Eaux, backed by trim lawns emblazoned at intervals with tricolour beds of salvia, alyssum and lobelia, was bright with flags and, on the longest beach in the north of France, the gay bathing tents still marched prettily down to the tide-line in big, money-making battalions. Music, one of those lilting accordion waltzes, blared from the loudspeakers around the Olympic-size piscine and, from time to time, echoing above the music, a man's voice announced over the public address system that Philippe Bertrand, aged seven, was looking for his mother, that Yolande Lefèvre was waiting for her friends below the clock at the entrance, or that a Madame Dufours was demanded on the telephone. From the beach, particularly from the neighbourhood of the three playground enclosures--'Joie de Vivre', 'Helio' and 'Azur'--came a twitter of children's cries that waxed and waned with the thrill of their games and, farther out, on the firm sand left by the now distant sea, the shrill whistle of the physical-fitness instructor marshalled his teenagers through the last course of the day.

It was one of those beautiful, naive seaside panoramas for which the Brittany and Picardy beaches have provided the setting--and inspired their recorders, Boudin, Tissot, Monet--ever since the birth of plages and bains de mer more than a hundred years ago.

To James Bond, sitting in one of the concrete shelters with his face to the setting sun, there was something poignant, ephemeral about it all. It reminded him almost too vividly of childhood--of the velvet feel of the hot powder sand, and the painful grit of wet sand between young toes when the time came for him to put his shoes and socks on, of the precious little pile of sea-shells and interesting wrack on the sill of his bedroom window ('No, we'll have to leave that behind, darling. It'll dirty up your trunk!'), of the small crabs scuttling away from the nervous fingers groping beneath the seaweed in the rock-pools, of the swimming and swimming and swimming through the dancing waves--always in those days, it seemed, lit with sunshine--and then the infuriating, inevitable 'time to come out'. It was all there, his own childhood, spread out before him to have another look at. What a long time ago they were, those spade-and-bucket days! How far he had come since the freckles and the Cadbury milk-chocolate Flakes and the fizzy lemonade!

Impatiently Bond lit a cigarette, pulled his shoulders out of their slouch and slammed the mawkish memories back into their long-closed file. Today he was a grown-up, a man with years of dirty, dangerous memories--a spy. He was not sitting in this concrete hideout to sentimentalize about a pack of scrubby, smelly children on a beach scattered with bottle-tops and lolly-sticks and fringed by a sea thick with sun-oil and putrid with the main drains of Royale. He was here, he had chosen to be here, to spy. To spy on a woman.

Edmund : Yes, she moves above and beyond us, a ghost haunting the past, and here we sit pretending to forget, but straining our ears listening for the slightest sound, hearing the fog drip from the eaves like the uneven tick of a rundown, crazy clock—or like the dreary tears of a trollop spattering in a puddle of stale beer on a honky-tonk table top! [He laughs with maudlin appreciation.] Not so bad, that last, eh? Original, not Baudelaire. Give me credit! [then with alcoholic talkativeness] You've just told me some high spots in your memories. Want to hear mine? They're all connected with the sea. Here's one. When I was on the Squarehead square rigger, bound for Buenos Aires. Full moon in the Trades. The old hooker driving fourteen knots. I lay on the bowsprit, facing astern, with the water foaming into spume under me, the masts with every sail white in the moonlight, towering high above me. I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of it, and for a moment I lost myself—actually lost my life. I was set free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and Hying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to Life itself! To God, if you want to put it that way. Then another time, on the American Line, when I was lookout on the crow's nest in the dawn watch. A calm sea, that time. Only a lazy ground swell and a slow drowsy roll of the ship. The passengers asleep and none of the crew in sight. No sound of man. Black smoke pouring from the funnels behind and beneath me. Dreaming, not keeping lookout, feeling alone, and above, and apart, watching the dawn creep like a painted dream over the sky and sea which slept together. Then the moment of ecstatic freedom came. The peace, the end of the quest, the last harbor, the joy of belonging to a fulfillment beyond men's lousy, pitiful, greedy fears and hopes and dreams! And several other times in my life, when I was swimming far out, or lying alone on a beach, I have had the same experience. Became the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock, swaying in the tide. Like a saint's vision of beatitude. Like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see—and seeing the secret, are the secret. For a second there is meaning! Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on toward nowhere, for no good reason! [He grins wryly.] It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a sea gull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death!

My dear boy— I answer your letter at once. I ventured to read it to a great friend of mine, a charming woman whose help and sympathy have been very precious to me, a woman withal with a real feeling for art and literature; and we agreed that it was charming. You wrote from your heart and you do not know the delightful naïveté which is in every line. And because you love you write like a poet. Ah, dear boy, that is the real thing: I felt the glow of your young passion, and your prose was musical from the sincerity of your emotion. You must be happy! I wish I could have been present unseen in that enchanted garden while you wandered hand in hand, like Daphnis and Chloe, amid the flowers. I can see you, my Daphnis, with the light of young love in your eyes, tender, enraptured, and ardent; while Chloe in your arms, so young and soft and fresh, vowing she would ne'er consent—consented. Roses and violets and honeysuckle! Oh, my friend, I envy you. It is so good to think that your first love should have been pure poetry. Treasure the moments; for the immortal gods have given you the Greatest Gift of All, and it will be a sweet, sad memory till your dying day. You will never again enjoy that careless rapture. First love is best love; and she is beautiful and you are young, and all the world is yours. I felt my pulse go faster when with your adorable simplicity you told me that you buried your face in her long hair. I am sure that it is that exquisite chestnut which seems just touched with gold. I would have you sit under a leafy tree side by side, and read together Romeo and Juliet; and then I would have you fall on your knees and on my behalf kiss the ground on which her foot has left its imprint; then tell her it is the homage of a poet to her radiant youth and to your love for her. Yours always, G. Etheridge Hayward

“You listen to these things,” the man was saying, “and you say, ‘Yes, they are true, but they have been that way always.’ Or you say, ‘Maybe it will come, but not in my time—it will not help me.’ And so you return to your daily round of toil, you go back to be ground up for profits in the worldwide mill of economic might! To toil long hours for another’s advantage; to live in mean and squalid homes, to work in dangerous and unhealthful places; to wrestle with the spectres of hunger and privation, to take your chances of accident, disease, and death. And each day the struggle becomes fiercer, the pace more cruel; each day you have to toil a little harder, and feel the iron hand of circumstance close upon you a little tighter. Months pass, years maybe—and then you come again; and again I am here to plead with you, to know if want and misery have yet done their work with you, if injustice and oppression have yet opened your eyes! I shall still be waiting—there is nothing else that I can do. There is no wilderness where I can hide from these things, there is no haven where I can escape them; though I travel to the ends of the earth, I find the same accursed system—I find that all the fair and noble impulses of humanity, the dreams of poets and the agonies of martyrs, are shackled and bound in the service of organized and predatory Greed! And therefore I cannot rest, I cannot be silent; therefore I cast aside comfort and happiness, health and good repute—and go out into the world and cry out the pain of my spirit! Therefore I am not to be silenced by poverty and sickness, not by hatred and obloquy, by threats and ridicule—not by prison and persecution, if they should come—not by any power that is upon the earth or above the earth, that was, or is, or ever can be created. If I fail tonight, I can only try tomorrow; knowing that the fault must be mine—that if once the vision of my soul were spoken upon earth, if once the anguish of its defeat were uttered in human speech, it would break the stoutest barriers of prejudice, it would shake the most sluggish soul to action! It would abash the most cynical, it would terrify the most selfish; and the voice of mockery would be silenced, and fraud and falsehood would slink back into their dens, and the truth would stand forth alone! For I speak with the voice of the millions who are voiceless! Of them that are oppressed and have no comforter! Of the disinherited of life, for whom there is no respite and no deliverance, to whom the world is a prison, a dungeon of torture, a tomb! With the voice of the little child who toils tonight in a Southern cotton-mill, staggering with exhaustion, numb with agony, and knowing no hope but the grave! Of the mother who sews by candlelight in her tenement-garret, weary and weeping, smitten with the mortal hunger of her babes! Of the man who lies upon a bed of rags, wrestling in his last sickness and leaving his loved ones to perish! Of the young girl who, somewhere at this moment, is walking the streets of this horrible city, beaten and starving, and making her choice between the brothel and the lake! With the voice of those, whoever and wherever they may be, who are caught beneath the wheels of the juggernaut of Greed! With the voice of humanity, calling for deliverance! Of the everlasting soul of Man, arising from the dust; breaking its way out of its prison—rending the bands of oppression and ignorance—groping its way to the light!”

“He dreamt of how his and every other story would end in shame. He pictured Earth after the profiteers had finished carving up every last shard. The planet would go dark, and every animal would devour itself or fall, pale and listless, into a black acid sea. The oceans would boil away, and eventually this rock of humble miracles would go silent. Spend the rest of time adrift in its slot of space, the land gray and ashen like a crater, and nothing would notice or remember what had gone on here. It was as inevitable as the next drink he would take. He thought of all that he’d lost and tried to summon his friends—their faces, their voices, their holy souls entombed in his despair. He could wish that the dead only waited patiently off stage, their makeup still on, longing for salvation when they’d take their bows. He could let his memories be the noose from which he’d swing at dusk.

Or.

Or he could climb out of this abyss. As he slipped into sleep, he told himself there was no going back to the slowly drowning swamps of the Mississippi Delta. There was a thousand dollars still in his glove compartment, a thousand more in his back pocket, and another quest, another vision, lying in wait. Even after all this, there was always a reason to stand again. To summon the courage to live and to be alive. To rage against the faceless entropy, the savage logic of accumulation that would return them all to exile, that aimed to strip them bare of everything, every place, and every person they’d ever loved. To find hope in defiance, in the subterranean fire, and to always and forever endure the Truth and struggle to extinction. He stumbled on in his dreams, mourning the rivers and fields of his homeland. He saw it burning in blue fire, and he prayed for the strength to defend it, to fight for it, to bring it back alive.”

I have of late—but wherefore I know not—lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition, that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving, how express and admirable in action, how like an angel in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world; the paragon of animals; and yet to me what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me—nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.

In the last few pages of the novel the dystopian city is destroyed by an atomic bomb, and the way it is described is just savagely beautiful:

"The concussion knocked the air across and down the river, turned the men over like dominoes in a line, blew the water in lifting sprays, and blew the dust and made the trees above them mourn with a great wind passing away south. Montag crushed himself down, squeezing himself small, eyes tight. He blinked once. And in that instant saw the city, instead of the bombs, in the air. They had displaced each other. For another of those impossible instants the city stood, rebuilt and unrecognizable, taller than it had ever hoped or strived to be, taller than man had built it, erected at last in gouts of shattered concrete and sparkles of torn metal into a mural hung like a reversed avalanche, a million colors, a million oddities, a door where a window should be, a top for a bottom, a side for a back, and then the city rolled over and fell down dead. The sound of its death came after."

The seasons long for each other, like men and women, in order that they may be cured of their excesses.

Spring, if it lingers more than a week beyond its span, starts to hunger for summer to end the days of perpetual promise. Summer in its turn soon begins to sweat for something to quench its heat, and the mellowest of autumns will tire of gentility at last, and ache for a quick sharp frost to kill its fruitfulness.

Even winter—the hardest season, the most implacable—dreams, as February creeps on, of the flame that will presently melt it away. Everything tires with time, and starts to seek some opposition, to save it from itself. So August gave way to September and there were few complaints.

the words are everywhere, inside me, outside me, well well, a minute ago I had no thickness, I hear them, no need to hear them, no need of a head, impossible to stop them, impossible to stop, I’m in words, made of words, others’ words, what others, the place too, the air, the walls, the floor, the ceiling, all words, the whole world is here with me, I’m the air, the walls, the walled-in one, everything yields, opens, ebbs, flows, like flakes, I’m all these flakes, meeting, mingling, falling asunder, wherever I go I find me, leave me, go towards me, come from me, nothing ever but me, a particle of me, retrieved, lost, gone astray, I’m all these words, all these strangers, this dust of words, with no ground for their settling, no sky for their dispersing, coming together to say, fleeing one another to say, that I am they, all of them, those that merge, those that part, those that never meet, and nothing else, yes, something else, that I’m something quite different, a quite different thing, a wordless thing in an empty place, a hard shut dry cold black place, where nothing stirs, nothing speaks, and that I listen, and that I seek, like a caged beast born of caged beasts born of caged beasts born of caged beasts born in a cage and dead in a cage, born and then dead, born in a cage and then dead in a cage, in a word like a beast, in one of their words, like such a beast, and that I seek, like such a beast, with my little strength, such a beast, with nothing of its species left but fear and fury, no, the fury is past, nothing but fear, nothing of all its due but fear centupled, fear of its shadow, no, blind from birth, of sound then, if you like, we’ll have that, one must have something, it’s a pity, but there it is, fear of sound, fear of sounds, the sounds of beasts, the sounds of men, sounds in the daytime and sounds at night, that’s enough, fear of sounds, all sounds, more or less, more or less fear, all sounds, there’s only one, continuous, day and night, what is it, it’s steps coming and going, it’s voices speaking for a moment, it’s bodies groping their way, it’s the air, it’s things, it’s the air among the things, that’s enough, that I seek, like it, no, not like it, like me, in my own way, what am I saying, after my fashion, that I seek, what do I seek now, what it is, it must be that, it can only be that, what it is, what it can be, what what can be, what I seek, no, what I hear, now it comes back to me, all back to me, they say I seek what it is I hear, I hear them, now it comes back to me, what it can possibly be, and where it can possibly come from, since all is silent here, and the walls thick, and how I manage, without feeling an ear on me, or a head, or a body, or a soul, how I manage, to do what, how I manage, it’s not clear

A scaffold, when it is erected and prepared, has indeed a profoundly disturbing effect. We may remain more or less open-minded on the subject of the death penalty, indisposed to commit ourselves so long as we have not seen a guillotine with our own eyes. But to do so is to be so shaken that we are obliged to take our stand for or against. ... The guillotine is the ultimate expression of Law, and its name is vengeance; it is not neutral, nor does it allow us to remain neutral. He who sees it shudders in the most confounding dismay. All social questions achieve their finality around that machine, a lifeless mechanism of wood, iron, and rope. It is as though that arrangement of wood and iron and rope expressed a will. In the hideous picture which its presence evokes it seems to be most terribly a part of what it does. It is the executioner's accomplice; it consumes, devouring flesh and drinking blood. It is a kind of monster created by the judge and the craftsman; a spectre seeming to live an awful life born of the death it deals.

Norman Denny, trans.

The life he led in his twenties was much more scrag-like than mine; yet I am sure I have drunk more than he has, and that even if he gets to have a hundred of his paintings and prints displayed in every important gallery in Australia he will still be far from knowing what I almost knew on certain nights in the winter of 1960 when I staggered away from the fireplace in the Existentialist’s shack and out in the frosty night, and looked at the throbbing stars over the Great Divide and the inland and then at the timid lights twinkling on the edge of Melbourne, and ran or blundered from one tree to another down the hillside until I found myself on some level patch of grass that could hardly have looked different from any other in the darkness but felt like the place I had traveled all my life to stand firmly on at last, and stood there convinced that I was about to see with utter clarity a vision of the woman who has been waiting for me all her life in her hilltop fastness among the back roads of Harp Gully or of the complete text of the work of fiction that had waited for all time in a universe of possibilities for me, it’s author, until suddenly I was aware of nothing but my body doubled over and all the beer and wine I had drunk since three o’clock that day in the Harp Gully hotel spewing out of me and my face wet with a sort of tears yet also the hope that my misery just then was part of the ritual I had to undergo before I came into my own and the puddle of muck at my feet a sign of something I could surely pass beyond.

To begin with, the art of jigsaw puzzles seems of little substance, easily exhausted, wholly dealt with by a basic introduction to Gestalt: the perceived object we may be dealing with a perceptual act, the acquisition of a skill, a physiological system, or, as in the present case, a wooden jigsaw puzzle - is not a sum of elements to be distinguished from each other and analysed discretely, but a pattern, that is to say a form, a structure: the element's existence does not precede the existence of the whole, it comes neither before nor after it, for the parts do not determine the pattern, but the pattern determines the parts: knowledge of the pattern and of its laws, of the set and its structure, could not possibly be derived from discrete knowledge of the elements that compose it. That means that you can look at a piece of a puzzle for three whole days, you can believe that you know all there is to know about its colouring and shape, and be no further on than when you started. The only thing that counts is the ability to link this piece to other pieces, and in that sense the art of the jigsaw puzzle has something in common with the art of go. The pieces are readable, take on a sense, only when assembled; in isolation, a puzzle piece means nothing - just an impossible question, an opaque challenge. But as soon as you have succeeded, after minutes of trial and error, or after a prodigious half-second flash of inspiration, in fitting it into one of its neighbours, the piece disappears, ceases to exist as a piece. The intense difficulty preceding this link-up - which the English word puzzle indicates so well - not only loses its raison d'être, it seems never to have had any reason, so obvious does the solution appear. The two pieces so miraculously conjoined are henceforth one, which in its turn will be a source of error, hesitation, dismay, and expectation.

BEFORE SUNRISE, RAIN wrapped the Harbor’s Front Street, its one and two story buildings, with dark foil. At midday, sunlight blanched the blues, pinks, greens and even black tar paper to the rattiest ghosts of themselves, which you could not look at directly without squinting. (Ghosts, risen in light…) Nets and ropes wound through chalk-white lifesavers in store windows. Oars leaned against the buildings’ water-ward walls. Beyond all, the sea flamed.

My bus rolled north out of Abuja and circulated endlessly through the spaghetti junction, still sparse and new-looking after all these years. The road uncoiled into the highway towards Zaria, cutting through sandy, scrubby plains that continued for miles, providing ample space for Abuja's urban expansion. We passed Abuja Model City, a gated community of brand-new houses organised in tidy, toy-like rows in the midst of this semi-desert, like pioneers in a brave new world of orderliness. I wondered how long Model city would last before sinking into the quicksand of Nigerian urban decline.

I was on my way to Zuma Rock, a large, dome-shaped volcanic inselberg, known as the 'Ayers Rock of Nigeria', an iconic symbol of the central region. Zuma Rock was one of the few places from 1988 that I remember clearly. My father, brother, sister and I had climbed out of the car and stood on the empty highway to observe the giant monolith. My father said you could see a man's face on the rock, a quirk of natural erosion. Everyone except me seemed able to spot it.

'Can't you see the eye?' my brother Tedum asked incredulously. 'It's there . . . there!' I thought they were all hallucinating.

Perhaps I would see it this time around. For the last portion of my journey from Abuja, I switched to an okada. After going a week without these bikes, I realised how much I loved them. Though fraught with danger and often ridden by reckless drunks in a hurry, okadas were exciting, liberating and cheap, and they appealed to a downwardly mobile side to my character I hadn't know existed. I would use this form of transport even if I were a billionaire.

Minutes later, as we crested a hill, Zuma Rock rose suddenly and magnificently out of the otherwise featureless, yellowy landscape. Its dark, striated dome stood several hundred metres high and held dominion over the scenery for miles around. After days in Abuja's flatness, my eyes needed to adjust to this topographical excitement. Back in 1988, the surrounding landscape was a flat and barely populated expanse of trees and sandy soil. Now, traffic in the area around the rock droned more densely, and the previously deserted plateau shone with corrugated rooftops.

This time, my eyes could decipher the outline of a cone-headed alien with a dark round eye. I wanted to phone Tedum and tell him I could finally see the 'man' on the rock. But there was nobody to call: five years after first visiting here, he died suddenly from heart failure, two years before our father was killed. My sister is now the only living link with that day. Revisiting Zuma Rock by myself felt like a physical expression of the family's loss, and all morning I had been worried that coming here might disrupt whatever amnesia may have protected me from my pain these past dozen years. Fortunately, my melancholy was swept aside by some unusual activity in the area.

This novel has so many great paragraphs but I love the section where the main character, a psychopath with an extraordinary sense of smell, retreats to a cave in the mountains for years.

He climbed back up to the peak a few more times during the first weeks to sniff out the horizon. But soon that had become more a wearisome habit than a necessity, for he had not once scented the least threat. And so he finally gave up these excursions and was concerned only with getting back into his crypt as quickly as possible once he had taken care of the most basic chores necessary for simple survival. For here, inside the crypt, was where he truly lived. Which is to say, for well over twenty hours a day in total darkness and in total silence and in total immobility, he sat on his horse blanket at the end of the stony corridor, his back resting on the rock slide, his shoulders wedged between the rocks, and enjoyed himself.

We are familiar with people who seek out solitude: penitents, failures, saints, or prophets. They retreat to deserts, preferably, where they live on locusts and honey. Others, however, live in caves or cells on remote islands; some—more spectacularly—squat in cages mounted high atop poles swaying in the breeze. They do this to be nearer to God. Their solitude is a self-mortification by which they do penance. They act in the belief that they are living a life pleasing to God. Or they wait months, years, for their solitude to be broken by some divine message that they hope then speedily to broadcast among mankind.

Grenouille’s case was nothing of the sort. There was not the least notion of God in his head. He was not doing penance nor waiting for some supernatural inspiration. He had withdrawn solely for his own personal pleasure, only to be near to himself. No longer distracted by anything external, he basked in his own existence and found it splendid. He lay in his stony crypt like his own corpse, hardly breathing, his heart hardly beating—and yet lived as intensively and dissolutely as ever a rake had lived in the wide world outside.

This sentence reflects the thought process of a man with dementia:

"He turned to the doorway where she'd appeared. He began a sentence: "I am—" but when he was taken by surprise, every sentence became an adventure in the woods; as soon as he could no longer see the light of the clearing from which he'd entered, he would realize that the crumbs he'd dropped for bearings had been eaten by birds, silent deft darting things which he couldn't quite see in the darkness but which were so numerous and swarming in their hunger that it seemed as if they were the darkness, as if the darkness weren't uniform; weren't an absence of light but a teeming and corpuscular thing, and indeed when as a studious teenager he'd encountered the word "crepuscular" in McKay's Treasury of English Verse, the corpuscles of biology had bled into his understanding of the word, so that for his entire adult life he'd seen in twilight a corpuscularity, as of the graininess of the high-speed film necessary for photography under conditions of low ambient light, as of a kind of sinister decay; and hence the panic of a man betrayed deep in the woods whose darkness was the darkness of starlings blotting out the sunset or black ants storming a dead opossum, a darkness that didn't just exist but actively consumed the bearings that he'd sensibly established for himself, lest he be lost; but in the instant of realizing he was lost, time became marvelously slow and he discovered hitherto unguessed eternities in the space between one word and the next, or rather he became trapped in that space between words and could only stand and watch as time sped on without him, the thoughtless boyish part of him crashing on out of sight blindly through the woods while he, trapped, the grownup Al, watched in oddly impersonal suspense to see if the panic-stricken little boy might, despite no longer knowing where he was or at what point he'd entered the woods of this sentence, still manage to blunder into the clearing where Enid was waiting for him, unaware of any woods— "packing my suitcase," he heard himself say."

Almost in the middle of that sky, over Prechistensky Boulevard, stood the huge, bright comet of the year 1812—surrounded, strewn with stars on all sides, but different from them in its closeness to the earth, its white light and long, raised tail—that same comet which presaged, as they said, all sorts of horrors and the end of the world. But for Pierre this bright star with its long, luminous tail did not arouse any frightening feeling. On the contrary, Pierre, his eyes wet with tears, gazed joyfully at this bright star, which, having flown with inexpressible speed through immeasurable space on its parabolic course, suddenly, like an arrow piercing the earth, seemed to have struck here its one chosen spot in the black sky and stopped, its tail raised energetically, its white light shining and playing among the countless other shimmering stars. It seemed to Pierre that this star answered fully to what was in his softened and encouraged soul, now blossoming into new life.

And as for the senator, wouldn't it be rather amusing to —

No.

(At this point, we see the eyebrows contract in a more than usually violent spasm, the mouth thin to knife-blade grimness.)

No. Amusing is not the word. These people are not amusing. They should never be dealt with amusingly. They understand only one language: brute force.

Therefore we must launch a campaign of systematic terror. In order to be effective, this will require an organisation of at least five hundred highly skilled killers and torturers, all dedicated individuals. The head of the organisation will draw up a list of clearly defined, simple objectives; such as the removal of that apartment building, the suppression of that newspaper, the retirement of that senator. They will then be dealt with in order, regardless of the time taken or the number of casualties. In each case, the principal criminal will first receive a polite note, signed Uncle George, explaining exactly what he must do before a certain deadline if wants to stay alive. It will also be explained to him that Uncle George operates on the theory of guilt by association.

One minute after the deadline, the killing will begin. The execution of the principal criminal will be delayed for some weeks or months, to give him opportunity for reflection. Meanwhile, there will be daily reminders. His wife may be kidnapped, garotted, embalmed and seated in the living-room to await his return from the office. His children's heads may arrive in cartons by mail, or tapes of the screams his relatives utter as they are tortured to death. His friends' homes may be blown up in the night. Anyone who has ever known him will be in mortal danger.

When the organisation's one hundred per cent efficiency has been demonstrated a sufficient number of times, the population will slowly begin to learn that Uncle George's will must be obeyed instantly and without question.

But does Uncle George want to be obeyed? Doesn't he prefer to be defied, so he can go on killing and killing – since all these people are just vermin, and the more of them that die the better? All are, in the last analysis, responsible for Jim's death; their words, their thoughts, their whole way of life willed it, even though they never knew he existed. But, when George gets in as deep as this, Jim hardly matters any more. Jim is nothing, now, but an excuse for hating three quarters of the population of America. . . . George's jaws work, his teeth grind, as he chews and chews the cud of his hate.

But does George really hate all these people? Aren't they themselves merely an excuse for hating? What is George's hate, then? A stimulant – nothing more; though very bad for him, no doubt. Rage, resentment, spleen; of such is the vitality of middle age. If we say that he is quite crazy at this particular moment, then so, probably, are at least half a dozen others in these many cars around him; all slowing now as the traffic thickens, going downhill, under the bridge, up again past the Union Depot. . . . God! Here we are, downtown already! George comes up dazed to the surface, realising with a shock that the chauffeur-figure has broken a record; never before has it managed to get them this far entirely on its own. And this raises a disturbing question: is the chauffeur steadily becoming more and more of an individual? Is it getting ready to take over much larger areas of George's life?

No time to worry about that now. In ten minutes they will have arrived on campus. In ten minutes, George will have to be George; the George they have named and will recognise. So now he consciously applies himself to thinking their thoughts, getting into their mood. With the skill of a veteran, he rapidly puts on the psychological makeup for this role he must play.

In the Republic of Korea is a quite rare breed of humans even by the whole world's standards. The name of whom are "I'm not doing this shit because I'm broke(나 돈 없어서 이짓 하는 것 아냐)." There isn't much difficulty finding these lifeforms participating in "this shit" to heart's content, as there are many such individuals laying around society like coal ores in Minecraft. Although, since their kind doesn't just walk around with that label written on oneself, need be a little time to distinguish those people from others. A little, really. Tidbit even. One of them I will introduce to you dear readers.

So there's this fee receiver working at a highway toll arch, a woman in her 40~50somethings. The gate was collecting fixed amount of fee, 900 KRW, which I didn't have change for. I took my 10,000 Won bill out of my wallet and gave her.

Now, unless you're a Goddamn God, it takes bit of a minute to grab the wallet; take out the money; put it on my off-hand; open the window, then finally present the money. It seemed as though the collector was either feeling a waste of time or extremely bored out. Just as she got my money, almost contemplating to return that bill, she asked: "no change?" I go, shaking my head and: "no, none" after more than a normal period of time. Look, I am slower-mouthed than the most of you, okay? Anyway, then she goes: "seriously? Why no change?" whether she was tryna question or criticize or lecture me with that tone -- I do not know. The 10k Won, during this whole interaction, still in her hand.

Seeing this sight, fear; awkwardness; etc. was rinsed off of my mind only to reveal erupting annoyance. That is MY 10k Won bill. So I go: "'Hell are you holding up for? We're gonna start blocking the traffic." Then, as if she did a fucking magnificent discovery, goes: "you care so much about that for a slowpoke. Besides, nobody is behind you, sir." Whilst she finally began doing her job, I started thinking to myself. Is this lady trying to toy me around? Or is this an advice from her so as to become me a well-functioning working class by acting quicker?? Or is she just joking??? Or-or, uh, come to the end of mine, none of these were the case. Because of course she was simply one of the 'I-am-not-doing-this-shit-because-I-am-broke.'

Now, processing takes some time, too. I could be so opportunistic to interrogate on her such great, amazing breed of an identity. Sadly enough, I couldn't help but shut up; take the change and leave; with my entire face turning red and blue like a dumbfounded fool.

That exact day, I could find more of I-am-not-doing-this-shit-because-I-am-broke's here and there. A supervisor supervising a parking lot inside some high rise building; an owner of a famous surlungtang place; a civil defense officiary; a cafe waitress who refused to serve things on-the-house to people that aren't attracted by her. Did they all rise up to assert their presence or what? Maybe it's just an unlucky day, or I got sensitive due to the 'change' problem beforenoon. . . Hmm.

Way back home that night, passed one more toll-arch in Namsan. Reminiscing the lesson learned from earlier that day: soon as the gate appeared, I put my hand in a pocket. But then my 1k bill was only one pocket to be found so I searched every pocket, trying to find the right one. The next thing I know I rear-ended a car which was stopping to pay.

⚠️ Translator's Note: This is based on a false story most likely not happened. Manual toll-collecting system still exists, but most s.Korean drivers nowadays use instantaneous payment system(Hy-pass).

“In the course of the next few nights, when the animal gave its concert with admirable punctuality, he found it hard to accept that it was the voice of a common animal, all part of nature. It was natural. To him it was as if these theatrical, bombastic noises were being made by a wounded, drunken Galician woodcutter who had been beaten by his rival and was now in his death throes. But once he had told himself that it was just a mindless animal, subject to the force of its own instincts, he was overcome by emotion, he felt stirred—the sound was mighty, the stag awakened visions of a great strength concealing both might and desperation, despair at being caught in the grip of a superhuman force, trapped in this call that was determined by sexual destiny, a call that bid one to wager everything on a single card and drew one to dangerous places where one could easily lose one’s life. The stag’s noises contained a madness, a readiness to leave the familiar paths and go beyond all the rules, to cross the borders of safety, or even to abandon one’s own existence.”

“Existence alone had never been enough for him; he had always wanted more. Perhaps it was only the from the force of his desires that he had regarded himself as a man to whom more was permitted than to others.”

(P&V Translation)

"The most cursory survey of the global situation confirmed that, yes, it really was the worst who were full of passionate intensity - the ones to be feared and resisted were not the preachers of decline, the diviners of our civilization's exhaustion, but all those wild eyed zealots who strove to create a heaven on earth, refusing to see that, in so doing, they would inevitably unleash hell. Absolutists, zealots, demagogues, jihadists, messianic utopians - all manner of fanatics thrived in the contemporary chaos, exploiting the frightening complexity of the age to hawk their simplistic narratives, their archaic binaries that brooked no ambiguity and sanctioned bottomless bloodshed." (pg. 85)

“By a twist of circumstance, as Frau Opitz’s body was descending on ropes into the open grave, the exact autumn equinox took place, and the ecliptic was aligned in such a special way that it counterbalanced the vibration of the earth. In the highland valley that spread above the underground lake stillness sets in, and although it is never windy here, now there is no sense of the faintest puff, as though the world were holding its breath. Late insects are perching on stems, a starling turns to stone, staring at a long-gone movement among the clumps of parsley in the garden. A spiderweb stretched between the blackberry bushes stops quivering and goes taut, straining to hear the waves coming from the cosmos, and water makes itself at home in the moss thallus, as if it were to stay there forever, as if it were to forget about its most integral feature—that it flows. For the earthworm, the world’s tension is a sign to seek shelter for the winter. Now it is planning to push down into the ground, perhaps hoping to find the deeply hidden ruins of paradise. The cows that chew the yellowing grass also come to a standstill, putting their internal factories of life on hold. A squirrel looks at the miracle of a nut and knows that it is pure, condensed time, that it is also its future, dressed in this strange form. And in this brief moment everything defines itself anew, marking out its limits and aims afresh; just for a short while, blurred shapes cluster together again.

It is a very brief moment of equilibrium between light and darkness, almost imperceptible, a single instant in which the whole pattern is filled, the promise of great order is fulfilled, but only in the blink of an eye. In this scrap of time everything returns to a state of perfection that existed before the sky was separated from the earth.”

“This he understood: that association renders men stronger and brings out each person’s best gifts, and gives a joy which is rarely to be had by keeping to oneself, the joy of realizing how many honest decent capable people there are for whom it is worth giving one’s best (while living just for oneself very often the opposite happens, of seeing people’s other side, the side which makes one keep one’s hand always on the hilt of one’s sword)”.

While thus he lay debating, his valet, though asleep, was by no means at rest. His innards commenced to growl and snarl like beagles at a grounded fox; the hominy and cider in him foamed and effervesced; anon there came salutes to the rising moon, and the bedchamber filled with the perfume of ferment. The author of these snored roundly, but his master was not so fortunate; indeed he had at length to flee the room, ears ringing, head a-spin, and the smart of bumbolts in his eyes.

“One should always be drunk. That’s the great thing; the only question. Not to feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and bowing you to the earth, you should be drink without respite. Drunk with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you please. But get drunk.”

“Current toys are made of a graceless material, the product of chemistry, not of nature. Many are now moulded from complicated mixtures; the plastic material of which they are made has an appearance at once gross and hygienic, it destroys all the pleasure, the sweetness, the humanity of touch. A sign which fills one with consternation is the gradual disappearance of wood, in spite of its being an ideal material because of its firmness and softness, and the natural warmth of its touch. Wood removes, from all the forms which it supports, the wounding quality of angles which are too sharp, the chemical coldness of metal. When the child handles it, and knocks it, it neither vibrates nor grates, it has a sound at once muffled and sharp. It is a familiar and poetic substance, which does not sever the child from close contact with the tree, the table, the floor. Wood does not wound or break down; it does not shatter, it wears out, it can last a long time, live with the child, alter little by little the relations between the object and the hand. If it dies, it is in dwindling, not in swelling out like those mechanical toys which disappear behind the hernia of a broken spring. Wood makes essential objects, objects for all times.”

Tonight, he senses their presence again. He'd rather feel the presence of lovers, imaginary though they may be than the absence of the woman he's separated from. If only for a night, they're a respite from the conversation he carries on without her, addressing her as if she can hear him. The lovers are silent. They lie listening to the river, and with his eyes closed he can almost hear it as they must: a high-pitched echo of sewers, a sound of darkness laced with flowing water. Every crack trickles, every overhang drips. Each drop encases its own separate note, the way each drop engulfs its own blue pearl of night.

Between wakefulness and dreaming, with his eyes closed he can see the light reflected by the falling river of rain: fogged streetlamps and taillights streaked along the Outer Drive, a downtown of dimmed office buildings and glowing hotel lobbies, acetylene sparking behind blue factory windows, racks of vigil candles in the cathedral, always kept open, across the street from the neon-lit bus terminal. If he were to rise and walk along the river, he'd see the shades raised and curtains parted, and find himself in a neighborhood where the dark buildings, as he's always suspected, are populated by lovers. Their silhouettes stand undressing, framed in windows, naked and enigmatic like the lovers on a tarot card—men and women, men and men, women and women, embracing. Lovers in the present appear superimposed over lovers from the past so that it's impossible for him to tell who is a shadow of whom. The rooms, parked cars, all the sites of their private histories, glimmer as if their memories have become luminous as spirits. Even the loners are visible beneath single bulbs, appraising their desire in mirrors. The El clatters by above the roofs, its lighted windows like a strip of blue movie.

Anyhow they came adown the river; on its waters on rafts, by its shores in wains or bestriding their horses or their kine, or afoot, till they had a mind to abide; and there as it fell they stayed their travel, and spread from each side of the river, and fought with the wood and its wild things, that they might make to themselves a dwelling-place on the face of the earth.

So they cut down the trees, and burned their stumps that the grass might grow sweet for their kine and sheep and horses; and they diked the river where need was all through the plain, and far up into the wild-wood to bridle the winter floods: and they made them boats to ferry them over, and to float down stream and track up-stream: they fished the river’s eddies also with net and with line; and drew drift from out of it of far-travelled wood and other matters; and the gravel of its shallows they washed for gold; and it became their friend, and they loved it, and gave it a name, and called it the Dusky, and the Glassy, and the Mirkwood-water; for the names of it changed with the generations of man.

“I got back from the University late in the afternoon, had a quick swim, ate my dinner, and bolted off to the Stanton house to see Adam. I saw him sitting out on the galley reading a book (Gibbon, I remember) in the long twilight. And I saw Anne. I was sitting in the swing with Adam, when she came out the door. I looked at her and knew that it had been a thousand years since I had last seen her back at Christmas when she had been back at the Landing on vacation from Miss Pound's School. She certainly was not now a little girl wearing round-toed, black patent-leather, flat-heeled slippers held on by a one-button strap and white socks held up by a dab of soap. She was wearing a white linen dress, cut very straight, and the straightness of the cut and the stiffness of the linen did nothing in the world but suggest by a kind of teasing paradox the curves and softnesses sheathed by the cloth. She had her hair in a knot on the nape of her neck, and a little white ribbon around her head, and she was smiling at me with a smile which I had known all my life but which was entirely new, and saying, 'Hello, Jack,' while I held her strong narrow hand in mine and knew that summer had come.”
― Robert Penn Warren