Prophet song

 She will not remember this face, already it belongs to the plain and sorry faces that have looked away, seeing how this face has already been told, seeing how all faces have been told, this face that speaks of all creation, the terrible energy of the stars, the universe smashed to dust and made over again and again in deranged creation. 

Bellow

 “Oh? My dear girl, in spite of my years, I am a man of the modern age. You do not find David and Jonathan Ss and Olivier bosom buddies in these days. The man’s company was very pleasant. He seemed also to enjoy con, versation with me. As for his views, he was just a masy of intelligent views. He expressed as many as he could, and at all times. Everything he said I found eventually in written form. He was like Voltaire, a graphomaniac. His mind was unusually active, he thought he should explain everything, and he actually said some things very well. Like ‘Science is the mind of the race.’ That’s true, you know. It’s a better thing to emphasize than other collective facts, like disease or sin. And when I see the wing of a jet plane I don’t only see metal, but metal tempered by the agreement of many minds which know the pressure and velocity and weight, calculating on their slide rules whether they are Hindus or Chinamen or from the Congo or Brazil. Yes, on the whole he was a sensible intelligent person, certainly on the right side of many questions.” 

World War I he had had another version of it—desperate darkness, the dreary liquid yellow mud to a depth of two inches over cobblestones in the Jewish streets. People needed their candles, their lamps and their copper kettle, their slices of lemon in the image of the sun. This waa tha conquest of grimness with the aid always of Mediterranean, symbols. Dark environments overcome by imported relj, gious signs and local domestic amenities. Without the power of the North, its mines, its industries, the worlq would never have reached its astonishing modern form, And regardless of Augustine, Sammler had always loved his Northern cities, especially London, the blessings of its gloom, of coal smoke, gray rains, and the mental and hu. man opportunities of a dark muffled environment. There one came to terms with obscurity, with low tones, one did not demand full clarity of mind or motive. But now Augustine’s odd statement required a new interpretation. Listening to Angela carefully, Sammler perceived different developments. The labor of Puritanism now was ending. The dark satanic mills changing into light satanic mills. The reprobates converted into children of joy, the sexual ways of the seraglio and of the Congo bush adopted by the emancipated masses of New York, Amsterdam, London. Old Sammler with his screwy visions! He saw the increas ing triumph of Enlightenment—Liberty, Fraternity, Equality, Adultery! Enlightenment, universal education, universal suffrage, the rights of the majority acknowledged by all governments, the rights of women, the rights of children, the rights of criminals, the unity of the different races afhrmed, Social Security, public health, the dignity of the person, the right to justice—the struggles of threé revolutionary centuries being won while the feudal bonds of Church and Family weakened and the privileges of aristocracy (without any duties) spread wide, democratized, especially the libidinous privileges, the right to be uninhibited, spontaneous, urinating, defecating, belching, coupling in all positions, tripling, quadrupling, polymorphous, noble in being natural, primitive, combining the leisure and luxurious inventiveness of Versailles with the hibiscus-covered erotic ease of Samoa. Dark romanticism now took hold. As old at least as the strange Orientalism of the Knights Templar, and since then filled up with Lady Stanhopes, Baudelaires, de Nervals, Stevensons, and Gauguins—those South-loving barbarians. Oh yes, the Templars. They had adored the Muslims. One hair from the head of a Saracen was more precious than the whole body of a Christian. Such crazy fervor! And now all the racism, all the strange erotic persuasions, the tourism and local color, the exotics of it had broken up but the mental masses, inheriting everything in a debased state, had formed an idea of the corrupting disease of being white and of the healing power of black. The dreams of nineteenth-century poets polluted the psychic atmosphere of the great boroughs and suburbs of New York. Add to this the dangerous lunging staggering crazy violence of fanatics, and the trouble was very deep. Like many people who had seen the world collapse once, Mr. Sammler entertained the possibility it might collapse twice. He did not agree with refugee friends that this doom was inevitable, but liberal beliefs did not seem capable of self-defense, and you could smell decay. You could see the suicidal impulses of civilization pushing strongly. You wondered whether this Western culture could survive universal dissemination—whether only its science and technology or administrative practices would travel, be adopted by other societies. Or whether the worst enemies of civilization 

The Plot Against America

 Pressing his skull firmly back into the grip of her hand, he started to sob uncontrollably. “They blew his leg off,” he told her, and here my mother motioned for Sandy and me to leave her to comfort him alone. 

A new life began for me. I'd watched my father fall apart, and I would never return to the same childhood. The mother at home was now away all day working for Hahne’s, the brother on call was now off after school working for Lindbergh, and the father who’d defiantly serenaded all those callow cafeteria anti-Semites in Washington was crying aloud with his mouth wide open—crying like both a baby abandoned and a man being tortured—because he was powerless to stop the unforeseen. And as Lindbergh’s election couldn’t have made clearer to me, the unfolding of the unforeseen was everything. Turned wrong way round, the relentless unforeseen was what we schoolchildren studied as “History,” harmless history, where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable. The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic.

&

Her pretty face, with its large features and thickly applied makeup, suddenly looked to me preposterous—the carnal face of the ravenous mania to which, in my mother’s judgment, her emotional vounger sister had helplessly fallen prey. To be sure, for a child in the court of Louis XIV the ambitions and satisfactions of such a relative would never have attained the same intimidating aura of significance that Aunt Evelyn’s did for me, nor would the worldly advancement of a cleric like Rabbi Bengelsdorf have seemed the least bit scandalous to my parents were they themselves raised at court as a marquis and a marchioness. Probably If couldn’t have done any worse—I might well have done a lot better—seeking solace from the two nuns on the Lyons Avenue bus than from someone reveling in the pleasures of the standard, petty corruptions that proliferate wherever people compete for even the tiniest advantages of rank.

&

Unlike his mother and my parents, Seldon couldn’t get over the thrill of discovering that it wasn’t he who had inexplicably “lost” his clothes but I who had stolen them to use for my getaway. This utter improbability established, as never before, a value to his own existence that had previously escaped his attention. Telling the story with all the prestige of savior and co-conspirator both—and showing everyone who’d look at them his scraped feet—seemed to make Seldon significant at last even in his own eyes, a daredevil of a boy able to compel a hero’s attention for the first time in his life, while I was devastated, not only by the shame of it all, which was more unbearable and Jonger lasting than the headache, but because my stamp album, my greatest treasure, that which I could not live without, was gone, I didn’t remember having taken it with me until the day after I got home from the hospital and got up in the morning to get dressed and saw that it was missing trom beneath my socks and my underwear. The reason I stored it there in the first place was so as to see it first thing every morning when I dressed for school. And now the first thing 1 saw on my first morning home was that the biggest thing I had ever owned was gone. 

Chabon

 They made their way past several more curricula vitae holding cocktails, as well as a number of actual Surrealists, like raisins studded in a pudding. For the most part these seemed to be a remarkably serious, even sober bunch of fellows. They wore dark suits with waistcoats and solid neckties. Most of them seemed to be Americans—Peter Blume, Edwin Dickinson, a shy, courtly fellow named Joseph Cornell—who shared an air of steel-rimmed, Yankee probity that surrounded like a suburb their inner Pandemonium. Joe tried to keep all the names straight, but he was still not sure who Charley was or what was being done by Uta Hagen to his aunt. 

Emma

 Her tears fell abundantly; but her grief was so truly artless, that no dignity could have made it more respectable in Emma’s eyes; and she listened to her, and tried to console her with all her heart and understanding—really for the time convinced that Harriet was the superior creature of the two, and that to resemble her would be more for her own welfare and happiness than all that genius or intelligence could do. 

It was rather too late in the day to set about being simpleminded and ignorant; but she left her with every previous resolution confirmed of being humble and discreet, and repressing imagination all the rest of her life.

The Invisible Bridge

Stans tried again, offering that it was so every candidate and charity in town wouldn’t be harassing the contributors for donations—which didn’t make sense. The question wasn’t why the campaign had kepr contributions from the public; it was why it hadn’t even kept a record for itself. Stans replied that there was nothing illegal in doing so. At that, Sam Ervin stuck in the shiv: “Mr. Stans, do you not think that men who have been honored by the American people as you have ought to have their course of action guided by ethical principles which are superior to the minimum requirements of criminal law?” That was Sam Ervin all over. 

&

 Once upon a time “the occult” had been the redoubt of rubes. Now, in a world where the usual sources of authority no longer had answers for anything, the weird stuff was getting more serious consideration. 

&

 Grantland Rice’s “it’s how you play the game” had transmogrified into Vince Lombardi’s ~ Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.” Watergate, then, was no  less about Richard Nixon than it was about us, an emanation of our national soul: a nation that now believed “it’s us against them, and the only goal is to win, with no quarter asked or given.” 

&

The defense case grew increasingly surreal and sordid. Judiciary members’ switchboards were swamped by identically phrased phone calls concerning “the lynch-mob atmosphere created in this city by the Washington Post and other parts of the Nixon-hating media”; these were scripted by a George Mason University student named Karl Rove and his faux-grassroots group “Americans for the Presidency.” In Richmond Hills, New York, the superannuated president of the Republican Club, which sported a gargantuan SUPPORT YOUR PRESIDENT across the entire face of the building, told Newsweek “they” —the presidents’ persecutors—“were encouraging poor Negroes to come up here and endorsing fornication and supporting illegitimate children. And Patty Hearst! She’s a product of a liberal environment.” The Georgia state Republican chairman, for his part, maintained, “If the news media is attacking the President, he must be doing something right.” 

Then there were the glassy-eyed young people crowding the U.S. Capitol steps every morning bearing signs reading FORGIVE, LOVE, UNITE and chanting “God needs Nixon” in front of the Rayburn Office Building wearing sandwich-board images of Judiciary Committee members treading, “I am praying for ___.” “This nation is God’s nation,” their leader explained. “The office of the President of the United States is, therefore, sacred.” This leader was the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. Thousands of brainwashed “Moonies,” it turned out, had been placed front and center at the White House Christmas tree lighting ceremony back in December in “Project Unity” armbands. They were the ones waving banners reading “God Loves the President” and “God Loves America” in time to “Deck the Halls.” The president had come out to pay his respects; the Moonies literally knelt down to worship him. 

Moon didn’t actually believe God loved America—or at least its form of government, democracy, which he considered the work of Satan nor did he much love the deity whose birth Christmas celebrated, whom he considered decidedly inferior to himself, In face his plan was to take over the country by 1977, lest Armageddon come, That was why the Moonies had been loaded into vans across the country, allowed five or four hours or even just three hours of sleep a night while chanting “Our Satan” incessantly to stay awake, all under the discipline of handlers who watched Hitler Youth films for their training in disciplinary techniques. Here they were: the president’s people. And the president welcomed their devotion. In February, Moon had visited the Oval Office. Together, they bowed their heads for a prayer in which Moon proposed a national fast to preserve his presidency. The fast took place that July, kicked off in a ceremony attended by Bruce “Dr. Happiness” Herschensohn and Rabbi Baruch Korff. 

This banquet was the president’s chance to thank them. “Rabbi Korff’s eloquence, his intelligence, his dedication,” Nixon’s disembodied voice boomed across the huge Shoreham banquet hall, “have been a great source of strength to me and all of us in these difficult times.” The rabbi hung up the phone receiver, intoned, “We love you dearly,” and brushed away a stubborn tear.

The Beautiful and

 The last bits 

After the sureties of Youth there sets in a period of intense and intolerable complexity. With the soda jerker this period is so short as to be almost negligible. Men higher in the scale hold out longer and the attempt to preserve the ultimate niceties of relationship, to retain “impractical” ideas of integrity. But by the late twenties the business has grown too intricate, and what has hitherto been imminent and confusing has become gradually remote and dim. Routine comes down like twilight on a harsh landscape, softening it until it is tolerable. The complexity is too subtle, too varied; the values are changing utterly with each lesion of vitality; it has begun to appear that we can learn nothing from the past with which to face the future—so we cease to be impulsive, convincible men, interested in what is ethically true by fine margins, we substitute rules of conduct for ideas of integrity, we value safety above romance, we become, quite unconsciously, pragmatic. It is left to the few to be persistently concerned with the nuances of relationships—and even this few only in certain hours especially set aside for the task. 

Anthony Patch had ceased to be an individual of mental adventure, of curiosity, and had become an individual of bias and prejudice, with a longing to be emotionally undisturbed. This gradual change had taken place through the past several years, accelerated by a succession of anxieties preying on his mind. There was, first of all, the sense of waste, always dormant in his heart, now awakened by the circumstances of his position. In his moments of insecurity he was haunted by the suggestion that life might be, after all, significant. In his early twenties the conviction of the futility of effort, of the wisdom of abnegation, had been confirmed by the philosophies he had admired as well as by his association with Maury Noble, and later with his wife. Yet there had been occasions—just before his first meeting with Gloria, for example, and when his grandfather had suggested that he should go abroad as a war correspondent—upon which his dissatisfaction had driven him almost to a positive step. 

&

 At high school she had enjoyed a rather unsavory reputation. As a matter of fact her behavior at the class picnic, where the rumors started, had been merely indiscreetshe had retained her technical purity until over a year later, The boy had been a clerk in a store on Jackson Street, and on the day after the incident he departed unexpectedly to New York. He had been intending to leave for some time, but had tarried for the consummation of his amorous enterprise. 

After a while she confided the adventure to a girl friend, and later, as she watched her friend disappear down the sleepy street of dusty sunshine, she knew in a flash of intuition that her story was going out into the world. Yet after telling it she felt much better, and a little bitter, and made as near an approach to character as she was capable of by walking in another direction and meeting another man with the honest intention of gratifying herself again. As a rule things happened to Dot. She was not weak, because there was nothing in her to tell her she was being weak, : She was not strong, because she never knew that some of the things she did were brave. She neither defied nor conformed nor compromised.

She had no sense of humor, but, to take its place, a happy disposition that made her laugh at the proper times when she was with men. She had no definite intentions—sometimes she regretted vaguely that her reputation precluded what chance she had ever had for security. There had been no open discovery: her mother was interested only in starting her off on time each morning for the jewelry store where she earned fourteen doljars a week. But some of the boys she had known in high school now looked the other way when they were walking with “‘nice girls,” and these incidents hurt her feelings. When they occurred she went home and cried. 

Besides the Jackson Street clerk there had been two other men, of whom the first was a naval officer, who passed through town during the early days of the war. He had stayed over a night to make a connection, and was leaning idly against one of the pillars of the Stonewall Hotel when she passed by. He remained in town four days. She thought she loved him—lavished on him that first hysteria of passion that would have gone to the pusillanimous clerk. The naval officer’s uniformthere were few of them in those days—had made the magic. He left with vague promises on his hps, and, once on the train, rejoiced that he had not told her his real name. 

&

It was here that he encountered “man named Parker Allison, who had been exactly the wrong sort of rounder at Harvard, and who was running through a large ‘“‘yeast” fortune as rapidly as possible. Parker Allison’s notion of distinction consisted in driving a noisy red-and-yellow racing-car up Broadway with two glittering, hard-eyed girls beside him. He was the sort who dined with two girls rather than with one—his imagination was almost incapable of sustaining a dialogue. Besides Allison there was Pete Lytell, who wore a gray derby on the side of his head. He always ha money and he was customarily cheerful, so Anthony held aimless, long-winded conversation with him through many afternoons of the summer and fall. Lytell, he found, not only talked but reasoned in phrases. His philosophy was a series of them, assimilated here and there through an active, thoughtless life. He had phrases about Socialism—the immemorial ones; he had phrases pertaining to the existence of a personal deitysomething about one time when he had been in a railroad accident; and he had phrases about the Irish problem, the sort of woman he respected, and the futility of prohibition. ‘The only time his conversation ever rose superior to these muddled clauses, with which he interpreted the most rococo happenings in a life that had been more than usually eventful, was when he got down to the detailed discussion of his most animal existence: he knew, to a subtlety, the foods, the liquor, and the Women that he preferred. He was at once the commonest and the most remarkable product of civilization. He was nine out of ten People that one passes on a city street—and he was a hairless ape with two dozen tricks. He was the hero of a thousand romances of life and art—and he was a virtual moron, performing staidly yet absurdly a series of complicated and infinitely astounding epics over a span of threescore years. 

With such men as these two Anthony Patch drank and discussed and drank and argued. He liked them because they knew nothing about him, because they lived in the obvious and had not the faintest conception of the inevitable continuity of life. They sat not before a motion picture with consecutive reels, but at a musty old-fashioned travelogue with all values stark and hence all implications confused. Yet they themselves were not confused, because there was nothing in them to be confused—they changed phrases from month to month as they changed neckties. 

&

But he hated to be sober. It made him conscious of the people around him, of that air of struggle, of greedy ambition, of hope more sordid than despair, of incessant passage up or down, which in every metropolis is most in evidence through the unstable middle class. Unable to live with the rich he thought that his next choice would have been to live with the very poor. Anything was better than this cup of perspiration and tears. 

The sense of the enormous panorama of life, never strong in Anthony, had become dim almost to extinction. At long intervals now some incident, some ges~ture of Gloria’s, would take his fancy—but the gray veils had come down in earnest upon him. As he grew older those things faded—after that there was wine. 

There was a kindliness about intoxication—there was that indescribable gloss and glamour it gave, like the memories of ephemeral and faded evenings. After a few high-balls there was magic in the tall glowing Arabian night of the Bush Terminal Building—its summit 8 peak of sheer grandeur, gold and dreaming against the inaccessible sky. And Wall Street, the crass, the banal—again it was the triumph of gold, a gorgeous sentient spectacle; it was where the great kings kept the money for their wars....

....the fruit of youth or of the grape, the transitory magic of the brief passage from darkness to darkness the old illusion that truth and beauty were in some way entwined.