“‘No, I am not a man who harbors romantic ideas about the extension of the spirit. It’s something I’d like to think I taught my sons, to partake of the physical world while it is yours to take, because that is one meaning of life with which no one can argue. To taste, to touch, to breathe in, to eat and stuff yourself–all the rest, all that takes place in the heart and mind lives in the shadow of uncertainty. But the lesson didn’t come easily to you, and you never accepted it in the end. You shot yourself in … Continue reading Great Moments in Literature

“‘Katz, as he endured this bombardment, was feeling sad and remote. Walter and the girl seemed to have snapped under the pressure of thinking in too much detail about the fuckedness of the world. They’d been seized by a notion and talked each other into believing in it. Had blown a bubble that had then broken free of reality and carried them away. They didn’t seem to realize that they were dwelling in a world with a population of two.” –Jonathan Franzen, Freedom, 2010 “A YOUNG NURSE WALKS FEVERISHLY THRU THE CITY’S STREETS AFTER HER SWING SHIFT DUTY…RESTLESS, LONELY…HOPING THAT … Continue reading Great Moments in Literature

“‘To find themselves utterly alone at night where company is desirable and expected makes some people fearful; but a case more trying by far to the nerves is to discover some mysterious companionship when intuition, sensation, memory, analogy, testimony, probability, induction–every kind of evidence in the logician’s list–have united to persuade consciousness that it is quite in isolation. ” –Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd, revised final version in 1912 “YOU’RE GREAT, HONEY! YOU’RE WASTED HERE! YOU DESERVE SOMETHING BETTER THAN A TYPEWRITER AND THIS SNEAKY CRUMB! GET YOURSELF A BIKINI AND START A CHAIN OF HEART ATTACKS AT … Continue reading Great Moments in Literature

“Actually, we hadn’t really stepped into a clearing: it was more that the thin woods we’d come through had ended, and now in front of us there was open marshland as far as we could see. The pale sky looked vast and you could see it reflected every so often in the patches of water breaking up the land. Not so long ago, the woods must have extended further, because you could see here and there ghostly dead trunks poking out of the soil, most of them broken off only a few feet up. And beyond the dead trunks, maybe … Continue reading Great Moments in Literature

“She hadn’t caught me, obviously enough, at a very erotic moment in my life. I had never been much of a pickup artist–a few ghastly encounters in my twenties had seen to that–and the alternative prospect of a euphoric romance not only exhausted me but, in fact, struck me as impossible. This wasn’t because of any fidelity to my absent wife or some aversion to sex, which, I like to think, grabs me as much as the next man. No, it was simply that I was uninterested in making, as I saw it, a Xerox of some old emotional state. … Continue reading Great Moments in Literature

“It was the boredom that comes of being cut off from everything that could make life sweet, or arouse curiosity, or enlarge the range of the senses. It was the boredom the comes of having to perform endless tasks that have no savour and acquire skills one would gladly be without. I learned to march and drill and shoot and keep myself clean according to Army standards; to make my bed and polish my boots and my buttons and to wrap lengths of dung-colored rag around my legs in the approved way. None of it had any great reality for … Continue reading Great Moments in Literature