Affenlight dropped his cigarette butt into a trash can and thought of Pella’s mother, who’d spent her life - or at least the part during which he’d known her - among the sick and dying, but never seemed to suffer a moment of physical or psychological weakness. Perhaps she was blessed with a hardy constitution, or perhaps she couldn’t afford to complain or feel pain when she had so many fragile bodies to tend to. When Affenlight caught the flu or fell into one of his grim moods, she would frown and ignore him. He’d dismissed this as a lack of sympathy, and even perhaps a form of stupidity, but maybe it was wisdom instead. Had he learned - would he ever learn - to discard the thoughts he could not use? It remained an open question, how much sympathy love could stand.
Odysseus Hears of the Death of Kalypso
Donald Revell
But in the mud of Passchendaele, falling dead from a bullet wound was only for the lucky: ”A party of ‘A’ Company men passing up to the front line found … a man bogged to above the knees,” remembered Major C.A. Bill of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. ”The united efforts of four of them, with rifles beneath his armpits, made not the slightest impression, and to dig, even if shovels had been available, would be impossible, for there was no foothold. Duty compelled them to move on up to the line, and when two days later they passed down that way the wretched fellow was still there; but only his head was now visible and he was raving mad.”
“One event sometimes had infinite ramifications and could change the whole settings of a person’s life.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Geometry
“I used to walk. For miles, I’d walk. It’d start in my chest and I’d think, ‘time to move.’ Shoes on, jacket if it was cool out, and I’d be gone. I’d pick one of the cardinals - north, usually - and go on. I learned not to hesitate.
At first I tried waiting it out. Tried ignoring the pressure building around my heart. Tried breathing the beast out of me - deep in, long out, deep in - never worked. I’d end up pacing the length of my place - five steps up, five back - one time, again, once more, again - until I knew I was a step away from losing it all.
I figured out it was walls after a bit. The walls made the beast look bigger, the way a man can seem as tall as a far-away mountain. That’s perspective. Two figures on a plane, and all that. So one day I took the beast out into the open and just moved - never fast, always steady - and after a while it was diminished.
There are miles between me and the beast now, so I’ve stopped walking, though I feel its stirring at times. It still moves, closing the gap I’ve made. I know I’ll see the beast appear again, someday on the far horizon and I won’t wait it out then. I won’t even breathe. I’ll know to grab my coat, turn the other way, and go, and I won’t stop moving for years.”
The Shame of College Sports
At the start of the 2010 football season, A. J. Green, a wide receiver at Georgia, confessed that he’d sold his own jersey from the Independence Bowl the year before, to raise cash for a spring-break vacation. The NCAA sentenced Green to a four-game suspension for violating his amateur status with the illicit profit generated by selling the shirt off his own back. While he served the suspension, the Georgia Bulldogs store continued legally selling replicas of Green’s No. 8 jersey for $39.95 and up.
“These were the things that built the world. Not to know or care about them was a betrayal of fundamental principles, a betrayal of gender, of species. What could be more useless than a man who couldn’t fix a dripping faucet—fundamentally useless, dead to history, to the messages in his genes?”
―Don DeLillo, White Noise
(Source: invisiblestories)
“China Girls” is not the preferred nomenclature.
