Then they sat in their house at Pass Christian, put a bottle of whiskey between them, felt a surge of happiness, were able to speak frankly and cheerfully to each other, laugh and joke, drink, even make love. But that is crazy. Why should people be miserable in good weather and happy in bad? Surely…
His words still shape our consciousness, even if we fail to read him. This is not due to some hackneyed idealism (“tilting at windmills”), but rather to his pervasive impact on the genre that taught us to think like moderns: the novel. He pioneered the representation of individual subjectivity and aspiration, which today undergirds the…
During the last months I found that I could be moderately happy if I simultaneously (1) drank, (2) read Raymond Chandler, and (3) listened to Beethoven. ***** The world had gone crazy, said the crazy man in his cell. What was nutty was that the movie folk were trafficking in illusions in a real world…
You should be interested! Such a quest serves God’s cause! How? Because the Good proves nothing. When everyone is wonderful, nobody bothers with God. If you had ten thousand Albert Schweitzers giving their lives for their fellow men, do you think anyone would have a second thought about God? Or suppose the Lowell Professor of…
At least in Louisiana we knew how to take things easy. We could always drink. ***** Then I realized why I drank and smoked. It was a way of dealing with time. What to do with time? A fearful thing: a human body of ten billion cells ready to do any one of ten billion…
Unlike him I had been unable to escape into the simple complexities of science. All he had to do was solve the mystery of the universe, which may be difficult but is not as difficult as living an ordinary life. ***** Everybody talks about the horrors of drink, which are real enough, but not about…
“These studies are useful, pleasant, and entertaining, young friend, because the mind does not encounter in them the abstractions of theology, the uncertainties of medicine, the intricacies of law, nor the ruggedness of mathematics. It is all satisfying, all delightful, all enchanting, and all educational, both physics as well as natural history. It doesn’t exhaust…
Then do what? Talk? Talk about what? Some years ago I discovered that I had nothing to say to anybody nor anybody to me, that is, anything worth listening to. There is nothing left to say. So I stopped talking. Until you showed up. I don’t know why I want to talk to you or…
So anyhow I began my new life then when I stepped out of my life routine worn bare and deep as a cowpath across a meadow, climbed out of my rut, stopped listening to the news and Mary Tyler Moore. And strangely, stopped drinking and smoking. The second I left my old life’s cowpath, I discovered…
We entered the house, I picked out a good seat by the sitting room, for I never liked leaving the company of skirts for long . . . ***** It all seems fine to me in its own fashion; and so, in the countryside I am happy in a country way, and in the city…
manwithoutqualities 