For two years I was caught between passionate liberals and conservatives among my fellow inmates at Fort Pelham. Most prisoners are ideologues. There is nothing else to do. Both sides had compelling arguments. Each could argue plausibly for and against religion, God, Israel, blacks, affirmative action, Nicaragua. It was more natural for me, less boring,…
It is a bad time for psychiatrists. Old-fashioned shrinks are out of style and generally out of work. We, who like our mentor Dr. Freud believe there is a psyche, that it is born to trouble as the sparks fly up, that one gets at it, the root of trouble, the soul’s own secret, by…
THE PLACE WHERE the strange events related in this book occur, Feliciana, is not imaginary. It was so named by the Spanish. It was and is part of Louisiana, a strip of pleasant pineland running from the Mississippi River to the Perdido, a curious region of a curious state. Never quite Creole or French or…
Thirty years earlier the child knew that something was going to happen, and that the something was all he ever wanted or needed to know, and that it only remained for him to wait for it to happen and to settle for nothing less until it did. What was the something? Women? War? Or victory…
Men in this century are no different from the Jews at Buchenwald who did not give themselves leave to resist death. I know your name at last, he said, laughing and hooting hee hee hooooee like a pig-caller and kicking the tires, and you are not going to prevail over me. Old father of lies,…
Unfortunately for the poor man awaiting the Last Days and raving away at God and man in the bowels of Sourwood Mountain directly below thousands of normal folk playing golf and antiquing and barbecuing and simply enjoying the fall colors—for on the following day at the height of his lunacy the cloud blew away and…
Will it not be a relief to all of mankind to have this dreary question settled once and for all, proved or disproved? Imagine! We shall no longer have to listen to preachers haranguing unbelievers about God’s existence, and professors haranguing people about God’s nonexistence and mythic structures? ***** But I’ve always been suspicious of…
Take Christians. I am surrounded by Christians. They are generally speaking a pleasant and agreeable lot, not noticeably different from other people—even though they, the Christians of the South, the U.S.A., the Western world have killed off more people in recent centuries than all other people put together. Yet I cannot be sure they don’t…
Why did good married couples look so glum? Old couples, young couples, thirty-five-year-old Atlanta couples in condos, sixty-five-year-old Ohio couples in villas, each as glum as if one had got stuck with the other at a cocktail party for two hours. Two hours? Ten years! Thirty years! ***** In his strange new mood he made…
Is this an age of belief, he reflected, a great renaissance of faith after a period of crass materialism, atheism, agnosticism, liberalism, scientism? Or is it an age of madness in which everyone believes everything? Which? Like many Californians, she knew how to expand the particular into the general, turn a hobby into a religion,…
manwithoutqualities 