[b]Rick Moody
I think literature is best when it’s voicing what we would prefer not to talk about.[/b]
On the other hand, that could be anything.
Have I mentioned that I expect death around every turn, that every blue sky has a safe sailing out of it, that every bus runs me over, that every low, mean syllable uttered in my direction seems to intimate the violence of murder, that every family seems like an opportunity for ruin and every marriage a ceremony into which calamity will fall and hearts will be broken and lives destroyed and people branded by the mortifications of love?
For some, in other words, a normal day.
The past was so past it hurt.
And it’s probably never coming back again.
Words are the oldest information storage and retrieval system ever devised. Words are probably older than the cave paintings in France, words have been here for tens of thousands of years longer than film, moving pictures, video, and digital video, and words will likely be here after those media too. When the electromagnetic pulse comes in the wake of the nuclear blast? Those computers and digital video cameras and videotape recorders that are not melted outright will be plastic and metal husks used to prop open doors. Not so with the utterances of tongues. Words will remain, and the highly complicated and idiosyncratic accounts assembled from them will provide us with the dark news about the blast. The written word will remain, scribbled on collapsed highway overpasses, as a testament to love and rage, as evidence of the wanderers in the ruin.
Right, like that’s supposed to comfort us somehow.
People came to the desert because the stars were in the desert, and the stars had yet to be corrupted by man… The stars, it seemed, would crush man in a scenic, gravitational panorama before man would ever corrupt the stars.
For one thing, you’ve got to reach them first.
If God had designed the orchestra, then the cello was His greatest accomplishment.
That’s the big fiddle, isn’t it?