SNOW WHITE had another glass of healthy orange juice. "From now on I deny myself to them. These delights. I maintain an esthetic distance. No more do I trip girlishly to their bed in the night, or after lunch, or in the misty mid-morning. Not that I ever did. It was always my whim which governed those gregarious encounters summed up so well byLivy in the phrase, vae victis. I congratulate myself on that score at least. And no more will I chop their onions, boil their fettucini, or marinate their flank steak. No more will I trudge about the house pursuing stain. No more will I fold their lingerie in neat bundles and stuff it away in the highboy. I am not even going to speak to them, now, except through third parties, or if I have something special to announce -- a new nuance of my mood, a new vagary, a new extravagant caprice. I dont know what such a policy will win me. I am not even sure I wish to implement it. It seems small and mean-spirited. I have conflicting ideas. But the main theme that runs through my brain is that what is, is insufficient. Where did that sulky notion come from? From the rental library, doubtless. Perhaps the seven men should have left me in the forest. To perish there, when all the roots and berries and rabbits and robins had been exhausted. If I had perished then, I would not be thinking now. It is true that there is a future in which I shall inevitably perish. There is that. Thinking terminates. One shall not always be leaning on ones elbow in the bed at a quarter to four in the morning, wondering if the Japanese are happier than their piglike Western contemporaries. Another orange juice, with a little vodka in it this time."
"THEY can treat me like a rube if they wish," Clem said holding tightly to the two hundred bottles of Lone Star at the Alamo Chili House. "I suppose I am a rubish hayseed in some sense, full of down-home notions that contradict the more sophisticated notions of my colleagues. But I notice that it is to me they come when it is a question of grits or chitlings or fried catfish. Of course these questions do not arise very often. I have not had a whiff of fried catfish these twelve years! How many nights have I trudged home with my face fixed for fried catfish, only to find that we were having fried calimaretti or some other Eastern dish. Not that I would put down those tender rings of squid deep-fried in olive oil. I even like the squarish can the olive oil comes in, emblazoned with green-and-gold devices, flowery emblemature out of the nineteenth century. It makes my mouth water just to look at it, that can. But why am I talking to myself about cans? Cans are not what is troubling me. What is troubling me is the quality of life in our great country, America. It seems to me to be deprived. I dont mean that the deprived people are deprived, although they are, clearly, but that even the fat are deprived. I suppose one could say that they are all humpheads and let it go at that. I am worried by the fact that no one responded to Snow Whites hair initiative. Even though I am at the same time relieved. But it suggests that Americans will not or cannot see themselves as princely. Even Paul, thatmost princely of our contemporaries, did not respond appropriately. Of course it may be that princely is not a good thing to be. And of course there is our long democratic tradition which is anti-aristocratic. Egalitarianism precludes princeliness. And yet our people are not equal in any sense. They are either. . . The poorest of them are slaves as surely as if they were chained to gigantic wooden oars. The richest of them have the faces of cold effete homosexuals. And those in the middle are wonderfully confused. Redistribute the money. That will not ameliorate everything, but it will ameliorate some things. Redistribute the money. This can be achieved in only one way. By making the rich happier. New lovers. New lovers who will make their lives exciting and rich in a way that. . . We must pass a law that all marriages of people with more than enough money are dissolved as of tomorrow. We will free all these poor moneyed people and let them out to play. The quid pro quo is their money. Then we take the money and --"
EDWARD was blowing his mind, under the boardwalk. "Well my mind is blown now. Nine mantras and three bottles of insect repellent, under the boardwalk. I shall certainly be sick tomorrow. But it is worth it to have a blown mind. To stop being a filthy bourgeois for a space, even a short space. To gain access to everything in a new way. Under the boardwalk. Those cream Corfam shoes clumping overhead. I understand them now, for the first time. Not their molecular structure, in which I am not particularly interested, but their sacredness. Their centrality. They are the center of everything, those shoes. They are it. I know that, now. Too bad it is not worth knowing. Too bad it is not true. It is not even temporarily true. Well, that must mean that my mind is not fully blown. That harsh critique. More insect repellent!"
"THE refusal of emotion produces nervousness," Bill said dipping into the barrel of decadent absinthe. "Remember that. You are tense as a wire-walker, Hubert. If it is still possible to heave a sigh you should heave it. If it is still possible to rip out a groan you should rip it out. If it is still possible to smite the brow with anguished forefinger then you should let that forefinger fall. And there are expostulations and entreaties that meet the case to be found in old books, look them up. This concatenation of outward and visible signs may I say may detonate an inward invisible subjective correlative, booming in the deeps of the gut like an Alka-Seltzer to produce tranquillity. I say may. And you others there, lounging about with expressions of steely unconcern, you are just like Hubert. The disease is the same and the remedy is the same. As for me, I am out of it. I have copted out if you want to put it that way. After a life rich in emotional defeats, I have looked around for other modes of misery, other roads to destruction. Now I limit myself to listening to what people say, and thinking what pamby it is, what they say. My nourishment is refined from the ongoing circus of the mind in motion. Give me the odd linguistic trip, stutter and fall, and I will be content. Actually, when you get right down to it, I should be the monk, and Paul the leader here." "We have entertained the notion," Hubert said.
"I HAVE killed this whole bottle of Chablis wine by myself," Dan said. "And that other bottle of Chablis too -- that one under the bed. And that other bottle of Chablis too -- the one with the brown candle stuck in the mouth of it. And I am not afraid. Not of what may come, not of what has been. Now I will light that long cigar, that cigar that stretches from Mont St. Michel and Chartres, to under the volcano. What is merely fashionable will fade away, and what is merely new will fade away, but what will not fade away, is the wayI feel: analogies break down, regimes break down, but the way I feel remains. I feel abandoned. After a hard day tending the vats, and washing the buildings, one wants to come home and find a leg of mutton on the table, in a rich gravy with little pearly onions studded in it, and perhaps a small pot of Irish potatoes somewhere about. Instead I come home to this nothingness. Now she sits in her room reading Dissent and admiring her figure in the mirror. She still loves us, in a way, but it isnt enough. It is a failure of leadership, I feel. We have been left sucking the mop again. True leadership would make her love us fiercely and excitingly, as in the old days. True leadership would find a way out of this hairy imbroglio. I am tired of Bills halting explanations, promises. If he doesnt want to lead, then let us vote. That is all I have to say, except one more thing: when one has been bending over a hot vat all day, one doesnt want to come home and hear a lot of hump from a cow-hearted leader whose leadership buttons have fallen off -- some fellow who spends the dreamy days eating cabbage and watching ships, while you are at work. Work, with its charts, its lines of authority, its air of importance."
