Health + Youth

“Is it possible that the relationship between humanity and evil is similar to the relationship between the ocean and an iceberg floating on its surface? Both the ocean and the iceberg are made of the same material. That the iceberg seems separate is only because it is in a different form. In reality, it is part of a vast ocean.

“It was impossible to expect a moral awakening from humankind itself, just like it was impossible to expect humans to lift off the earth by pulling up on their own hair. To achieve moral awakening required a force outside the human race.

“This thought determined the entire course of Ye’s life.”
—Cixin Liu, The Three Body Problem

You look like a field of flowers.
You look like flowers in a vase.
You look like brains and breasts.
You act like life stabbing death to death.
—from “Hymn to Aphrodite” by Frederick Seidel

“A pause here, a near inaudible sight as she turns her head to the window, eyes raking the street as if the answer she is looking for is surely going to appear, is just running a bit late.

“‘You must be wondering why I wanted to talk to you.’

“At these words, for some reason, my heart starts to pound. Then she says not quite the last thing I expected to hear: ‘It’s about the dog.’”
—Sigrid Nunez, “The Blind”

“I should not be among people. Perhaps this is obvious, but the idea has come to me like a revelation, just as it has before. This is the way I do it. The way I live. Would you be surprised to know I went to law school once? Would it mean something to you to know that when I was sixteen, I lost my virginity to a woman twice my age? A friend of my parents? Would you like to know some of the things about my parents that would help you to understand, the things they said or did? Would it help to know how, when I enter a new town, I can build an entire person from a stolen piece of mail or a simple story I have invented?

“Who cares? I should not be among people, and so I have taken myself away again, to a place where there are few of them, and the land runs flat in every direction. I am being someone new. My days are long and mostly silent. I have been here before, you know. After Kodiak. After Bandon. After Animas. All by myself in a place that is new, inside days with no people. I have been inside these days before, and they feel like the right place to be for a long time, but then that changes. Would you like to understand that change? Would you like to know what it is about me, who should not be among people, that eventually brings me back among people? It is simple. Simplify your thinking.

“I get lonely.”
—Shawn Vestal, “Please Give Me One Good Reason Not to Hate You”

“It seemed we were always saying things we didn’t quite mean.

“I said, I used to miss you when you were out of town, but now I have that feeling when I look at you, when you’re right here.’

“This was true. I did mean this.”
—Catherine Lacey

“I peeked over the bunk’s edge and studied the face below me, now only a black oval, like a fencer’s mask, and, because I stared too long in the dark, the face began to boil and writhe.”

“I studied him surreptitiously over the edge of the bunk, and soon I could see alien features forming on the face below me—Martian mouth, Andromedan eyes, staring back at me with evil curiosity. It made me feel weightless and dizzy when the mouth spoke to me with the voice of my grandmother: ‘Right now,’ Strangler Bob said, ‘you don’t get it. You’re too young.’ My grandmother’s voice, the same aggrieved tone, the same sorrow and resignation.”
—Denis Johnson, “Strangler Bob”

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.  
   They may not mean to, but they do.  
They fill you with the faults they had
   And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
   By fools in old-style hats and coats,  
Who half the time were soppy-stern
   And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
   It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
   And don’t have any kids yourself.
—“This Be the Verse,” Philip Larkin