[b]Thornton Wilder
Esteban fell face downward upon the floor. “I am alone, alone, alone,” he cried. The Captain stood above him, his great plain face ridged and gray with pain; it was his own old hours he was reliving. He was the awkwardest speaker in the world apart from the lore of the sea, but there are times when it requires a high courage to speak the banal. He could not be sure the figure on the floor was listening, but he said, “We do what we can. We push on, Esteban, as best we can. It isn’t for long, you know. Time keeps going by. You’ll be surprised at the way time passes”.[/b]
That’s banal enough for some of us.
The best thing about animals is they don’t talk much.
At least not around us.
If there were any plan in the universe at all, if there were any pattern in human life, surely it could be discovered mysteriously latent in those lives so suddenly cut off. Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan.
Either/or sure but which? And which ought it be?
He possessed the six attributes of the adventurer-- a memory for names and faces, with the aptitude for altering his own; the gift of tongues; inexhaustible invention; secrecy; the talent for falling into conversation with strangers; and that freedom from conscience that springs from a contempt for the dozing rich he preyed upon.
Two out of six. How about you?
It required all his delicate Epicurean education to prevent his doing something about it; he had to repeat over to himself his favorite notions: that the injustice and unhappiness in the world is a constant; that the theory of progress is a delusion; that the poor, never having known happiness, are insensible to misfortune. Like all the rich he could not bring himself to believe that the poor (look at their houses, look at their clothes) could really suffer. Like all the cultivated he believed that only the widely read could be said to know that they were unhappy.
Now of course as we all know that’s just not true. Even if it’s not ecactly false.
I think that it can be assumed that no adults are ever really ‘shocked’ — that being shocked is always a pose.
Actually, a few times I really was. And not just here.