[b]Nathanael West
Perhaps I can make you understand. Let’s start from the beginning. A man is hired to give advice to the readers of a newspaper. The job is a circulation stunt and the whole staff considers it a joke. He welcomes the job, for it might lead to a gossip column, and anyway he’s tired of being a leg man. He too considers the job a joke, but after several months at it, the joke begins to escape him. He sees that the majority of the letters are profoundly humble pleas for moral and spiritual advice, and they are inarticulate expressions of genuine suffering. He also discovers that his correspondents take him seriously. For the first time in his life, he is forced to examine the values by which he lives. This examination shows him that he is the victim of the joke and not its perpetrator.[/b]
Now that’s a fucking insight!
He was giving birth to groups of words.
Worse, words meant only to define and to defend other words.
She wasn’t hard-boiled. It was just that she put love on a special plane, where a man without money or looks couldn’t move.
Works that way when he isn’t hard-boiled either.
His mouth formed an O with lips torn angry in laying duck’s eggs from a chicken’s rectum.
It actually doesn’t matter what it means; you either get it or you don’t.
It seems to me that someone must surely take the hint and write the life of Miss McGeeney, the woman who wrote the biography of the man who wrote the biography of the man who wrote the biography of the man who wrote the biography of Boswell.
Of course no one ever did.
We must take the long view—every defeat is a victory in a war of attrition.
Of course that can stretch all the way out to the beginning of time.