[b]Viet Thanh Nguyen
It is always better to admire the best among our foes rather than the worst among our friends.[/b]
Let’s start doing that here, okay?
I gradually shrank in size until I was a teenager, then a child, and then, at last, a baby, crawling, until inevitably I was sucked naked and screaming through that portal every man’s mother possesses, into a black hole where all light vanished. As that last glimmer faded, it occurred to me that the light at the end of the tunnel seen by people who have died and come back to life was not Heaven. Wasn’t it much more plausible that what they saw was not what lay ahead of them but what lay behind? This was the universal memory of the first tunnel we all pass through, the light at its end penetrating our fetal darkness…
Holes [and tunnels] coming and going.
You tried to play the game, okay? But they run the game. You don’t run anything. That means you can’t change anything. Not from the inside. When you got nothing, you got to change things from the outside.
Let’s figure out who runs things here. Then, sure, change it.
If something is worth dying for, then you’ve got a reason to live.
Nope, nothing yet.
Right?
Marriage is slavery, I said. And when God made us human—if God exists—He didn’t intend for us to be slaves to each other.
And I doubt that changes just because you’re gay.
Ever since the first caveman discovered fire and decided that the ones still living in darkness were benighted, it’s been civilization against barbarism . . . with every age having its own barbarians.
Them as often as not.