Metro Man Quotes

There's only one thing that can save a man from madness and that's uncertainty.

Being or nothing, that is the question. Ascending, descending, coming, going, a man does so much that in the end he disappears.

And then, after five minutes of silence, almost inaudibly, the old man sighed and said, more to himself than to Artyom: ‘Lord, what a splendid world we ruined . . .

If someday, in a morning, you see you, in a mirror or the dent of a spoon, and wonder Where is my soul and Where has it gone, remember this: Catch the gaze of a woman on the metro, subway, tram. Look at a man. Seek and you will find you in the silvered space, a flash between souls.

But if they have a flashlight, it means they're human and not some kind of monsters from the surface,' objected Artyom. "I don't know what's worse," said Melnik, cutting off Artyom.

Any faith served man only as a crutch supporting him.

Getting a new version of the answer every day, Artyom was unable to compel himself to believe what was true, because the next day another, no less precise and comprehensive one, might arise. Whom should he believe? And in what? ... Any faith served man only as a crutch supporting him. ... He understood why man needs this support. Without it, life would have become empty, like an abandoned tunnel.

I have heard queens' swans, moved a man to cry, heard Bach played in the Metro on guitars. I have made love in Paris. Let me die.

Į žmones reikia žiūrėti iš aukštai. Būdavo, užgesinu šviesą ir atsistoju prie lango: jie nė neįtaria, kad juos galima stebėti ir iš viršaus. Jie rūpinasi savo priekiu, kartais užpakaliu, bet visi jų triukai skirti metro setyniasdešimties centimetrų ūgio žiūrovui. O ar kas nors kada pagalvojo, kaip atrodo katiliuko formos kepurė žvelgiant iš septinto aukšto? <...> Vieną vakarą man toptelėjo mintis pašaudyti į žmones.

The man is well inside the train before the dreadful truth occurs to me. He is the man from the newspaper. The rapist. My doppelganger. My mirrored doppelganger.” William Wilson in the short story 'Metro' by Steen Langstrup.

WE ALL DO IT, YOU know. Distract ourselves from noticing how time’s passing. We throw ourselves into our jobs. We focus on keeping the blight off our tomato plants. We fill up our gas tanks and top off our Metro cards and do the grocery shopping so that the weeks look the same on the surface. And then one day, you turn around, and your baby is a man. One day, you look in the mirror, and see gray hair. One day, you realize there is less of your life left than what you’ve already lived. And you think, How did this happen so fast? It was only yesterday when I was having my first legal drink, when I was diapering him, when I was young. When this realization hits, you start doing the math. How much time do I have left? How much can I fit into that small space? Some of us let this realization guide us, I guess. We book trips to Tibet, we learn how to sculpt, we skydive. We try to pretend it’s not almost over. But some of us just fill up our gas tanks and top off our Metro cards and do the grocery shopping, because if you only see the path that’s right ahead of you, you don’t obsess over when the cliff might drop off. Some of us never learn. And some of us learn earlier than others. —

The top eleven are, in order, T. S. Eliot’s “Prufrock,” Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour,” Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” William Carlos Williams’s “Red Wheelbarrow,” Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish,” Ezra Pound’s “The River Merchant’s Wife,” Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy,” Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” Frost’s “Mending Wall,” Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man,” and Williams’s “The Dance.

We all do it, you know. Distract ourselves from noticing how time’s passing. We throw ourselves into our jobs. We focus on keeping the blight off our tomato plants. We fill up our gas tanks and top off our Metro cards and do the grocery shopping so that the weeks look the same on the surface. And then one day, you turn around, and your baby is a man. One day, you look in the mirror, and see gray hair. One day, you realize there is less of your life left than what you’ve already lived. And you think, How did this happen so fast? It was only yesterday when I was having my first legal drink, when I was diapering him, when I was young.

It was true, it was easy enough for an old man like him, with no children, to risk his moth-eaten skin, but the young man still had a long life ahead of him - too long to be concerned about immortality.

I am an American, proud to be an American, proud to be a black American. I’m not African-American. I’ve never been to Africa. I’m an American that is black and my　– and I’m proud to be a black that submits to my Christianity. I am proud to be just a man. I mean a man’s man, not a metro sexual, not one that gets his nails done. I mean a man that used to get out there and knock heads and get his fingernails dirty. I’m proud of being a man, but my manhood submits to my Christianity, but I don’t see that in Al Sharpton. Any time anything happens that attacks his blackness, he fears it and　– because he has nothing else to stand on. Thus, when the real civil rights movement of everyone steps up, when we’re saying the Tea Party, don’t take being discriminated against. If a black person was kicked out of a hotel for being black down in Florida, it would be an uproar, but since the Tea Party was kicked out because of their political views, that’s going against America. That’s why we’re here going against the Constitution, with certain unalienable rights. That is the true fight we must start and we must fight today like never before.

WE ALL DO IT, YOU know. Distract ourselves from noticing how time’s passing. We throw ourselves into our jobs. We focus on keeping the blight off our tomato plants. We fill up our gas tanks and top off our Metro cards and do the grocery shopping so that the weeks look the same on the surface. And then one day, you turn around, and your baby is a man. One day, you look in the mirror, and see gray hair. One day, you realize there is less of your life left than what you’ve already lived. And you think, How did this happen so fast? It was only yesterday when I was having my first legal drink, when I was diapering him, when I was young. When this realization hits, you start doing the math. How much time do I have left? How much can I fit into that small space? Some of us let this realization guide us, I guess. We book trips to Tibet, we learn how to sculpt, we skydive. We try to pretend it’s not almost over. But some of us just fill up our gas tanks and top off our Metro cards and do the grocery shopping, because if you only see the path that’s right ahead of you, you don’t obsess over when the cliff might drop off. Some of us never learn. And some of us learn earlier than others.

Any faith served man only as a crutch supporting him. When Artyom was young, his stepfather’s story about how a monkey took up a cane and became a man made him laugh. After that, apparently, the clever macaque no longer let the cane out of his hand because he couldn’t straighten up. He understood why man needs this support. Without it, life would have become empty, like an abandoned tunnel.

These were strange, freakish, and dangerous creatures, the likes of which might well have brought Darwin himself to despair with their obvious lack of conformity to the laws of evolutionary development. As much as these beasts might differ from the animals humans were used to, and whether they had been reborn under the invisible and ruinous rays of sunlight, turned from inoffensive representatives of urban fauna into the spawn of hell, or whether they had always dwelled in the depths, only now to be disturbed by man – still, they were an evident part of life on earth.

You are absolutely at the correct spot. Well done, you, for finding us!" Damien's smile was so warm that I watched the tense set of the human's shoulders relax. Then he actually held out his hand and said, "Excellent. I'm Adam Paluka, from Tulsa's Fox News 23, I'm here to interview your High Priestess and, I'm guessing, some of you as well." "Nice to meet you, Mr. Paluka. I'm Damien," Damien said, taking his hand. Then he giggled a little and added, "Oooh, strong grip!" The reporter grinned. "I aim to please. And call me Adam. Mr. Paluka is my dad." Damien giggled again. Adam chuckled. They made major eye contact. Stevie Rae nudged me and we shared a /look./ Adam was cute, seriously cute in a young, up-and-coming metro-sexual guy way. Dark hair, dark eyes, good teeth, really good shoes, and a man satchel, which Stevie Rae and I spotted together. Our eyes telegraphed to each other /potential boyfriend for Damien!/ "Hi there, Adam, I'm Stevie Rae." She stuck out her hand. As he took it she said, "You don't have a girlfriend, do ya?" His straight-toothed smile faltered, but only a little. "No. I don't, um. No. I absolutely don't have a girlfriend.

The first movie star I met was Norma Shearer. I was eight years old at the time and going to school with Irving Thalberg Jr. His father, the longtime production chief at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, devoted a large part of his creative life to making Norma a star, and he succeeded splendidly. Unfortunately, Thalberg had died suddenly in 1936, and his wife's career had begun to slowly deflate. Just like kids everywhere else, Hollywood kids had playdates at each other's houses, and one day I went to the Thalberg house in Santa Monica, where Irving Sr. had died eighteen months before. Norma was in bed, where, I was given to understand, she spent quite a bit of time so that on those occasions when she worked or went out in public she would look as rested as possible. She was making Marie Antoinette at the time, and to see her in the flesh was overwhelming. She very kindly autographed a picture for me, which I still have: "To Cadet Wagner, with my very best wishes. Norma Shearer." Years later I would be with her and Martin Arrouge, her second husband, at Sun Valley. No matter who the nominal hostess was, Norma was always the queen, and no matter what time the party was to begin, Norma was always late, because she would sit for hours—hours!—to do her makeup, then make the grand entrance. She was always and forever the star. She had to be that way, really, because she became a star by force of will—hers and Thalberg's. Better-looking on the screen than in life, Norma Shearer was certainly not a beauty on the level of Paulette Goddard, who didn't need makeup, didn't need anything. Paulette could simply toss her hair and walk out the front door, and strong men grew weak in the knees. Norma found the perfect husband in Martin. He was a lovely man, a really fine athlete—Martin was a superb skier—and totally devoted to her. In the circles they moved in, there were always backbiting comments when a woman married a younger man—" the stud ski instructor," that sort of thing. But Martin, who was twelve years younger than Norma and was indeed a ski instructor, never acknowledged any of that and was a thorough gentleman all his life. He had a superficial facial resemblance to Irving Thalberg, but Thalberg had a rheumatic heart and was a thin, nonathletic kind of man—intellectually vital, but physically weak. Martin was just the opposite—strong and virile, with a high energy level. Coming after years of being married to Thalberg and having to worry about his health, Martin must have been a delicious change for Norma.

This neighborhood was mine first. I walked each block twice: drunk, then sober. I lived every day with legs and headphones. It had snowed the night I ran down Lorimer and swore I’d stop at nothing. My love, he had died. What was I supposed to do? I regret nothing. Sometimes I feel washed up as paper. You’re three years away. But then I dance down Graham and the trees are the color of champagne and I remember— There are things I like about heartbreak, too, how it needs a good soundtrack. The way I catch a man’s gaze on the L and don’t look away first. Losing something is just revising it. After this love there will be more love. My body rising from a nest of sheets to pick up a stranger’s MetroCard. I regret nothing. Not the bar across the street from my apartment; I was still late. Not the shared bathroom in Barcelona, not the red-eyes, not the songs about black coats and Omaha. I lie about everything but not this. You were every streetlamp that winter. You held the crown of my head and for once I won’t show you what I’ve made. I regret nothing. Your mother and your Maine. Your wet hair in my lap after that first shower. The clinic and how I cried for a week afterwards. How we never chose the language we spoke. You wrote me a single poem and in it you were the dog and I the fire. Remember the courthouse? The anniversary song. Those goddamn Kmart towels. I loved them, when did we throw them away? Tomorrow I’ll write down everything we’ve done to each other and fill the bathtub with water. I’ll burn each piece of paper down to silt. And if it doesn’t work, I’ll do it again. And again and again and— — Hala Alyan, “Object Permanence

Everywhere power has to be seen in order to give the impression that it sees. But this is not the case. It doesn't see anything. It is like a woman walled up in a 'peepshow'. It is separated from society by a two-way mirror. And it turns slowly, undresses slowly, adopting the lewdest poses, little suspecting that the other is watching and masturbating in secret. The metro. A man gets on - by his glances, gestures and movements, he carves out a space for himself and protects it. From that space, he sets his actions to those of the neighbouring, approximate molecules. He becomes the centre of a physical pressure, sniffs out hostile vibrations and emanations, or friendly ones, on the verge of panic. He joins up with others out of fear. He innervates his whole body with a calculated indifference, wraps himself in a superficial reverie, created only to keep others at a distance. He deciphers nothing, protects himself from the crossfire of everyone's gazes and sets his own as a backhand down the line, staring at a particular face at the back of the carriage until the very lightness of his stare stirs the other in his sleep. When the train accelerates or brakes, all the bodies are thrown in the same direction, like the shoals of fish which change direction simultaneously. The marvellous underwater lethargy of the metro, the self-defence of the capillary systems, the cruel play of vague thoughts - all while waiting for the stop at Faidherbe-Chaligny. The crucial thing is not to have sweeping views of the future, but to know where to plant your primal scene. The danger for us is that we'll keep running up against the wall of the Revolution. For this is the source of our misery: our phobias, our prohibitions, our phantasies, our utopias are imbedded in the nineteenth century, where their foundations were laid down. We have to put an end to this historical coagulation. Beyond it, all is permitted. It will perhaps be the adventure of the end of the century to dissolve the wall of the Revolution and to plunge on beyond it, towards the marvels of form and spirit.

However we decide to apportion the credit for our improved life spans, the bottom line is that nearly all of us are better able today to resist the contagions and afflictions that commonly sickened our great-grandparents, while having massively better medical care to call on when we need it. In short, we have never had it so good. Or at least we have never had it so good if we are reasonably well-off. If there is one thing that should alarm and concern us today, it is how unequally the benefits of the last century have been shared. British life expectancies might have soared overall, but as John Lanchester noted in an essay in the London Review of Books in 2017, males in the East End of Glasgow today have a life expectancy of just fifty-four years—nine years less than a man in India. In exactly the same way, a thirty-year-old black male in Harlem, New York, is at much greater risk of dying than a thirty-year-old male Bangladeshi from stroke, heart disease, cancer, or diabetes. Climb aboard a bus or subway train in almost any large city in the Western world and you can experience similar vast disparities with a short journey. In Paris, travel five stops on the Metro’s B line from Port-Royal to La Plaine—Stade de France and you will find yourself among people who have an 82 percent greater chance of dying in a given year than those just down the line. In London, life expectancy drops reliably by one year for every two stops traveled eastward from Westminster on the District Line of the Underground. In St. Louis, Missouri, make a twenty-minute drive from prosperous Clayton to the inner-city Jeff-Vander-Lou neighborhood and life expectancy drops by one year for every minute of the journey, a little over two years for every mile. Two things can be said with confidence about life expectancy in the world today. One is that it is really helpful to be rich. If you are middle-aged, exceptionally well-off, and from almost any high-income nation, the chances are excellent that you will live into your late eighties. Someone who is otherwise identical to you but poor—exercises as devotedly, sleeps as many hours, eats a similarly healthy diet, but just has less money in the bank—can expect to die between ten and fifteen years sooner. That’s a lot of difference for an equivalent lifestyle, and no one is sure how to account for it.

Christians don't think that Dawkins thinks that they think that God really has a beard. "Old man in the sky with a white beard" is a figure of speech – shorthand – which neatly encapsulates various errors which lazy atheists and naive theists sometimes make, for example: 1: They imagine that Christians think that God is a human being of some kind and therefore ask questions like: "What does he eat?"; "If he made the world, what did he stand on?"; "If he doesn't have a beard, how does he shave?" and "How did he evolve?" (Three guesses which of those questions troubles Professor Dawkins.) Christians don't think that God is an old man. They don't even think he is a man. They probably don't even think he's made of atoms. 2: They confuse symbols with representations: they think that when Michelangelo painted God on the Pope's ceiling, he was making an informed guess about what someone would have seen with their eyes if they bumped into God on the Roman metro – as opposed to using pictures to put across theological ideas. 3: They imagine that Christians think that God lives in some particular place in space and time. They may not think that we think that he lives in the sky, but I think that they think that we think that if you had a fast enough spaceship you could eventually track him down. Dawkins doesn't commit himself on the question of God's facial hair; but it is pretty clear that he thinks that God lives in the sky – or at any rate, in some place in the empirical universe.

I'm breaking the ‘did we think about having sex with a stranger’ tension vibe we have going now. It must be broken to return to equilibrium. Sex is a for couples. It has emotion and knowing each other for more than a week. -Abby explaining why she kissed a man she met twelve hours ago.

—¡Asha’man, levantad la barricada tres metros! A la orden de Taim, el borde circular de la cúpula se elevó en todo el perímetro. Los desprevenidos Shaido, que habían estado empujando contra la barrera que no veían, trastabillaron hacia adelante, aunque se recuperaron de inmediato y el mar de rostros velados arremetió en masa. Pero sólo tuvieron tiempo para dar un paso antes de que se oyera la siguiente orden de Taim: —¡Asha’man, matad! La primera línea de Shaido explotó. No había otro modo de describirlo. Las figuras con cadin’sor saltaron hechas añicos en surtidores de sangre y carne. Los flujos de Saidin se adentraron a través de aquella densa rociada carmesí, saltando de figura en figura en un abrir y cerrar de ojos, y la siguiente línea de Shaido pereció, y a continuación la siguiente, y la siguiente, como si se estuvieran precipitando a un gigantesco picador de carne.

Everyone knows that death is unavoidable. Death was a part of daily life in the metro. But it always seemed that nothing unfortunate would happen to you, that the bullets would fly past you, the disease would skip over you. Death of old age was a slow affair so you needn’t think about it. You can’t live in constant awareness of your mortality. You had to forget about it, and though these thoughts came to you anyway, you had to drive them away, to smother them, otherwise they could take root in your consciousness and they would make your life a misery. You can’t think about the fact that you’ll die. Otherwise you might go mad. There’s only one thing that can save a man from madness and that’s uncertainty. The life of someone who has been sentenced to death is different from the life of a normal person in only one way: the one knows exactly when he will die, and the regular person is in the dark about it, and consequently it seems he can live forever, even though it’s entirely possible that he could be killed in a catastrophic event the following day. Death isn’t frightening by itself. What’s frightening is expecting it.

Fear and terror are not the same thing at all. Fear spurs a man on to take action and be creative. Terror paralyses the body and blocks the flow of thought, it makes a man less human.

You mean beauty doesn’t exist without people?’ Sasha asked eventually, puzzled. ‘Probably not,’ he replied absentmindedly. ‘If there’s no one to see it . . . After all, animals aren’t capable, are they?’ ‘And if animals are different from people because they can’t see the difference between what’s beautiful and what’s ugly,’ Sasha pondered, ‘does that mean people can’t exist without beauty either?’ ‘Oh, yes they can,’ said the old man, shaking his head. ‘Lots of people don’t need it at all.

Being or nothingness, that is the question. Ascending, descending, coming, going, a man does so much that in the end he disappears. A taxi bears him off, a metro carries him away, the Tower doesn't care, nor the Pantheon. Paris is but a dream, Gabriel is but a reverie (a charming one), Zazie the dream of a reverie (or of a nightmare) and all this story the dream of a dream, the reverie of a reverie, scarcely more than the typewritten delirium of an idiotic novelist.

Tourists enter Tehran from the south on a carriageway built by order of the Shah. On the city’s outskirts they pass through the green belt he envisioned would protect Tehran from the twin scourges of desert wind and dust. In the central city visitors pass by the government ministries, hospitals, universities, schools, concert halls, monuments, bridges, sports complexes, hotels, museums, galleries, and gleaming underground metro that were among his many pet projects. … He championed the social welfare state that today provides Iranians with access to state-run health care and education. He raised the scholarship money that allowed hundreds of thousands of Iranian university students, including many luminaries of the Islamic Republic, to study abroad at leading American and European universities. The Shah ordered the fighter jets that made Iran’s air force the most powerful in southwestern Asia. He established the first national parks and state forests and ordered strict water, animal, and conservation measures. Perhaps it is no surprise that Iran today has the look and feel of a haunted house. The man who built modern Iran is nowhere to be seen but his presence is felt everywhere. The revolutionaries who replaced the Shah may not like to hear it, but Iran today is as much his country as it is theirs.

Kam tu tā raksti?’’ es viņai jautāju, noliekdamies pār viņas kaklu. ‘’Tev.’’ ‘’Man?’’ Viņa mani pamet, es vēl paguvu nodomāt un jau sajutos nelāgi. ‘’Kas tev kait? Tu esi pavisam bāls. Vai kaut kas noticis?’’ ‘’Kādēļ tu man raksti?’’ ‘’O, patiesībā es īsti nerakstu tev, es rakstu, ko es vēlētos darīt kopā ar tevi…’’ Visās malās mētājās papīra lapas. Ap viņu, viņai pie kājām, uz gultas. Es paņēmu vienu uz labu laimi: …piknikot, gulēt siestu pie upes, ēst persikus, krevetes, radziņus, rīsus, peldēties, dejot, pirkt man kurpes, veļu, smaržas, lasīt avīzi, pētīt vitrīnas, braukt ar metro, uzmanīties, lai nenokavētu, pagrūst tevi, kad tu aizņem visu vietu, izkārt veļu, iet uz Operu, aizbraukt uz Beirutu, Vīni, iet uz sacīkstēm, iepirkties, rīkot bārbekjū, rūkt, jo tu aizmirsi ogles, tīrīt zobus reizē ar tevi, pirkt tev apakšbikses, pļaut mauriņu, lasīt avīzi tev pār plecu, neļaut tev pārēsties grauzdētus riekstiņus, apmeklēt Luāras vīna pagrabus un Hunter Valley pagrabus, tēlot muļķi, čalot, iepazīstināt tevi ar Martu un Tino, lasīt kazenes, gatavot ēst, atgriezties Vjetnamā, nēsāt sari, kopt dārzu, atkal tevi pamodināt, jo tu krāc, iet uz zooloģisko dārzu, uz krāmu tirgu, braukt uz Parīzi, Londonu, Melrouzu, Pikadiliju, dziedāt tev dziesmas, atmest smēķēšanu, lūgt, lai tu man nogriez nagus, pirkt traukus, niekus, nekam nederīgas lietas, ēst saldējumu, skatīties uz cilvēkiem, uzvarēt tevi šahā, klausīties džezu, regeju, dejot mambo un čačača, garlaikoties, gražoties, pūsties, smieties, tīt tevi ap mazo pirkstiņu, meklēt māju ar skatu uz govīm, nepiedienīgi piekraut iepirkuma ratiņus, pārkrāsot griestus, šūt aizkarus, stundām sēdēt pie galda, runājot ar interesantiem cilvēkiem, raustīt tevi aiz ūsām, griezt tev matus, ravēt nezāles, mazgāt mašīnu, sacīt tev skarbus vārdus, iemācīties adīt, uzadīt tev šalli, izārdīt tās šausmas, savākt kaķus, suņus, papagaiļus, ziloņus, noīrēt riteņus, nebraukt ar tiem, gulēt šūpuļtīklā, pārlasīt vecmāmiņas Bicot, atkal apskatīt Sūzijas kleitas, ēnā dzert Margaritas, krāpties, iemācīties lietot gludekli, izsviest gludekli pa logu, dziedāt lietū, bēgt no tūristiem, noreibt, teikt tev visu patiesību, atcerēties, ka visu patiesību nevajag sacīt, klausīties tevī, dot tev roku, iet pakaļ gludeklim, klausīties dziesmu vārdus, uzlikt modinātāju, aizmirst čemodānus, beigt rikšot, iznest atkritumu spaini, jautāt tev, vai tu vēl arvien mani mīli, pļāpāt ar kaimiņieni, stāstīt tev par savu bērnību Bahreinā, par manas auklītes gredzeniem, hennas un ambras bumbiņu smaržu, smērēt plānas maizes šķēles, līmēt etiķetes uz ievārījuma podiem…

Vai varu tev ko uzticēt? Ko ļoti smagu? -Uzticiet vien, ja jau tik tālu esam… - Man liekas, ka tas ir labi. - Kas ir labi? - Tas, kas ar tevi notiek… - Būt par muļķu karalieni? - Nē, ka Adrians aiziet. Man liekas, tu esi vairāk vērta… Vairāk vērta nekā šī mazliet uzspēlētā jautrība… Vairāk vērta nekā vīlēt nagus metro, ņurcot savu piezīmju blociņu, vairāk vērta nekā Firmenžedona skvērs, vairāk vērta nekā tas, par ko jūs abi bijāt kļuvuši. Tas ir šokējoši, ko es tev te tagad stāstu, vai ne? Un piedevām, kur es bāžu savu degunu? Jā, tas ir šokējoši, bet ko padarīsi. Es nespēju izlikties, tu man esi pārāk mīļa. Man liekas, Adrians nebija uzdevuma augstumos. Viņš atļāvās būt pārāk kūtrs ar tevi. Lūk, ko es domāju… Tas ir šokējoši, jo viņš ir mans dēls, un man nevajadzētu par viņu tā runāt… Jā, es zinu. Bet, lūk, es esmu vecs muļķis, un man nospļauties par pieklājību. Es tev to saku, jo es tev uzticos. Tu… Tu netiki mīlēta, kā nākas. Un, ja tu būtu tikpat godīga kā es šajā konkrētajā tavas dzīves minūtē, tu, protams, savilktu aizvainotu seju, bet tu domātu tieši tāpat…

Kryptonite. I love their smell, their taste, the sounds they make when they come inside of me. But between a full-time job, law school, hours of reading cases, and study groups, I barely have time to sleep, much less date. Which is why I gave them up. “Which floor?” His upper crust Brit accent curls around my spine, making mush out of me. “Uh, nine.” I reach across to press the ‘9’ button, and a whiff of his scent reaches me—expensive cologne, clean soap, and a base note I suspect is just him. My legs, already wobbly from the mad dash from the Metro, turn to Jell-O. Damn! No wonder women stuff panties in his pockets. The man is pure sex on a stick. If anybody could tempt me to break my no-screwing-men vow, yeah, it would be Gabriel Storm. The door closes and someone coughs, alerting me to the other people in the elevator. Hoping no one noticed my temporary lapse of sanity, I look behind me. Only blank expressions greet me. Thank God. It won’t do for a rumor to spread around the office that I’ve been caught drooling over the COO of the company we are negotiating against. No one would take me seriously after that. I do the polite thing and wish good morning all around, get back a couple of nods before the car reaches the second floor, site of my law firm’s cafeteria. As soon as the door opens, the smell of cinnamon drifts into the car. Stuffed French toast day. Knowing what’s coming, I step to the side to avoid the stampede. Not that I blame them. With a limited supply of the delicious treat, it’s every employee for himself. When the doors slide shut, Gabriel Storm and I are the sole occupants in the car. For seven floors,

Also ich hab da so ne Theorie... So ne Art Vergleich. Dass das Leben wie eine Metrolinie ist... wie... Gleise. Und zwischendurch gibt es Weichen, die dich auf ein anderes Gleis führen. Und es gibt nicht nur eine Endstation, sondern mehrere. Manche wollen einfach nur von hier nach da, mehr nicht. Andere wollen ins Depot, um sich auszuruhen. Und wieder andere wechseln über geheime Verbindungsgänge auf eine andere Linie. Will sagen... Natürlich kann immer was passieren. Aber! Jeder hat nur einen Zielpunkt! Seinen eigenen! Und man muss eben einfach die Weichen immer schön richtig stellen, damit man seinen Zielpunkt erreicht!

I was convinced I'd met all the men metro Boston had to offer. There was the wandering millennials, the affluent assholes, the man-shaped children, the chronically misogynistic mansplainers.

Of all the letters I’ve received from readers, my favorite came from a homeless man. It arrived in a dirty envelope with no return address, and it was scrawled on neon orange paper. It was signed “Berkeley Baby.” It would never have made it past the New York Times mailroom after the anthrax scare. The letter writer turned out to have been the night rewrite editor on the metro desk at the New York Times before he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in the mid-1970s. Since then, he had adopted the name Berkeley Baby and lived on the streets of Berkeley, California, near the university, a forlorn, sad figure not unlike the Phantom of Fine Hall. He wrote, “John Nash’s story gives me hope that one day the world will come back to me too.

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„Im Westen nannte man sie ›Satan‹. Dieser Name war der einzige lichte Moment der ansonsten blindgeborenen menschlichen Zivilisation.

„Als ich und meine Kollegen begriffen, dass sich das Phänomen Kannibalismus hier bereits etabliert hatte und nichts mehr dagegen zu unternehmen war, beschlossen wir, uns wenigstens um die kulinarische Seite der Angelegenheit zu kümmern. Und da erinnerte sich einer von uns daran, wie in Korea Hunde zubereitet werden: Man steckt sie lebend in einen Sack und schlägt sie mit Prügeln tot. Das Fleisch gewinnt dadurch an Qualität. Es wird weich und zart. Was für den einen multiple Hämatome sind, ist für den anderen sozusagen ein geklopftes Schnitzel. Also nehmt es uns bitte nicht übel. Ich könnte mir ja durchaus vorstellen, zuerst den Exitus herbeizuführen und dann prügeln zu lassen, aber leider sind innere Blutungen ein absolutes Muss. Rezept ist Rezept.«

„Doch Gebote, die von göttlichen Lippen verkündet werden, überdauern Jahrhunderte. Es braucht gar nicht viel. Man muss nur einen Gott schaffen und ihm beibringen, die richtigen Worte zu sprechen.

But who is he, my protagonist? Jacob? Marusya? Genrikh? Me? Yurik? No. No one, in fact, who is conscious of an individual existence, of birth and an anticipated, and unavoidable, death. Not a person at all, one might say, but a substance with a certain chemical makeup. And is it possible to call a “substance” something that, being immortal, has the capacity to transform itself, to change all its fine, subtle little planes and angles, its crooks and crevices, its radicals? It is more likely an essence that belongs neither to being nor to nonbeing. It wanders through generations, from person to person, and creates the very illusion of personality. It is the immortal essence, written in code, that organized the mortal bodies of Pythagoras and Aristotle, Parmenides and Plato, as well as the random person one encounters on the road, in the streetcar, on the metro, or in the seat next to you in an airplane. Who suddenly appears before you, and calls up a familiar, dim sensation of a previously glimpsed outline, a bend or a curve, a likeness—perhaps of a great-grandfather, a fellow villager, or even someone from the other side of the world. Thus, my protagonist is essence itself. The bearer of everything that defines a human being—the high and the low, courage and cowardice, cruelty and gentleness, and the hunger for knowledge. One hundred thousand essences, united in a certain pattern and order, form a human being, a temporary abode for each and every person. This is, in fact, immortality. And you, a human being—a white man, a black woman, an idiot, a genius, a Nigerian pirate, a Parisian baker, a transvestite from Rio de Janeiro, an old rabbi from Bnei Brak—you, too, are just a temporary abode.

Wie sonst sollen wir mit unseren Leuten fertig werden? Ständig muss man sie ablenken. Zügeln. Kanalisieren sozusagen. Ihnen irgendeine Idee unterjubeln. Eine Religion oder Ideologie. Immer wieder neue Feinde für sie erfinden. Sie können einfach nicht ohne Feinde! Ohne Feinde verlieren sie sich! Können sich nicht mehr definieren. Wissen nichts über sich selbst.