Seymour Quotes

I'm a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.

I have scars on my hands from touching certain people…Certain heads, certain colours and textures of human hair leave permanent marks on me.

I privately say to you, old friend... please accept from me this unpretentious bouquet of early-blooming parentheses: (((()))).

I don't really deeply feel that anyone needs an airtight reason for quoting from the works of the writers he loves, but it's always nice, I'll grant you, if he has one.

Give me a story that just makes me unreasonably vigilant. Keep me up till five only because all your stars are out, and for no other reason.

The connection was so bad, and I couldn’t talk at all during most of the call. How terrible it is when you say I love you and the person at the other end shouts back ‘What?

Seymour once said that all we do our whole lives is go from one little piece of Holy Ground to the next. Is he ever wrong?

I'll tell you a terrible secret — Are you listening to me? There isn't anyone out there who isn't Seymour's Fat Lady.

I'm more interested in arousing enthusiasm in kids than in teaching the facts. The facts may change, but that enthusiasm for exploring the world will remain with them the rest of their lives.

I live alone (but catless, I'd like everybody to know)....

Do you know what I was smiling at? You wrote down that you were a writer by profession. It sounded to me like the loveliest euphemism I had ever heard. When was writing ever your profession? It's never been anything but your religion.

She worries over the way her love for me comes and goes, appears and disappears. She doubts its reality simply because it isn't as steadily pleasurable as a kitten. God knows it is sad. The human voice conspires to desecrate everything on earth.

I have so much I want to tell you, and nowhere to begin.

There isn't anyone out there who isn't Seymour's Fat Lady.

Jane," I said quietly. She opened her eyes, she had been far away in prayer. "Yes, Mary? Forgive me, I was praying." "If you go on flirting with the king with those sickly little smiles, one of us Boleyns is going to scratch your eyes out.

Keep me up till five because all your stars are out, and for no other reason…Oh dare to do it Buddy! Trust your heart. You’re a deserving craftsman. It would never betray you. Good night. I’m feeling very much over-excited now, and a little dramatic, but I think I’d give almost anything on earth to see you writing a something, an anything, a poem, a tree, that was really and truly after your own heart.

Just go to bed, now. Quickly. Quickly and slowly.

oh, this happiness is strong stuff. It's marvelously liberating.

I’m not going to bed after all. Somebody around here hath murdered sleep. Good for him.

John Keats / John Keats / John / Please put your scarf on.

If you're going to say the Jesus Prayer, at least say it to Jesus, and not to St. Francis and Seymour and Heidi's grandfather all wrapped up in one.

I wanted you to thank you for being my friend and letting me play a part in your story.

If you can't, or won't, think of Seymour, then you go right ahead and call in some ignorant psychoanalyst. You just do that. You just call in some analyst who's experienced in adjusting people to the joys of television, and Life magazine every Wednesday, and European travel, and the H-bomb, and Presidential elections, and the front page of the Times, and God knows what else that's gloriously normal.

But guilt is guilt. It doesn't go away. It can't be nullified. It can't even be fully understood, I'm certain - it's roots run too deep into private and long-standing karma. About the only thing that saves my neck when I get to feeling this way is that guilt is an imperfect form of knowledge. Just because it isn't perfect doesn't mean that it can't be used. The hard thing to do is to put it to practical use, before it gets around to paralyzing you.

If there is an amateur reader still left in the world—or anybody who just reads and runs—I ask him or her, with untellable affection and gratitude, to split the dedication of this book four ways with my wife and children.

Books … they’re kind of a compulsion for me. To find a great bookstore is a great thing.

If only you’d remember before ever you sit down to write that you’ve been a reader long before you were ever a writer. You simply fix that fact in your mind, then sit very still and ask yourself, as a reader, what piece of writing in all the world Buddy Glass would most want to read if he had his heart’s choice. The next step is terrible, but so simple I can hardly believe it as I write it. You just sit down shamelessly and write the thing yourself. I won’t even underline that. It’s too important to be underlined.

There isn't anyone anywhere who isn't Seymour's Fat Lady. Don't you know that? Don't you know that goddam secret yet? And don't you know — listen to me, now — don't you know who that Fat Lady really is? . . . Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It's Christ Himself. Christ Himself, buddy.

Keep me up till five because all your stars are out, and for no other reason.

Edward Seymour says, ‘You should have been a bishop, Cromwell.’ ‘Edward,’ he says, ‘I should have been Pope.

Zooey said... It would be very nice to come home and be in the wrong house. To eat dinner with the wrong people by mistake, sleep in the wrong bed by mistake, and kiss everybody good-bye in the morning thinking they were your own family.

Yet a real artist, I've noticed, will survive anything. (Even praise, I happily suspect.)

Every maker of video games knows something that the makers of curriculum don't seem to understand. You'll never see a video game being advertised as being easy. Kids who do not like school will tell you it's not because it's too hard. It's because it's--boring

Anyway, I started bitching one night before the broadcast. Seymour'd told me to shine my shoes just as I was going out the door with Waker. I was furious. The studio audience were all morons, the announcer was a moron, the sponsors were morons, and I just damn well wasn't going to shine my shoes for them, I told Seymour. I said they couldn't see them anyway, where we sat. He said to shine them anyway. He said to shine them for the Fat Lady.

I feel overwhelmingly grateful to them, but I don't know what to do with their invisible gifts.

In a cool solitude of trees Where leaves and birds a music spin, Mind that was weary is at ease, New rhythms in the soul begin. - In a Cool Solitude of Trees

Were most of your stars out? Were you busy writing your heart out?

However contradictory the coroner's report — whether he pronounces Consumption or Loneliness or Suicide to be the cause of death — isn't it plain how the true artist-seer actually dies? I say that the true artist-seer, the heavenly fool who can and does produce beauty, is mainly dazzled to death by his own scruples, the blinding shapes and colors of his own sacred human conscience.

Emotions make excellent servants, but tyrannical masters.

If or when I do start going to an analyst, I hope to God he has the foresight to let a dermatologist sit in on the consultation. A hand specialist. I have scars on my hands from touching certain people... Certain heads, certain colours and textures of human hair leave permanent marks on me. Other things, too. Charlotte once ran away from me, outside the studio, and I grabbed her dress to stop her, to keep her near me. A yellow cotton dress I loved because it was too long for her. I still have a lemon-yellow mark on the palm of my right hand. Oh God, if I'm anything by a clincal name, I'm a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.

Generally in life, knowledge is acquired to be used. But school learning more often fits Freire's apt metaphor: knowledge is treated like money, to be put away in a bank for the future.

Surely, he was all real things to us: our blue-striped unicorn, our double-lensed burning glass, our consultant genius, our portable conscience, our supercargo and our one full poet.

Seymour once said to me — in a crosstown bus, of all places — that all legitimate religious study must lead to unlearning the differences, the illusory differences, between boys and girls, animals and stones, day and night, heat and cold.

You have to count on living every single day in a way you believe will make you feel good about your life--so that if it were over tomorrow, you'd be content with yourself.

I'm only a housewife, I'm afraid." How often do we hear this shocking admission. I'm afraid when I hear it I feel very angry indeed. Only a housewife: only a practitioner of one of the two most noble professions (the other one is that of a farmer); only the mistress of a huge battery of high and varied skills and custodian of civilization itself. Only a typist, perhaps! Only a company director, or a nuclear physicist; only a barrister; only the President! When a woman says she is a housewife she should say it with the utmost pride, for there is nothing higher on this planet to which she could aspire.

Kindness is goodness hidden in the heart More often than declared in speech. - Kindness

By age seventeen he [Seymoure Sthulman]'d convinced himself that every human being he saw was a parasite, captive to the dictates of consumption. But as he reconstructs Zeno's translation, he realizes that the truth is infinitely more complicated, that we all are beautiful even as we are all part of the problem, and that to be a part of the problem is to be human.

Franny has the measles, for one thing. Incidentally, did you hear her last week? She went on at beautiful length about how she used to fly all around the apartment when she was four and no one was home. The new announcer is worse than Grant - if possible, even worse than Sullivan in the old days. He said she surely dreamt that she was able to fly. The baby stood her ground like an angel. She said she knew she was able to fly because when she came down she always had dust on her fingers from touching the light bulbs.

I think part of why I have so many books around me and why I read every day is because I mythologize the writer. I don’t do that with any other artists.

I have scars on my hand from touching certain people. Once, in the park, when Frannie was still in the carriage, I put my hand on the downy pate of her head and left it there too long. Another time, at Loew's Seventy-second Street, with Zooey during a spooky movie. He was about six or seven, and he went under the seat to avoid watching a scary scene. I put my hand on his head. Certain heads, certain colors and textures of human hair leave permanent marks on me. Other things, too. Charlotte once ran away from me, outside the studio, and I grabbed her dress to stop her, to keep her near me. A yellow cotton dress I loved because it was too long for her. I still have a lemon-yellow mark on the palm of my right hand.

Sometimes your friends are your lovers, or have been at one time.

Personally, I'm not much for symbolism. I never get it. Why can't things be just as they are? I never thought to psychoanalyze Seymour Glass or sought to break down "Desolation Row." I just wanted to get lost, become one with somewhere else, slip a wreath on a steeple top solely because I wished it.

I privately say to you old friend (unto you, really, I'm afraid), please accept from me this unpretentious bouquet of early-blooming parenthesis: (((( )))). I suppose, most unflorally, I truly mean them to be taken, first off as bow-legged--buckle-legged--omens of my state of mind and body at this writing.

...my atoms, moreover, are arranged to make me constitutionally inclined to believe that where there's smoke there's usually strawberry Jello, seldom fire...

Knowledge empowers people with our most powerful tool: the ability to think and decide. There is no power for change greater than a child discovering what he or she cares about. (Speech about Global Warming read on the National Mall for the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, 2010)

I asked him what, if anything, got him down about teaching. He said he didn't think that anything about it got him exactly down, but there was one thing, he thought, that frightened him: reading the pencilled notations in the margins of books in the college library.

But fishing, as we know, in libraries or anywhere else, is a tricky business, with never a certainty of who's going to catch whom.

Turning on the shower, he thought of the wildly fancy bathroom at Charlotte's house. It was funny to think of, but the bathrooms he liked weren't fancy; this one, and the one at Seymour's, and the one at Harry's. They weren't fancy, but they were home. He got in the shower. The one squirt that always went haywire hit him right in the eye. He laughed up into the warm water running over his ears.

Plainly, she is quite besotted by him,... a girl, a young girl, and she is falling in love for the first time in her life. ...little Kitty Howard at a loss, stumbling in her speech, blushing like a rose, thinking of someone else and not herself is to see a girl become a woman.

I say that the true artist-seer, the heavenly fool who can and does produce beauty, is mainly dazzled to death by his own scruples, the blinding shapes and colors of his own human conscience.

Undoubtedly, though, what I'm really getting at is this: Since the bridegroom's permanent retirement from the scene, I haven't been able to think of anybody whom I'd care to send out to look for horses in his stead.

Years ago, in my earliest and pastiest days as a would-be writer, I once read a new story aloud to S. and Boo Boo. When I was finished, Boo Boo said flatly (but looking over at Seymour) that the story was “too clever.” S. shook his head, beaming away at me, and said cleverness was my permanent affliction, my wooden leg, and that it was in the worst possible taste to draw the group’s attention to it. As one limping man to another, old Zooey, let’s be courteous and kind to each other.

But what I don’t like — and what I don’t think either Seymour or Buddy would like, either, as a matter of fact — is the way you talk about all these people. I mean you don’t just despise what they represent — you despise them. It’s too damn personal, Franny. I mean it. You get a real little homicidal glint in your eye when you talk about this Tupper, for instance. All this business about his going into the men’s room to muss his hair before he comes in to class. All that. He probably does — it goes with everything else you’ve told me about him. I’m not saying it doesn’t. But it’s none of your business, buddy, what he does with his hair. It would be all right, in a way, if you thought his personal affectations were sort of funny. Or if you felt a tiny bit sorry for him for being insecure enough to give himself a little pathetic goddam glamour. But when you tell me about it — and I’m not fooling, now — you tell me about it as though his hair was a goddamn personal enemy of yours. That is not right — and you know it. If you’re going to to war against the System, just do your shooting like a nice, intelligent girl — because the enemy’s there, and not because you don’t like his hairdo or his goddam necktie.

God almighty, Franny," he said. "If you're going to say the Jesus Prayer, at least say it to Jesus, and not to St. Francis and Seymour and Heidi's grandfather all wrapped up in one. Keep him in mind if you say it, and him only, and him as he was and not as you'd like him to have been.

I don't care where an actor acts. It can be in summer stock, it can be over a radio, it can be over television, it can be in a goddam Broadway theatre, complete with the most fashionable, most well-fed, most sunburned-looking audience you can imagine. But I'll tell you a terrible secret — Are you listening to me? There isn't anyone out there who isn't Seymour's Fat Lady. That includes your Professor Tupper, buddy. And all his goddam cousins by the dozens. There isn't anyone anywhere that isn't Seymour's Fat Lady. Don't you know that? Don't you know that goddam secret yet? And don't you know — listen to me, now — don't you know who that Fat Lady really is? . . . Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It's Christ Himself. Christ Himself, buddy.

In a classical joke a child stays behind after school to ask a personal question. "Teacher, what did I learn today? " The surprised teacher asks, "Why do you ask that?" and the child replies, "Daddy always asks me and I never know what to say".

Love is but a frailty of mind when ‘tis not with ambition joined." -Sir Thomas Seymour

You can't argue with someone who believes, or just passionately suspects, that the poet's function is not to write what he must write but, rather, to write what he would write if his life depended on his taking responsibility for writing what he must in a style designed to shut out as few of his old librarians as humanly possible.

When I'd originally loaded the car and held the door open for him, I'd had a passing impulse to pick him up bodily and insert him gently through the open window.

I do very emphatically believe there is an enormous amount of the androgynous in any all-or-nothing prose writer, or even a would-be one.

The lesson here is this: Do what God says to do, nothing more and nothing less. There is no game here. There is one move, and it belongs to God. Your job is to follow it.

Only during courtship might a woman briefly gain the upper hand, as both Anne Boleyn and Jane Seymour did, but woe betide her if she did not quickly learn to conform once the wedding-ring was on her finger. The

I've met the girl. She's a zero in my opinion but terrific-looking. I don't actually know that she's a zero. I mean she hardly said two words the night I met her. Just sat and smiled and smoked, so it isn't fair to say.

This is too grand to be said (so I’m just the man to say it), but I can’t be my brother’s brother for nothing, and I know – not always, but I know – there is no single thing I do that is more important than going into that awful Room 307. There isn’t one girl in there, including the Terrible Miss Zabel, who is not as much my sister as Boo Boo or Franny. They may shine with the misinformation of the ages, but they shine. This thought manages to stun me: There’s no place I’d really rather got right now than into Room 307. Seymour once said that all we do our whole lives is go from one little piece of Holy Ground to the next. Is he never wrong? Just go to bed, now. Quickly. Quickly and slowly.

Never sway from what God has commanded you to do in the earth. No matter what your age, your generation has not passed until you exit the earth and enter heaven. So if God has commanded you to fulfill a commission, make it your utmost priority as long as you live.

Zooey was in dreamy top form. The announcer had them off on the subject of housing developments, and the little Burke girl said she hated houses that all look alike-meaning a long row of identical 'development' houses. Zooey said they were 'nice.' He said it would be very nice to come home and be in the wrong house. To eat dinner with the wrong people by mistake, sleep in the wrong bed by mistake, and kiss everybody goodbye in the morning thinking they were your own family. He said he even wished everybody in the world looked exactly alike. He said you'd keep thinking everybody you met was your wife or your mother or father, and people would always be throwing their arms around each other wherever they went, and it would look 'very nice.

Kindness is in a prison till it finds Release in words or deeds. - Kindness

Keep your heart open, and love will always find its way

There is no pleasure that I haven't made myself sick on.

Oh, God, if I'm anything by a clinical name, I'm a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I think people are plotting to make me happy.

It's really not a question of how long you have on this earth; it's about what you do with it.

You can’t think about thinking without thinking about thinking about something.

How I worship her simplicity, her terrible honesty. How I rely on it. Как боготворя нейната непосредственост, нейната невероятна честност! Как разчитам на тази честност!

My lips were quivering slightly, like two fools. Устните ми потрепваха като двама глупаци.

When they argue, there can be no danger of a permanent rift, because they're Mother and Daughter. A terrible and beautiful phenomenon to watch.

There isn't anyone out there who isn't Seymour's Fat Lady ... don't you know who that Fat Lady really is? ... Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It's Christ Himself. Christ Himself, buddy.

I believe I essentially remain what I have always been—a narrator, but one with extremely pressing personal needs. I want to introduce, I want to describe, I want to distribute mementos, amulets, I want to break out my wallet and pass around snapshots, I want to follow my nose. In this mood I don't dare go anywhere near the short story form. It eats up little fat undetached writers like me.

Jane would be the next queen and her children, when she had them, would be the next princes or princesses. Or she might wait, as the other queens had waited, every month, desperate to know that she had conceived, knowing each month that it did not happen that Henry's love wore a little thinner, that his patience grew a little shorter. Or Anne's curse of death in childbed, and death to her son, might come true. I did not envy Jane Seymour. I had seen two queens married to King Henry and neither of them had much joy of it.

When I’d checked into the bathroom with Seymour’s diary under my arm, and had carefully secured the door behind me, I spotted a message almost immediately. It was not, however, in Seymour’s handwriting but, unmistakably, in my sister Boo Boo’s. With or without soap, her handwriting was always almost indecipherably minute, and she had easily managed to post the following message up on the mirror; 'Raise high the roof beam, carpenters. Like Ares comes the bridegroom, taller far than a tall man. Love, Irving Sappho, formerly under contract to Elysium Studios Ltd. Please be happy happy happy with your beautiful Muriel. This is an order. I outrank everybody on this block.

An instant later, a silk hat materialised in the air beside me, considerably down and to the left, and my special, only technically unassigned cohort grinned up at me - for a moment, I rather thought he was going to slip his hand into mine.

Katherine of Aragon was a staunch but misguided woman of principle; Anne Boleyn an ambitious adventuress with a penchant for vengeance; Jane Seymour a strong-minded matriarch in the making; Anne of Cleves a good-humoured woman who jumped at the chance of independence; Katherine Howard an empty-headed wanton; and Katherine Parr a godly matron who was nevertheless all too human when it came to a handsome rogue.

To believe that someone else is responsible for your emotional state is to give them a sort of psychic power over you they do not have...we really do generate our own feelings. No one else can do it for us. We respond and are responsible. To think other people are responsible for our feelings is to inhabit a billiard ball, inanimate universe.

One of the thousand reasons I quit going to the theater when I was about twenty was that I resented like hell filing out of the theater just because some playwright was forever slamming down his silly curtain. (What ever became of that stalwart Fortinbras? Who eventually fixed his wagon?) Nonetheless, I’m done here… Seymour once said that all we do our whole lives is go from one piece of Holy Ground to the next. Is he never wrong? Just go to bed, now. Quickly. Quickly and slowly.

For example, when Seymour told one of the twins or Zooey or Franny or even Mme. Boo Boo (who was only two years younger than myself, and often entirely the Lady), to take off his or her galoshes on coming into the apartment, each and all of them knew he mostly meant that the floor would get tracked up if they didn't and that Bessie would have to get out the mop. When I told them to take off their galoshes, they knew I mostly meant that people who didn't were slobs. It was bound to make no small difference in the way they kidded or ragged us separately.

We shall seek the truth and endure the consequences.

Once, at one of the very rare and savory moments when my own teammates grudgingly allowed me to take the ball around one of the ends, Seymour, playing for the opposite side, disconcerted me by looking overjoyed to see me as I charged in his direction, as though it were an unexpected, an enormously providential chance encounter. I stopped almost dead short, and someone, of course, brought me down, in neighborhood talk, like a ton of bricks.

A journalist marries the news, Seymour. She’s capricious, cruel, and jealous. She demands you follow her to wherever on Earth life is cheapest, where she’ll stay a day or two, then jet off. You, your safety, your family are nothing,

Charlotte once ran away from me, outside the studio, and I grabbed her dress to stop her, to keep her near me. A yellow cotton dress I loved because it was too long for her. I still have a lemon-yellow mark on the palm of my right hand.

Fanny snarled. “She would never agree to help a talking, part-metal bull carry out his evil plans in exchange for cash – unlike me!” “Of course,” McMoo realized. “When Seymour Bushes went to the outside toilet he shouted Eliza’s name because he thought you were her. You were hiding inside!” She nodded proudly. “I went there as soon as I’d sneaked in and slipped the moo-der card in his paper –

When Seymour and I were five and three, Les and Bessie played on the same bill for a couple of weeks with Joe Jackson -- the redoubtable Joe Jackson of the nickel-plated trick bicycle that shone like something better than platinum to the very last row of the theater. A good many years later, not long after the outbreak of the Second World War, when Seymour and I had just recently moved into a small New York apartment of our own, our father -- Les, as he'll be called hereafter -- dropped in on us one evening on his way home from a pinochle game. He quite apparently had held very bad cards all afternoon. He came in, at any rate, rigidly predisposed to keep his overcoat on. He sat. He scowled at the furnishings. He turned my hand over to check for cigarette-tar stains on my fingers, then asked Seymour how many cigarettes he smoked a day. He thought he found a fly in his highball. At length, when the conversation -- in my view, at least -- was going straight to hell, he got up abruptly and went over to look at a photograph of himself and Bessie that had been newly tacked up on the wall. He glowered at it for a full minute, or more, then turned around, with a brusqueness no one in the family would have found unusual, and asked Seymour if he remembered the time Joe Jackson had given him, Seymour, a ride on the handle bars of his bicycle, all over the stage, around and around. Seymour, sitting in an old corduroy armchair across the room, a cigarette going, wearing a blue shirt, gray slacks, moccasins with the counters broken down, a shaving cut on the side of his face that I could see, replied gravely and at once, and in the special way he always answered questions from Les -- as if they were the questions, above all others, he preferred to be asked in his life. He said he wasn't sure he had ever got off Joe Jackson's beautiful bicycle.

Questions are also interventions. A good question can take a person's mind in a completely new direction and change his life. For example, ask yourself frequently, 'What is the most useful question to ask now?

French Louis Seymour of the West Canada Creek, who knew how to survive all alone in a treacherous wilderness, and Mr. Alfred G. Vanderbilt of New York City and Raquette Lake, who was richer than God and traveled in his very own Pullman car, and Emmie Hubbard of the Uncas Road, who painted the most beautiful pictures when she was drunk and burned them in her woodstove when she was sober, were all ten times more interesting to me than Milton's devil or Austen's boy-crazy girls or that twitchy fool of Poe's who couldn't think of any place better to bury a body than under his own damn floor.

It's the sort of absurd notion, though, that I wouldn't mind taking out for a good academic run someday.

When we believe something, we act as if it is true.

We are required only to keep looking.

Well, sit down next to me on this porch swing,” Seymour Williams said. “And we’ll tell you about something that never happened.

With his pewter-colored locks and sturdy jaw, Graham Seymour was the archetypal British civil servant, a man who’d been born, bred, and educated to lead. He was handsome, but not too; he was tall, but not remarkably so. He made others feel inferior, especially Americans.

[Y]ou’re someone who took up birds in the first place because they fired your imagination; they fascinated you because ‘they seemed of all created beings the nearest to pure spirit- those little creatures with a normal temperature of 125°.

She's an irritating, opinionated woman, a type Buddy can't stand. I don't think he could see her for what she is. A person, deprived, for life, of any understanding or taste for the main current of poetry that flows through things, all things.

Churchill: The strangling of Bolshevism at its birth would have been an untold blessing to the human race. Mr. Seymour Cocks (Labor Party): "If that had happened we should have lost the 1939 -45 war". Churchill: No, it would have prevented that war. [Speech in the House of Commons, May 11,1953]

Would you like to know how Charlotte got those nine stitches?" I asked suddenly, in a tone of voice that sounded perfectly normal to me. "We were up at the Lake. Seymour had written to Charlotte, inviting her to come up and visit us, and her mother finally let her. What happened was, she sat down in the middle of our driveway one morning to pet Boo Boo's cat, and Seymour threw a stone at her. He was twelve. That's all there was to it. He threw it at her because she looked so beautiful sitting there in the middle of the driveway with Boo Boo's cat. Everybody knew that for God's sake-me, Charlotte, Boo Boo, Waker, Walt, the whole family." I stared at the pewter ashtray on the coffee table. "Charlotte never said a word to him about it. Not a word." I looked up at my guest, rather expecting him to dispute me, to call me a liar. I am a liar, of course. Charlotte never did understand why Seymour threw that stone at her. My guest didn't dispute me though.

The newspaper of today far too often rush into print with stories that are essentially little more than tips, or hints of something toxic or criminal. For lack of time, money or skilled staff, we are besiege with "he said, she said".

Seymour once said to me—in a crosstown bus, of all places—that all legitimate religious study must lead to unlearning the differences, the illusory differences, between boys and girls, animals and stones, day and night, heat and cold.

It is June 27, 1912. You are lying in your bed in the Grand Hotel and it is 6 p.m. on the evening of June 27, 1912. Your mind accepts this absolutely. 6 p.m. on June 27, 1912. Elise McKenna is in this hotel at this very moment. Her manager, William Fawcett Robinson, is in this hotel at this very moment. Now, this moment, here. Both in the Grand Hotel on this evening of June 27, 1912. 6 p.m. on June 27, 1912. Elise McKenna, now, in this hotel. She and her company are in this hotel at this very moment. Now on June 27, 1912, 6 p.m. Your mind accepts this, absolutely. You have traveled back in time, soon you will open your eyes. You will walk into the corridor, and you will go downstairs and you will find Elise McKenna, who is in this hotel at this very moment.

Sickness and disease are destroyed through the precious atonement of Jesus. O how we ought to honor the stripes of Jesus, for "with his stripes we are healed.

The books I like...contain things to ponder, ignore, memorize, and laugh and wonder at.

Why' questions have little value, at best they get justifications or long explanations which do nothing to change the situation.

My own boyfriend didn't think I had the hypothetical balls to have sex in the park or go to a drag ball in the eighteen hundreds. Was I that much of a wimp?

When first we met we did not guess that Love would prove so hard a master.

Progressive teachers knew very well how to use the computer for their own ends as an instrument of change; School knew very well how to nip this subversion in the bud.

Others determined the morality. Others had the hatred. Others turned his work into victories. He did as he was told, expertise his trade mark. The soldier in his army.

I remember a little dispersed band of unfamiliar faces that surreptitiously turned around, now and then, to see who was coughing.

Horrible, but right. An honest Medusa’s Head.

This I have known, and these have come again With echoing happiness in heart and brain; Time standing still, surrendering to me Beauty that otherwise would cease to be. - Time Stands

Once a response becomes a habit, you stop learning. Theoretically, you could act differently, but in practice you do not. Habits are extremely useful, they streamline the parts of our lives we do not want to think about...But there is an art to deciding what parts of your life you want to turn over to habit, and what parts of your life you want to continue to learn from and have choice about. This is a key question of balance.

Nothing bothers me more than when people criticize my criticism of school by telling me that schools are not just places to learn maths and spelling, they are places where children learn a vaguely defined thing called socialization. I know. I think schools generally do an effective and terribly damaging job of teaching children to be infantile, dependent, intellectually dishonest, passive and disrespectful to their own developmental capacities.

Quite.” Chiron trotted over to his wheelchair. “That’s Seymour. If we speak quietly, we should be able to avoid waking him.” Meg immediately began exploring the living room. Knowing her, she was searching for small objects to throw at the leopard to wake him up.

Then you will not be ashamed to tell men and demons that you are sanctified, and are living a pure and holy life free from sin, a life that gives you power over the world, the flesh, and the devil.

Not prayer nor Bible verse, nor scholarship nor wit, nor grant under seal nor statute law can alter the fact of villain blood. Not all his craft and guile can make him a Howard, or a Cheney, or a Fitzwilliam, a Stanley or even a Seymour: not even in an emergency.

We got passes, till midnight after the parade. I met Muriel at the Biltmore at seven. Two drinks, two drugstore tuna-fish sandwiches, then a movie she wanted to see, something with Greer Garson in it. I looked at her several times in the dark when Greer Garson’s son’s plane was missing in action. Her mouth was opened. Absorbed, worried. The identification with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer tragedy complete. I felt awe and happiness. How I love and need her undiscriminating heart. She looked over at me when the children in the picture brought in the kitten to show to their mother. M. loved the kitten and wanted me to love it. Even in the dark, I could sense that she felt the usual estrangement from me when I don’t automatically love what she loves. Later, when we were having a drink at the station, she asked me if I didn’t think that kitten was ‘rather nice.’ She doesn’t use the word ‘cute’ any more. When did I ever frighten her out of her normal vocabulary? Bore that I am, I mentioned R. H. Blyth’s definition of sentimentality: that we are being sentimental when we give to a thing more tenderness than God gives to it. I said (sententiously?) that God undoubtedly loves kittens, but not, in all probability, with Technicolor bootees on their paws. He leaves that creative touch to script writers. M. thought this over, seemed to agree with me, but the ‘knowledge’ wasn’t too very welcome. She sat stirring her drink and feeling unclose to me. She worries over the way her love for me comes and goes, appears and disappears. She doubts its reality simply because it isn’t as steadily pleasurable as a kitten. God knows it is sad. The human voice conspires to desecrate everything on earth.

Walt, at about eleven, had a routine of looking at Seymour's wrists and telling him to take off his sweater. "Take off your sweater, hey, Seymour. Go ahead, hey. It's warm in here." S. would beam back at him, shine back at him. He loved that kind of horseplay from any of the kids. I did, too, but only off and on. He did invariably. He thrived, too, waxed strong, on all tactless or underconsidered remarks directed at him by family minors. In 1959, in fact, when on occasion I hear rather nettling news of the doings of my youngest brother and sister, I think on the quantities of joy they brought S. I remember Franny, at about four, sitting on his lap, facing him, and saying, with immense admiration, "Seymour, your teeth are so nice and yellow!" He literally staggered over to me to ask if I'd heard what she said.

The mathophobia endemic in contemporary culture blocks many people from learning anything they recognize as ‘math,’ although they may have no trouble with mathematical knowledge they do not perceive as such.

The main thing is the character's [Truman Capote's] interior and without getting too deep into it, there are lots of parallels in Phil's [Philip Seymour Hoffman's] life, which I knew and only became more evident with time. There was something about that character that he could own that nobody else could.

He said he ate his food out of our big refrigerators, drove our eight-cylinder American cars, un-hesitatingly used our medicines when he was sick, and relied on the U.S. Army to protect his parents and sisters from Hitler's Germany, and nothing, not one single thing in all his poems, reflected these realities.

But the thing is, you raved and you bitched when you came home about the stupidity of audiences. The goddam unskilled laughter coming from the fifth row. And that's right, that's right - God knows it's depressing. I'm not saying it isn't. But that's none of your business, really. That's none of your business, Franny. An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's. You have no right to think about these things, I swear to you. Not in any real sense, anyway. . . . I started bitching one night before the broadcast. Seymour'd told me to shine my shoes just as I was going out the door with Waker. I was furious. The studio audience were all morons, the announcer was a moron, the sponsors were morons, and I just damn well wasn't going to shine my shoes for them, I told Seymour. I said they couldn't see them anyway, where we sat. He said to shine them anyway. He said to shine them for the Fat Lady. . . . And don't you know - listen to me, now - don't you know who that Fat Lady really is? . . . Ah, buddy. It's Christ Himself. Christ Himself, buddy." For joy, apparently, it was all Franny could do to hold the phone, even with both hands . . . as if all of what little or much wisdom there is in the world were suddenly hers.

The fine purple cloaks, the holiday garments, elsewhere signs of gayety of mind, are stained with blood and bordered with black. Throughout a stern discipline, the axe ready for every suspicion of treason; “great men, bishops, a chancellor, princes, the king’s relations, queens, a protector kneeling in the straw, sprinkled the Tower with their blood; one after the other they marched past, stretched out their necks; the Duke of Buckingham, Queen Anne Boleyn, Queen Catherine Howard, the Earl of Surrey, Admiral Seymour, the Duke of Somerset, Lady Jane Grey and her husband, the Duke of Northumberland, the Earl of Essex, all on the throne, or on the steps of the throne, in the highest ranks of honor, beauty, youth, genius; of the bright procession nothing is left but senseless trunks, marred by the tender mercies of the executioner.

...my life itself couldn't very conceivably be less Zenful than it is, and what little I've been able to apprehend - I pick that verb with care - of the Zen experience has been a by-result of following my own rather natural path of extreme Zenlessness.

And thank goodness Jane did not meet in real life an Edmund Bertram, or a Mr Knightley, because if she had married she would doubtless, like her niece Anna, have produced human rather then paper progeny. So – for their failures of courage or determination – we can, must, give thanks to Charles Powlett, who wanted to kiss Jane when she was twenty; to Tom Lefroy, seen off by Madam Lefroy; to the talkative Reverend Samuel Blackall; to the silent Harris Bigg-Wither; to the Reverend Edward Bridges; to Robert Holt-Leigh, the dodgy MP who flirted with Jane in 1806; and to William Seymour, her brother Henry’s lawyer, who failed to ask Jane to marry him as they travelled in that carriage.

...but I do very emphatically believe there is an enormous amount of the androgynous in any all-or-nothing prose writer, or even a would-be one. I think that if he titters at male writers who wear invisible skirts he does so at his eternal peril. I'll say no more on the subject. This is precisely the sort of confidence that can be easily and juicily Abused.

The Pentecostal power, when you sum it all up, is just more of God's love. If it does not bring more love, it is simply a counterfeit.

I am not exactly wallowing in guilt at the moment, but guilt is guilt.It doesn't go away. It can't be nullified.

Дланите ми се потят, червата ми се бунтуват. Хармоничната личност никаква я няма. The hands are sweating, the bowels churning. The Integrated Man is simply not at home.

Струва ми се, че към мен я влече едновременно и майчинско, и чисто женско чувство.

He's the only soul alive who knew the deceased intimately.

More congenial to me than dictators Are rickshaw-runners. If they break my neck It will be by accident, Not as a matter of state policy.

Do not be too sure, young fellows, That you are better than your ancestors.

По онова време пишех на една недоизлекувана, да не кажа неуравновесена, германска машина. I was using a very poorly rehabilitated, not to say unbalanced, German typewriter at the time.

In many schools today, the phrase "computer-aided instruction" means making the computer teach the child. One might say the computer is being used to program the child. In my vision, the child programs the computer and, in doing so, both acquires a sense of mastery over a piece of the most modern and powerful technology and establishes an intimate contact with some of the deepest ideas from science, from mathematics, and from the art of intellectual model building.

The quantum death of Philip Seymour Hoffman. 24 hours before he was “officially” declared dead it was announced on the internet that he had already died. Many people were shocked to hear of his “official” death, especially those who had believed he was already dead. Philip Seymour Hoffman was both dead and alive in the minds of millions simultaneously. A rare death for a rare actor.

If the social industry is an addiction machine, the addictive behaviour it is closest to is gambling: a rigged lottery. Every gambler trusts in a few abstract symbols – the dots on a dice, numerals, suits, red or black, the graphemes on a fruit machine – to tell them who they are. In most cases, the answer is brutal and swift: you are a loser and you are going home with nothing. The true gambler takes a perverse joy in anteing up, putting their whole being at stake. On social media, you scratch out a few words, a few symbols, and press ‘send’, rolling the dice. The internet will tell you who you are, and what your destiny is through arithmetic ‘likes’, ‘shares’ and ‘comments’.

As we now learn, his marriage to Anne was never valid.’ Rafe rubs the crown of his head so that his red hair stands up in a tuft. ‘So as his union with Katherine was not valid either, he has never been married in his life. Twice a bridegroom yet never a husband – has it ever happened to a king before? Even in the Old Testament? Please God Mistress Seymour will go to work and give him a son. We cannot seem to keep an heir. The king’s daughter by Katherine, she is a bastard. His daughter by Anne, she is a bastard. Which leaves his son Richmond, who of course has always been a bastard.

Father Brendan Flynn: "A woman was gossiping with her friend about a man whom they hardly knew - I know none of you have ever done this. That night, she had a dream: a great hand appeared over her and pointed down on her. She was immediately seized with an overwhelming sense of guilt. The next day she went to confession. She got the old parish priest, Father O' Rourke, and she told him the whole thing. 'Is gossiping a sin?' she asked the old man. 'Was that God All Mighty's hand pointing down at me? Should I ask for your absolution? Father, have I done something wrong?' 'Yes,' Father O' Rourke answered her. 'Yes, you ignorant, badly-brought-up female. You have blamed false witness on your neighbor. You played fast and loose with his reputation, and you should be heartily ashamed.' So, the woman said she was sorry, and asked for forgiveness. 'Not so fast,' says O' Rourke. 'I want you to go home, take a pillow upon your roof, cut it open with a knife, and return here to me.' So, the woman went home: took a pillow off her bed, a knife from the drawer, went up the fire escape to her roof, and stabbed the pillow. Then she went back to the old parish priest as instructed. 'Did you gut the pillow with a knife?' he says. 'Yes, Father.' 'And what were the results?' 'Feathers,' she said. 'Feathers?' he repeated. 'Feathers; everywhere, Father.' 'Now I want you to go back and gather up every last feather that flew out onto the wind,' 'Well,' she said, 'it can't be done. I don't know where they went. The wind took them all over.' 'And that,' said Father O' Rourke, 'is gossip!

G. K. Chesterton wrote in Charles Dickens, that The Pickwick Papers was neither a good novel nor a bad novel but in fact ‘not a novel at all.’ He believed it was “something nobler than a novel”. Certainly it was never conceived as a novel but merely as the letterpress to accompany the “cockney sporting plates”. Unfortunately Robert Seymour committed suicide after the first two instalments so the third one was undertaken by Robert Buss whose work Dickens did not like and consequently the task fell to Hablot Knight Browne, who took the name “Phiz” and continued an artistic relationship with Dickens, illustrating many of his novels.

From the outset Dickens seemed to take charge even though he was younger than Seymour and less well known. His narrative input seemed to drive the content of the comic plates, which eventually led to the story becoming the main point of interest and with the death of Seymour the plates were reduced to two an instalment whereas the text increased to 16,000 words. Dickens succeeded where his predecessors had failed, making the print more important than the illustration.

There have been extensive human rights violations by American psychiatrists over the last 70 years. These doctors were pad by the American taxpayer through CIA and military contracts. It is past time for these abuses to stop, it is past time for a reckoning, and it is past time for individual doctors to be held accountable. The Manchurian Candidate Programs are of much more than "historical" interest. ARTICHOKE, BLUEBIRD, MKULTRA and MKSEARCH are precursors of mind control programs that are operational in the twenty first century. Human rights violations by psychiatrists must be ongoing in programs like COPPER GREEN, the interrogation program at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Such programs must be carried out within CIA units like Task Force 121 (The Dallas Morning News, December 1, 2004, p. 1A). Information pointing to ongoing human rights violations by psychiatrists is available in publications like The New Yorker (see article by Seymour M. Hersh, May 24, 2004). Yes the indifference, silence, denial, and disinformation of organized medicine and psychiatry continue. One purpose of The CIA Doctors: Human Rights Violations By American Psychiatrists is to break that silence.

In a short time God began to manifest His power and soon the building could not contain the people. Now the meetings continue all day and into the night and the fire is kindling all over the city and surrounding towns. Proud, well-dressed preachers come in to "investigate." Soon their high looks are replaced with wonder, then conviction comes, and very often you will find them in a short time wallowing on the dirty floor, asking God to forgive them and make them as little children.

But I'll tell you a terrible secret- Are you listening to me? There isn't anyone out there who isn't Seymour's Fat Lady. That includes your Professor Tupper, buddy. And all his goddam cousins by the dozens. There isn't anyone anywhere that isn't Seymour's Fat Lady. Don't you know that? Don't you know that goddam secret yet? And don't you know who the Fat Lady really is?...Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It's Christ Himself. Christ Himself, buddy." For joy apparently, it was all Franny could do to hold the phone, even with both hands. For a fullish minute or so, there were no other words, no further speech. Then: "I can't talk any more, buddy." The sound of a phone being replaced in its catch followed. Franny took in her breath slightly but continued to hold the phone to her ear. A dial tone, of course, followed the formal break in the connection. She appeared to find it extraordinarily beautiful to listen to, rather as if it were the best possible substitute for the primordial silence itself. But she seemed to know, too, when to stop listening to it, as if all of what little or much wisdom there is in the world were suddenly hers. When she replaced the phone, she seemed to know just what to do next, too. She cleared away the smoking things, then drew back the cotton bedspread from the bed she had been sitting on, took off her slippers, and got into the bed. For some minutes, before she fell into a deep, dreamless sleep, she just lay quiet, smiling at the ceiling.

Per fortuna, alcuni hanno messo nero su bianco quei loro turbamenti. Imparerai da loro… se vuoi. Proprio come un giorno, se tu avrai qualcosa da dare, altri impareranno da te. È una bella intesa di reciprocità. E non è istruzione. È storia. È poesia.

Seymour had already begun to believe, and I agreed with him as far as I was able to see the point, that education by any name would smell as sweet, and maybe much sweeter, if it didn't begin with a quest for knowledge at all, but with a quest, as Zen would put it, for no-knowledge. Dr. Suzuki says somewhere, that to be in a state of pure consciousness, satori, is to be with God before He said, 'Let there be light.' Seymour and I thought it might be a good thing to hold back this light from you and Franny, at least as far as we were able, and all the many lower, more fashionable lighting effects—the arts, sciences, classics, languages—'til you were both able at least to conceive of a state of being where the mind knows the source of all light.

You wrote down that you were a writer by profession. It sounded to me like the loveliest euphemism I had ever heard. When was writing ever your profession? It's never been anything but your religion. Never. I'm a little over-excited now. Since it is your religion, do you know what you will be asked when you die? But let me tell you first what you won't be asked. You won't be asked if you were working on a wonderful moving piece of writing when you died. You won't be asked if it was long or short, sad or funny, published or unpublished. You won't be asked if you were in good or bad form while you were working on it. You won't even be asked if it was the one piece of writing you would have been working on if you had known your time would be up when it was finished--I think only poor Soren K. will get asked that. I'm so sure you'll get asked only two questions.' Were most of your stars out? Were you busy writing your heart out? If only you knew how easy it would be for you to say yes to both questions. If only you'd remember before ever you sit down to write that you've been a reader long before you were ever a writer. You simply fix that fact in your mind, then sit very still and ask yourself, as a reader, what piece of writing in all the world Buddy Glass would most want to read if he had his heart's choice. The next step is terrible, but so simple I can hardly believe it as I write it. You just sit down shamelessly and write the thing yourself. I won't even underline that. It's too important to be underlined. Oh, dare to do it, Buddy ! Trust your heart. You're a deserving craftsman. It would never betray you.

The connection was so bad, and I couldn't talk at all during most of the call. How terrible it is when you say I love you and the person at the other end shouts back 'What?' I've been reading a miscellany of Vedanta all [358] day. Marriage partners are to serve each other. Elevate, help, teach, strengthen each other, but above all, serve. Raise their children honorably, lovingly, and with detachment. A child is a guest in the house, to be loved and respected-never possessed, since he belongs to God. How wonderful, how sane, how beautifully difficult, and therefore true. The joy of responsibility for the first time in my life.

He didn't disagree with me, but he seemed to feel that I have a perfection complex of some kind. Much talk from him, and quite intelligent, on the virtues of living the imperfect life, of accepting one's own and others' weaknesses. I agree with him, but only in theory. I'll champion indiscrimination till doomsday, on the grounds that it leads to health and a kind of very real, enviable happiness. Followed purely it's the way of the Tao, and undoubtedly the highest way. But for a discriminating man to achieve this, it would mean that he would have to dispossess himself of poetry, go beyond poetry. That is, he couldn't possibly learn or drive himself to like bad poetry in the abstract, let alone equate it with good poetry. He would have to drop poetry altogether. I said it would be no easy thing to do. Dr Sims said I was putting it too stringently – putting it, he said, as only a perfectionist would.

Питам се до каква степен на човек му е позволено да се възхищава от ръцете на брат си, без това да накара няколко модерни психоаналитични вежди да се повдигнат. To what extent, I wonder, may one be allowed to admire one's brother's hands without raising a few modern eyebrows?

The greats? Well, they all share that quality Napoleon most admired in his generals: luck. Be in Kabul when it falls. Be in Manhattan on 9/11. Be in Paris the night Diana’s driver makes his fatal misjudgement.” I flinch as the windows blast in, but, no, that’s not now, that’s ten days ago. “A journalist marries the news, Seymour. She’s capricious, cruel, and jealous. She demands you follow her to wherever on Earth life is cheapest, where she’ll stay a day or two, then jet off. You, your safety, your family are nothing,” I say it like I’m blowing a smoke ring, “nothing, to her.

In this entre-nous spirit, then, old confidant before we join the others, the grounded everywhere, including, I’m sure, the middle-aged hot-rodders who insist on zooming us to the moon, the Dharma Bums, the makers of cigarette filters for thinking men, the Beat and the Sloppy and the Petulant, the chosen cultists, all the lofty experts who know so well what we should or shouldn’t do with our poor little sex organs, all the bearded, proud, unlettered young men and unskilled guitarists and Zen-killers and incorporated aesthetic Teddy boys who look down their thoroughly unenlightened noses at this splendid planet where (please don’t shut me up) Kilroy, Christ, and Shakespeare all stopped – before we join these others, I privately say to you, old friend (unto you, really, I’m afraid), please accept from me this unpretentious bouquet of very early-blooming parentheses: (((()))).

THE COUNCIL WAS NOTHING LIKE Jason imagined. For one thing, it was in the Big House rec room, around a Ping-Pong table, and one of the satyrs was serving nachos and sodas. Somebody had brought Seymour the leopard head in from the living room and hung him on the wall. Every once in a while, a counselor would toss him a Snausage. Jason looked around the room and tried to remember everyone’s name. Thankfully, Leo and Piper were sitting next to him—it was their first meeting as senior counselors. Clarisse, leader of the Ares cabin, had her boots on the table, but nobody seemed to care. Clovis from Hypnos cabin was snoring in the corner while Butch from Iris cabin was seeing how many pencils he could fit in Clovis’s nostrils. Travis Stoll from Hermes was holding a lighter under a Ping-Pong ball to see if it would burn, and Will Solace from Apollo was absently wrapping and unwrapping an Ace bandage around his wrist. The counselor from Hecate cabin, Lou Ellen something-or-other, was playing “got-your-nose” with Miranda Gardiner from Demeter, except that Lou Ellen really had magically disconnected Miranda’s nose, and Miranda was trying to get it back. Jason had hoped Thalia would show. She’d promised, after all—but she was nowhere to be seen. Chiron had told him not to worry about it. Thalia often got sidetracked fighting monsters or running quests for Artemis, and she would probably arrive soon. But still, Jason worried. Rachel Dare, the oracle, sat next to Chiron at the head of the table. She was wearing her Clarion Academy school uniform dress, which seemed a bit odd, but she smiled at Jason. Annabeth didn’t look so relaxed. She wore armor over her camp clothes, with her knife at her side and her blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. As soon as Jason walked in, she fixed him with an expectant look, as if she were trying to extract information out of him by sheer willpower. “Let’s come to order,” Chiron said. “Lou Ellen, please give Miranda her nose back. Travis, if you’d kindly extinguish the flaming Ping-Pong ball, and Butch, I think twenty pencils is really too many for any human nostril. Thank you. Now, as you can see, Jason, Piper, and Leo have returned successfully…more or less. Some of you have heard parts of their story, but I will let them fill you in.” Everyone looked at Jason. He cleared his throat and began the story. Piper and Leo chimed in from time to time, filling in the details he forgot. It only took a few minutes, but it seemed like longer with everyone watching him. The silence was heavy, and for so many ADHD demigods to sit still listening for that long, Jason knew the story must have sounded pretty wild. He ended with Hera’s visit right before the meeting.

Този ден — бог е свидетел на това — беше забележителен не само с най-неочаквани знамения и поличби, но и с широко използване на писмената реч като средство за предаване на мисли. Скачаш в препълнена кола и ето че съдбата по своите неведоми пътища се погрижва у теб да се намерят тефтерче и молив, в случай че някой от спътниците ти се окаже глухоням. Промъкваш се в банята и нещо те накарва да се огледаш над мивката, да видиш няма ли там някакви откровения.

You think you know what a man is? You have no idea what a man is. You think you know what a daughter is? You have no idea what a daughter is. You think you know what this country is? You have no idea what this country is. You have a false image of everything. All you know is what a fucking glove is. This country is frightening. Of course she was raped. What kind of company do you think she was keeping? Of course out there she was going to get raped. This isn't Old Rimrock, old buddy - she's out there, old buddy, in the USA. She enters that world, that loopy world out there, with whats going on out there - what do you expect? A kid from Rimrock, NJ, of course she didn't know how to behave out there, of course the shit hits the fan. What could she know? She's like a wild child out there in the world. She can't get enough of it - she's still acting up. A room off McCarter Highway. And why not? Who wouldn't? You prepare her for life milking the cows? For what kind of life? Unnatural, all artificial, all of it. Those assumptions you live with. You're still in your olf man's dream-world, Seymour, still up there with Lou Levov in glove heaven. A household tyrannized by gloves, bludgeoned by gloves, the only thing in life - ladies' gloves! Does he still tell the one about the woman who sells the gloves washing her hands in a sink between each color? Oh where oh where is that outmoded America, that decorous America where a woman had twenty-five pairs of gloves? Your kid blows your norms to kingdom come, Seymour, and you still think you know what life is?" Life is just a short period of time in which we are alive. Meredith Levov, 1964. "You wanted Ms. America? Well, you've got her, with a vengeance - she's your daughter! You wanted to be a real American jock, a real American marine, a real American hotshot with a beautiful Gentile babe on your arm? You longed to belong like everybody else to the United States of America? Well, you do now, big boy, thanks to your daughter. The reality of this place is right up in your kisser now. With the help of your daughter you're as deep in the sit as a man can get, the real American crazy shit. America amok! America amuck! Goddamn it, Seymour, goddamn you, if you were a father who loved his daughter," thunders Jerry into the phone - and the hell with the convalescent patients waiting in the corridor for him to check out their new valves and new arteries, to tell how grateful they are to him for their new lease on life, Jerry shouts away, shouts all he wants if it's shouting he wants to do, and the hell with the rules of hte hospital. He is one of the surgeons who shouts; if you disagree with him he shouts, if you cross him he shouts, if you just stand there and do nothing he shouts. He does not do what hospitals tell him to do or fathers expect him to do or wives want him to do, he does what he wants to do, does as he pleases, tells people just who and what he is every minute of the day so that nothing about him is a secret, not his opinions, his frustrations, his urges, neither his appetite nor his hatred. In the sphere of the will, he is unequivocating, uncompromising; he is king. He does not spend time regretting what he has or has not done or justifying to others how loathsome he can be. The message is simple: You will take me as I come - there is no choice. He cannot endure swallowing anything. He just lets loose. And these are two brothers, the same parents' sons, one for whom the aggression's been bred out, the other for whom the aggression's been bred in. "If you were a father who loved your daughter," Jerry shouts at the Swede, "you would never have left her in that room! You would have never let her out of your sight!

…he is invariably a kind of super-size but unmistakably ‘classical’ neurotic, an aberrant who only occasionally, and never deeply, wishes to surrender his aberration; or, in English, a Sick Man who not at all seldom, though he’s reported to childishly deny it, gives out terrible cries of pain, as if he would wholeheartedly let go of both his art and soul to experience what passes in other people for wellness, and yet (the rumor continues) when his unsalutary-looking little room is broken into and someone - not infrequently, at that, someone who actually loves him - passionately asks him where the pain is, he either declines or seems unable to discuss it an any constructive critical length, and in the morning, when even great poets and painters presumably feel a bit more chipper than usual, he looks more perversely determined than ever to see his sickness run its course, as though by the light of another, presumably working day he had remembered that all men, the healthy ones included, eventually die, but that he, lucky man, is at least being done in by the most stimulating companion, disease or no, he has ever known.

Some swivel in Seymour has locked: he can no longer see the planet as anything but dying, and everyone around him complicit in the killing. The people in the Eden’s Gate houses fill their trash cans and pilot SUVs between their two homes and play music on Bluetooth speakers in their backyards and tell themselves they’re good people, conducting honorable, decent lives, living the so-called dream—as though America were an Eden where God’s warm benevolence fell equally across every soul. When in truth they’re participating in a pyramid scheme that’s chewing up everybody at the bottom, people like his mother. And they’re all congratulating themselves for it. MATHILDA:

Не можеш да спориш с човек, който вярва или поне силно подозира, че задачата на поета не е да пише каквото му диктува вътрешният подтик, а каквото би написал, ако, следвайки вътрешния си подтик, възприеме стил, който да е разбираем за колкото е възможно по-голям брой от познатите му библиотекарки. Сякаш това е въпрос на живот и смърт.

I think it should be done over, Buddy. …Please make peace with your wit. It's not going to go away, Buddy. To dump it on your own advice would be as bad and unnatural as dumping your adjectives and your adverbs because Prof. B. wants you to. What does he know about it? What do you really know about your own wit? I've been sitting here tearing up notes to you. I keep starting to say things like 'This one is wonderfully constructed,' and 'The conversation between the two cops is terrific.' So I'm hedging. I'm not sure why. I started to get a little nervous right after you began to read. It sounded like the beginning of something your arch-enemy Bob B. calls a rattling good story. Don't you think he would call this a step in the right direction? Doesn't that worry you? Even what is funny about the woman on the back of the truck doesn't sound like something you think is funny. It sounds much more like something that you think is universally considered funny. I feel gypped. Does that make you mad? You can say our relatedness spoils my judgement. It worries me enough. But I'm also just a reader. Are you a writer or just a writer of rattling good stories. I mind getting a rattling good story from you.

At length, when the conversation-in my view, at least -was going straight to hell, he got up abruptly and went over to look at a photograph of himself and Bessie that had been newly tacked up on the wall. He glowered at it for a full minute, or more, then turned around, with a brusqueness no one in the family would have found unusual, and asked Seymour if he remembered the time Joe Jackson had given him, Seymour, a ride on the handle bars of his bicycle, all over the stage, around and around. Seymour, sitting in an old corduroy armchair across the room, a cigarette going, wearing a blue shirt, gray slacks, moccasins with the counters broken down, a shaving cut on the side of his face that I could see, replied gravely and at on cc, and in the special way he always answered questions from Les - as if they were the questions, above all others, he preferred to be asked in his life. He said he wasn't sure he had ever got off Joe Jackson's beautiful bicycle. And aside from its enormous sentimental value to my father personally, this answer, in a great many ways, was true, true, true.

But Turkish princes have a dozen wives each, ' Jane says. 'If the king had been of their sect, he could have been married to the late queen, God rest her, and Katherine, God rest her, and at the same time to me, if he liked. For that matter, he could have been married to Mary Boleyn, and to Mary Shelton, and to Fitzroy’s mother. And the Pope could not have troubled him about it.

Anyway, I started bitching one night before the broadcast. Seymour'd told me to shine my shoes just as I was going out the door with Waker. I was furious. The studio audience were all morons, the announcer was a moron, the sponsors were morons, and I just damn well wasn't going to shine my shoes for them, I told Seymour. I said they couldn't see them anyway, where we sat. He said to shine them anyway. He said to shine them for the Fat Lady. I don't know what the hell he was talking about, but he had a very Seymour look on his face, and so I did it. He never did tell me who the Fat Lady was, but I shined my shoes for the Fat Lady every time I ever went on the air again- all the years you and I were on the program together, if you remember. I don't think I missed more than a couple of times.

Her little hands, Crumb. Her little paws, like a child's. She has no guile in her. And she never speaks. And if she does I have to bend my head to hear what she says. And in the pause I can hear my heart. Her little bits of embroidery, her scraps of silk, her halcyon sleeves, she cut out of the cloth some admirer gave her once, some poor boy struck with love for her...and yet she has never succumbed. Her little sleeves, her seed pearl necklace...she has nothing...she expects nothing...' A tear at last sneaks from Henry's eye, meanders down his cheek and vanishes into the mottled grey and ginger of his beard.

Нещо повече, макар вече да разтръбих, че съм щастлив писател, готов съм да се закълна, че не съм и никога не съм бил весел писател; квотата от невесели мисли, обичайни за професията, милостиво е отпусната и на мен. Furthermore, though I am, as I've already conspicuously posted, a happy writer, I'll take my oath I'm not now and never have been a merry one; I've mercifully been allowed the usual professional quota of unmerry thoughts.

ازم پرسید :« می شود اینقدر نشانه گیری نکنی؟ اگر با نشانه گیری بزنیش, فقط شانس آورده ای.» جواب دادم:«چطور شانسی می برم وقتی نشانه بگیرم؟» لحظه ای چیزی نگفت, همانطور بر لبه ی جدول ایستاد و, آنطوری که من فهمیدم, با عشق و محبت به من نگاه کرد. گفت: «چون که شانسی است. اگر تیله ی او را بزنی خوشحال می شوی, نه؟ خوشحال نمی شوی؟ و اگر از زدنِ تیله ی کسی خوشحال بشوی, یعنی پیش خودت انتظار نداشتی این کار را بکنی. پس حتما شانس هم در کار است,حتما مقدار زیادیش تصادف است.»

В погледа ѝ имаше нещо заплашително. Имах чувството, че в нея е въплътена цяла тълпа жени и че в друго време тя би могла да седи с плетката си пред гилотината и да се наслаждава на гледката. А аз цял живот съм изпитвал панически страх от всякакви тълпи. There was something distinctly intimidating about her stare. It seemed to come from a one-woman mob, separated only by time and chance from her knitting bag and a splendid view of the guillotine. I've been terrified of mobs, of any kind, all my life.

Години наред ние, седемте деца в нашето семейство, разполагащо само с една баня, имахме малко досадния, но полезен навик да си пишем бележки с парченца сапун върху огледалцето на аптечката. Обикновено тези бележки съдържаха изключително строги наставления, а понякога — и нескрити заплахи: „Бу Бу прибирай си кесето след къпане! Не го захвърляй на пода! Много целувки. Сиймор.“; „Уолт, днес е твой ред да изведеш Ф. и З. из парка. Вчера ги извеждах аз. Познай кой.“; „В сряда е годишнината от сватбата им. Не ходи на кино, не се мотай в радиото след предаването, за да не се набуташ в шамарите! Това се отнася и за теб, Бъди!“; „Мама се оплаква, че Зуи едва не изгълтал разхлабителното. Не оставяй разни вредни неща на мивката, че той може да ги достигне и изгълта!

Възпроизведох тази приказка не само защото винаги съм готов да препоръчам на родителите и на по-големите братя на десетмесечни пеленачета да им четат за умиряване хубава проза, но и по съвсем друга причина. Сега ще ви опиша една сватба, която се състоя през 1942 година. Според мен това е напълно завършен разказ — с начало и край, дори с предчувствие за смърт. Но тъй като са ми известни по-нататъшните факти, чувствам се задължен да отбележа, че сега, в 1955 година, младоженецът не е вече между живите. Той се самоуби през 1948 година, когато беше на курорт с жена си във Флорида. Всъщност най-същественото, което искам да кажа, е следното: откакто младоженецът слезе завинаги от сцената, аз не мога да намеря на негово място друг, комуто да се доверя в избора на кон.

I'm profoundly attracted to classical Zen literature, I have the gall to lecture on it and the literature of Mahayana Buddhism one night a week at college, but my life itself couldn't very conceivably be less Zenful than it is, and what little I've been able to apprehend - I pick that verb with care - of the Zen experience has been a by-result of following my own rather natural path of extreme Zenlessness. Largely because Seymour himself literally begged me to do so, and I never knew him to be wrong in these matters.) Happily for me, and probably for everybody, I don't believe it's really necessary to bring Zen into this. The method of marble-shooting that Seymour, by sheer intuition, was recommending to me can be related, I'd say, legitimately and un-Easternly, to the fine art of snapping a cigarette end into a small wastebasket from across a room. An art, I believe, of which most male smokers are true masters only when either they don't care a hoot whether or not the butt goes into the basket or the room has been cleared of eyewitnesses, including, quite so to speak, the cigarette snapper himself. I'm going to try hard not to chew on that illustration, delectable as I find it, but I do think it proper to append - to revert momentarily to curb marbles - that after Seymour himself shot a marble, he would be all smiles when he heard a responsive click of glass striking glass, but it never appeared to be clear to him whose winning click it was. And it's also a fact that someone almost invariably had to pick up the marble he'd won and hand it to him.

One other thing. And that's all. I promise you. But the thing is, you raved and you bitched when you came home about the stupidity of audiences. The goddam `unskilled laughter' comming from the fifth row. And that's right, that's right - God knows it's depressing. I'm not saying it isn't. But that's none of your business, really. That's none of your business, Franny. An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and *on his own terms", not anyone else's. You have no right to think about those things. I swear to you. Not in any real sense, anyway. You know what I mean?" ... The voice at the other end came through again. "I remember abouut the fifth time I ever went on `Wise Child'. I subbbed for Walt a few times when he was in a cast - remember when he was in the case? Anyway. I started bitching one night before broadcast. Seymour'd told me to shine my shoes just as I was going out the door with Waker. I was furious. The studio audience were all morons, the announcer was a moron, the sponsors were morons, and I just damn well wasn't going to shine my shoes for them, I told Seymour. I sais they couldn't see them anyway, where we sat. He said to shine them anyway. He said to shine them for the Fat Lady. I didn't know what the hell he was talking about, but he had a very Seymour look on his face, and so I did it. He never did tell me who the Fat Lady was, but I shined my shoes for the Fat Lady every time I ever went on the air again - all the years you and I were on the program together, if you remember. I don't think I missed more than one just a couple of times. This terribly clear, clear picture of the Fat Lady formed in my time. I had her sitting on this porch all day, swatting flies, with her radio goin full-blast from morning till night. I figured the heat was terrible, and she probably had cancer, and - I don't know. Anyway, seemed goddam clear why Seymour wanted me to shine my shoes when I went on air. It made *sense*." ... "... Let me tell you something now, buddy ... Are you listening?" ... "I don't care where an actor acts. It can be in summer stock, in can be over a radio, it can be over television, it can be in a goddam Broadway theatre, complete with the most fashionable, most well-fed, most sunburned-looking audience you can imagine. But I'll tell you a terrible secret - Are you listening to me? *There isn't anyone out there who isn't Seymour's Fat Lady.* That goddam cousins by the dozens. There isn't anyone *any*where that isn't Seymour's Fat Lady. Don't you know that? Don't you know that goddam secret yet? And don't you know - listen to me, now - *don't you know who that Fat Lady really is?*... Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It's Christ Himself. Christ Himself, buddy.

It is 100 years since John Dewey began arguing for the kind of change that would move schools away from authoritarian classrooms with abstract notions to environments in which learning is achieved through experimentation, practice and exposure to the real world. I, for one, believe the computer makes Dewey’s vision far more accessible epistemologically. It also makes it politically more likely to happen, for where Dewey had nothing but philosophical arguments, the present day movement for change has an army of agents. The ultimate pressure for the change will be child power.

Той обичаше тези грубовати шеги на хлапетата. И аз ги обичах, само че от време на време. А той – неизменно. Той цъфтеше и избуяваше под дъжда на всички нетактични и необмислени подмятания, отправени от по-малките. Сега, през 1959 г., когато се случи да чуя някоя огорчаваща ме новина за това, какви ги вършат по-малките ми братя и сестри, се сещам каква огромна радост доставяха те на Сиймор. Помня как четиригодишната Франи, седнала в скута му, се обърна към него и възкликна с безмерно възхищение: "Сиймор, зъбките ти са толкова хубави, толкова жълти!" Той направо падна от стола и веднага ме попита дали съм я чул какво казва. He loved that kind of horseplay from any of the kids. I did, too, but only off and on. He thrived, too, waxed strong, on all tactless or underconsidered remarks directed at him by family minors. In 1959, in fact, when on occasion I hear rather nettling news of the doings of my youngest brother and sister, I think on the quantities of joy they brought S. I remember Franny, at about four, sitting on his lap, facing him, and saying, with immense admiration, 'Seymour, your teeth arc so nice and yellow!' He literally staggered over to me to ask if I'd heard.

Her little hands, Crumb. Her little paws, like a child's. She has no guile in her. And she never speaks. And if she does I hate to bend my head to hear what she says. And in the pause I can hear my heart. Her little bits of embroidery, her scraps of silk, her halcyon sleeves, she cut out of the cloth some admirer gave her once, some poor boy struck with love for her...and yet she has never succumbed. Her little sleeves, her seed pearl necklace...she has nothing...she expects nothing...' A tear at last sneaks from Henry's eye, meanders down his cheek and vanishes into the mottled grey and ginger of his beard.

I sat up, woozy and blurry-eyed. I was lying in my old cot in the Me cabin. Sunlight streamed through the windows—morning light? Had I really slept that long? Snuggled up next to me, something warm and furry was growling and snuffling in my pillow. At first glance, I thought it might be a pit bull, though I was fairly sure I did not own a pit bull. Then it looked up, and I realized it was the disembodied head of a leopard. One nanosecond later, I was standing at the opposite end of the cabin, screaming. It was the closest I’d come to teleporting since I’d lost my godly powers. “Oh, you’re awake!” My son Will emerged from the bathroom in a billow of steam, his blond hair dripping wet and a towel around his waist. On his left pectoral was a stylized sun tattoo, which seemed unnecessary to me—as if he could be mistaken for anything but a child of the sun god. He froze when he registered the panic in my eyes. “What’s wrong?” GRR! said the leopard. “Seymour?” Will marched over to my cot and picked up the leopard head—which at some point in the distant past had been taxidermied and stuck on a plaque, then liberated from a garage sale by Dionysus and granted new life. Normally, as I recalled, Seymour resided over the fireplace mantel in the Big House, which did not explain why he had been chewing on my pillow. “What are you doing here?” Will demanded of the leopard. Then, to me: “I swear I did not put him in your bed.” “I did.” Dionysus materialized right next to me. My tortured lungs could not manage another scream, but I leaped back an additional few inches. Dionysus gave me his patented smirk. “I thought you might like some company. I always sleep better with a teddy leopard.” “Very kind.” I tried my best to kill him with eye daggers. “But I prefer to sleep alone.” “As you wish. Seymour, back to the Big House.” Dionysus snapped his fingers and the leopard head vanished from Will’s hands. “Well, then…

Moon, O Moon, how wondrous are you among God’s many works! You shine with majesty and brilliance, a thousand times more brightly than the brightest star! You were created on the same day as the sun. You give light just as the sun gives light. But your light, O Moon, is even more important than the light of the sun. The sun is nearly superfluous, for it lights the daytime when we hardly need it. By day, the world is bright and we can already see clearly all that surrounds us. The wonder of your light, O Moon, comes by night when it is dark so that you are a lamp for our feet and a beacon for our eyes. Moon, O Moon, how wondrous you are!

I'm in the unique position of being able to call my brother, straight out, a non-stop talker - which is a pretty vile thing to call somebody, I think - and yet at the same time to sit back, rather, I'm afraid, like a type with both sleeves full of aces, and effortlessly remember a whole legion of mitigating factors (and 'mitigating' is hardly the word for it). I can condense them all into one: By the time Seymour was in mid-adolescence - sixteen, seventeen - he not only had learned to control his native vernacular, his many, many less than elite New York speech mannerisms, but had by then already cone into his own true, bull's-eye, poet's vocabulary. His non-stop talks, his monologues, his nearharangues then came as close to pleasing from start to finish - for a good many of as, anyway -as, say, the bulk of Beethoven's output after lie ceased being encumbered with a sense of hearing, and maybe I'm thinking especially, though it seems a trifle picky, of the B-flat-major and C-sharp-minor quartets. Still, we were a family of seven children, originally. And, as it happened, none of us was in the least tongue-tied. It's an exceedingly weighty matter when six naturally profuse verbalizers and expounders have an undefeatable champion talker in the house. True, he never sought the title. And he passionately yearned to see one or another of us outpoint or simply outlast him in a conversation or an argument. Аз съм стигнал до завидното положение да мога направо да нарека брат си кречетало — което не е много ласкателно — и същевременно да седя спокойно, сякаш съм пълен господар на положението, и без усилие да си припомням цяла редица смекчаващи вината обстоятелства (при все че „смекчаващи вината“ едва ли е най-подходящият израз в случая). Мога да ги обобщя в едно: по времето, когато Сиймор бе достигнал средата на юношеската си възраст — на шестнайсет-седемнайсет години, — той не само владееше до съвършенство родния си език с всичките му тънкости, но си беше създал и собствен, много точен поетически речник. Неговата говорливост, неговите монолози, неговите едва ли не прокламации звучеха почти толкова приятно — поне за мнозина от нас, — колкото, да речем, повечето от творбите на Бетховен, създадени, след като се е освободил от бремето на слуха; макар и да звучи претенциозно, тук имам предвид по-специално квартетите в си бемол мажор и до диез миньор. В нашето семейство бяхме седем деца. И нито едно от тях не беше лишено в ни най-малка степен от дар слово. Е, не е ли голямо тегло, когато шестима словоохотливци и тълкуватели имат в къщата си един непобедим шампион по речовитост? Вярно, той никога не се е стремил към тази титла. Дори жадуваше някой от нас да го надмине ако не по красноречие, то поне до дългоречие в някой спор или прост разговор.

Виж какво, седнеш ли да пишеш, винаги гледай да се сещаш, че преди да станеш писател, дълго време си бил читател. Запечатал веднъж това в главата си, сядаш спокойно и се запитваш каква творба би се харесала най-много на Бъди Глас като читател, ако трябва да избира по сърце. Следващата стъпка, решителната, е толкова проста, че чак не е за вярване. Сядаш и без да ти мигне окото, написваш сам творбата. Дори не подчертавам това. То е толкова важно, че не се нуждае от подчертаване. О, Бъди, имай тази смелост. Довери се на сърцето си. Ти си достоен художник и то няма да ти изневери. If only you'd remember before ever you sit down to write that you've been a reader long before you were ever a writer. You simply fix that fact in your mind, then sit very still and ask yourself, as a reader, what piece of writing in all the world Buddy Glass would most want to read if he had his heart's choice. The next step is terrible, but so simple I can hardly believe it as I write it. You just sit down shamelessly and write the thing yourself. I won't even underline that. It's too important to be underlined. Oh, dare to do it, Buddy ! Trust your heart. You're a deserving craftsman. It would never betray you.

می‌دانی به چه لبخند می‌زدم؟ در فرم نوشتی که حرفه‌ات نویسندگی است. به نظرم قشنگ‌ترین حسن تعبیری بود که به عمرم شنیده بودم. از کی تا حالا نوشتن حرفه‌ی تو شده؟ نوشتن هیچ‌چیز نبوده جز مذهب تو. هیچ‌چیز. حالا کمی بیش‌ازحد هیجان‌زده‌ام. ازآنجاکه این مذهب توست, می‌دانی وقتی بمیری ازت چه سؤالی می‌کنند؟ نه, اول بگذارم بگویم ازت چه نمی‌پرسند. ازت نمی‌پرسند که دمِ مرگ داشتی یک قطعه‌ی معرکه و تأثیرگذار می‌نوشتی یا نه. ازت نمی‌پرسند که آن قطعه کوتاه بود یا بلند, غم‌انگیز بود یا خنده‌دار, چاپ شد یا نشد. ازت نمی‌پرسند که موقع کار کردن روی آن سرحال بودی یا نه. حتی ازت نمی‌پرسند که اگر می‌دانستی وقتت سر آماده بازهم بر روی این قطعه کار می‌کردی یا روی چیزی دیگر - فکر کنم این را فقط از سورِن ک. بیچاره بپرسند.. ولی مطمئنم از تو فقط دو چیز می‌پرسند. بیش‌تر ستاره‌هایت در آسمان بودند؟ آیا داشتی می‌نوشتی که دلت را کنار بگذاری؟

An unknown but certainly significant proportion of the population has almost completely given up on learning. These people seldom, if ever engage in deliberate learning and see themselves as neither competent at it nor likely to enjoy it. The social and personal cost is enormous. Although negative self-images can be overcome, in the life of an individual they are extremely robust and powerfully self-reinforcing. Deficiency becomes identity: “I can’t learn French, I don’t have an ear for languages;” “I could never be a businessman, I don’t have a head for figures;”… If people believe firmly enough that they cannot do math, they will usually succeed in preventing themselves from doing whatever they recognize as math. The consequences of such self-sabotage is personal failure, and each failure reinforces the original belief. And such beliefs may be most insidious when held not only by individuals, but by our entire culture.

What, I wonder, does the reader know of large families? More important, how much can he stand hearing on the subject, from me? I must say at least this much: If you're an older brother in a large family (particularly where, as with Seymour and Franny, there's an age difference of roughly eighteen years), and you either cast yourself or just not very advertently become cast in the role of local tutor or mentor, it's almost impossible not to turn into a monitor, too. But even monitors come in individual shapes, sizes, and colors. For example, when Seymour told one of the twins or Zooey or Franny, or even Mme Boo Boo (who was only two years younger than myself, and often entirely the Lady), to take off his or her rubbers on coming into the apartment, each and all of them knew he mostly meant that the floor would get tracked up if they didn't and that Bessie would have to get out the mop. When I told them to take off their rubbers, they knew I mostly meant that people who didn't were slobs. It was bound to make no small difference in the way they kidded or ragged us separately. Но, питам се, какво знае читателят за многочислените семейства? И което е по-важното, ще изтърпи ли не друг, а аз да му обясня този въпрос? Мога да кажа поне следното: ако си по-голям брат в многочислено семейство (в което разликата между Сиймор и Франи е горе-долу осемнайсет години) и сам си поел или някой е имал непредпазливостта да ти възложи ролята на наставник и опекун, почти невъзможно е да не се превърнеш и в надзирател. Но дори надзирателите се произвеждат в различни форми, размери и цветове. Така например, когато Сиймор кажеше на близнаците, на Зуи или Франи или дори на мадам Бу Бу (която е само две години по-малка от мен) да си събуват галошите, преди да влязат в апартамента, всеки от тях възприемаше думите му така: не се ли събуете, ще оставите стъпки по пода и после Беси ще трябва да се трепе с парцала. А когато аз им кажех да си събуят галошите, те го приемаха като обида: който не се събува е палачор. Оттук произтичаше и разликата в начина, по който те се шегуваха с него и с мен.

И ако предпочитам да не сравнявам съветите на Сиймор за играта на топчета със зен-стрелбата (с лък), то е, защото не съм нито зен-стрелец, нито зен-будист, а още по-малко познавач на зен. (Нали няма да е нередно, ако кажа, че Сийморовите и моите корени в източната философия — колебая се дали трябва да ги нарека „корени“ — водят началото си от новия и стария завет, от адвайта веданта и класическия даоизъм? Склонен съм да смятам себе си — ако изобщо мога да използвам звучните източни названия — за карма-йога, може би с щипка тжнана-йога, за да стане по пикантна гозбата. Дълбоко съм привързан към класическата зен-литература и дори имам дързостта да чета веднъж седмично лекции върху тази литература и литературата на махаяна, но начина ми на живот няма нищо общо със зен, а малкото, което съм успял да схвана от това учение — подбрах глагола много внимателно — е страничен резултат от това, че следвам своя собствен, почти естествен път на пълна беззеност. Главно, защото самият Сиймор буквално ме молеше да сторя това, а по тези въпроси той винаги беше прав.)

Тук си заслужава да отбележа — не само от добри чувства към брат ми, — че за него съм писал и преди. Всъщност, ако ме попридумате, може и да си призная, че много редки са периодите, в които не съм писал за него. И ако примерно под дулото на пистолет утре ме заставят да напиша разказ за динозавъра, не се съмнявам, че съвсем несъзнателно ще припиша на тази животинка някои черти, напомнящи за Сиймор — по какъв неповторим начин прегризва върха на някой столетен бор, да речем, или колко мило върти чудовищната си опашка. Някои хора — не близки приятели — са ме питали дали главният герой на една моя новела не носи повечето от чертите на Сиймор. Всъщност повечето от тези хора не питаха, те ми казваха. Изприщвам се, когато изобщо трябва да говоря на тази тема, но ще подчертая, че нито един от тези, които познаваха добре брат ми, не ме е питал и не ми е казвал нищо от този род — за което съм благодарен и което в известен смисъл ми е направило впечатление, тъй като не един и двама от моите герои говорят свободно манхатънски жаргон, имат еднаквия стремеж да се хвърлят там, където глупаците не смеят да припарят, и са преследвани от едно Същество, което предпочитам да нарека Стареца от планината.

It seems to me indisputably true that a good many people, the wide world over, of varying ages, cultures, natural endowments, respond with a special impetus, a zing, even, in some cases, to artists and poets who as well as having a reputation for producing great or fine art have something garishly Wrong with them as persons: a spectacular flaw in character or citizenship, a construably romantic affliction or addiction-extreme self-centredness, marital infidelity, stone-deafness, stone-blindness, a terrible thirst, a mortally bad cough, a soft spot for prostitutes, a partiality for grand-scale adultery or incest, a certified or uncertified weakness for opium or sodomy, and so on, God have mercy on the lonely bastards. If suicide isn't at the top of the list of compelling infirmities for creative men, the suicide poet or artist, one can't help noticing, has always been given a very considerable amount of avid attention, not seldom on sentimental grounds almost exclusively, as if he were (to put it much more horribly than I really want to) the floppy-eared runt of the litter. It's a thought, anyway, finally said, that I've lost sleep over many times, and possibly will again. Според мен много и много хора по широкия свят, хора на различна възраст, с различна култура и различни заложби гледат с особен възторг и дори понякога величаят онези художници и поети, които освен дето са си спечелили име с голямото си или добро изкуство имат нещо шантаво в себе си: нетърпими недостатъци в характера или в гражданското поведение, любовна страст или скръб, изключителен егоцентризъм, извънбрачна връзка, глухота, слепота, неутолима жажда, смъртоносна кашлица, слабост към проститутки, склонност към чудовищни прелюбодеяния или кръвосмешение, документирана или недокументирана страст към опиума или содомията и прочее — пази боже, самотните копелета. Макар самоубийството да не стои на първо място в списъка на задължителните за твореца недостатъци, не можем да не забележим, че самоубилият се поет или художник винаги се радва на много голямо, завидно внимание, нерядко само по чисто сантиментални причини, сякаш е (ще се изразя по-ужасно, отколкото ми се ще) клепоухото недорасло кутре от кучилото. Тази мисъл — това е последно — много пъти не ми е давала мира по цели нощи и сигурно пак ще върши същото.

Somewhat overly legibly, I wrote on a sheet of paper, "We're held up indefinitely by the parade. We're going to find a phone and have a cold drink somewhere. Will you join us?" I folded the paper once, then handed it to the Matron of Honor, who opened it, read it, and then handed it to the tiny old man. He read it, grinning, and then looked at me and wagged his head up and down several times vehemently. I thought for an instant that this was the full and perfectly eloquent extent of his reply, but he suddenly motioned to me with his hand, and I gathered that he wanted me to pass him my pad and pencil, I did so- without looking over at the Matron of Honor, from whom great waves of impatience were rising. The old man adjusted the pad and pencil on his lap with the greatest care, then sat for a moment, pencil poised, in obvious concentration, his grin diminished only a very trifle. Then the pencil began, very unsteadily, to move. An "i" was dotted. And then both pad and pencil were returned personally to me, with a marvellously cordial extra added wag of the head. He had written, in letters that had not quite jelled yet, the single word "Delighted." The Matron of Honor, reading over my shoulder, gave a sound faintly like a snort, but I quickly looked over at the great writer and tried to show by my expression that all of us in the car knew a poem when we saw one, and were grateful. На едно листче — някак прекалено четливо — написах: „Парадът ще ни задържи неопределено време. Искаме да потърсим телефон и да пием нещо разхладително. Ще дойдете ли с нас?“ После сгънах листчето на две и го подадох на придворната, която го прочете и предаде на дребничкия старец. Той го прочете ухилен, погледна ме и усилено закима с глава. Реших, че това е изчерпателен и напълно красноречив отговор, но той махна с ръка към мен и разбрах, че иска да му подам тефтерчето и молива. Подадох му ги, без да поглеждам придворната, която на вълни, на вълни излъчваше нетърпение. Старчето намести много внимателно тефтерчето и молива на коленете си, застина така, явно събирайки мислите си, после, почти все със същата усмивка, вдигна молива. Много неуверено моливът започна да се движи. Накрая бе сложена акуратна точка. След това с изключително сърдечно кимане тефтерчето и моливът ми бяха върнати. Още пресните букви гласяха: „С удоволствие.“ Придворната погледна през рамото ми бележката и издаде звук, подобен на пръхтене, но аз веднага обърнах лице към великия писател и се постарах да покажа с изражението си, че всички ние веднага можем да различим една истинска поема и сме му много благодарни.

Това е един от малко известните епизоди в биографията ми, но от мен да мине, ще го разкажа. На около девет години нечувано ме блазнеше мисълта, че съм най-бързият бегач в света. Това, нека добавя, е едно странно, невключено в учебната програма самомнение, което трудно умира, и дори сега, на свръхзаседналите си четирийсет години, аз се виждам как префучавам — с градски дрехи — покрай тумби от бележити, но запъхтени олимпийци и им махам приятелски, без помен от високомерие. И тъй, една прекрасна пролетна вечер — все още живеехме на Ривърсайд Драйв — Беси ме прати да купя сладолед. Излязох от къщи в същия вълшебен час, за който стана дума преди няколко страници. Не по-малко фатален за изграждането на този анекдот е фактът, че бях с гуменки, които за всеки най-бърз бегач в света са същото или почти същото, каквото са червените обувки за малкото момиченце на Ханс Кристиан Андерсен. Откъснал се веднъж от къщи, превърнах се в самия Меркурий и ударих в страхотен спринт по дългата отсечка до Бродуей. Завоя на Бродуей взех на едно колело и продължих нататък, постигайки невъзможното: увеличение на скоростта. Дрогерията, в която продаваха сладолед „Луис Шери“, неизменният избор на Беси, отстоеше на още три преки на север. Някъде по средата на тази отсечка профучах край книжарницата, от която обикновено си купувахме вестници и списания, но профучах слепешката, без да забележа наоколо някакви познати или роднини. Изведнъж, при следващата пряка, долових шум от преследване зад себе си, което явно се извършваше на крака. Първата ми, може би типична за нюйоркчанина мисъл, беше, че ме гони полицията — най-вероятно заради нарушаване на пределната скорост в извънучилищна зона. Напрегнах се, за да изстискам още малко скорост от тялото си, но напразно. Нечия ръка ме сграбчи за пуловера, и то точно на мястото, където би трябвало да раздават номерата на победителите, и аз, здравата уплашен, понамалих, понамалих и спрях тромаво като чернокрак албатрос. Преследвачът, разбира се, беше Сиймор, който изглеждаше не по-малко уплашен от мен. „Какво става? Какво става?“, заповтаря като обезумял. Все още ме държеше за пуловера. Освободих се с рязко движение от ръката му и го осведомих на уличен мръснишки жаргон, който няма да възпроизвеждам дословно, че нищо не става, нищо не се е случило, аз просто тичам и няма защо да се крещи. „Боже, как ме уплаши! — възкликна той с огромно облекчение. — Ама как тичаш! Едвам те настигнах.“ После тръгнахме заедно за сладоледа. Това може да е чудно, може и да не е, но духът на миналия на второ място най-бърз бегач в света не беше много забележимо понижен. Преди всичко, беше ме надбягал не друг, а Сиймор. Освен това вниманието ми беше привлечено от неговото тежко дишане. То ми действаше някак успокоително.

Yet, we are not Skinner's rats. Even Skinner's rats were not Skinner's rats: the patterns of addictive behavior displayed by rats in the Skinner Box were only displayed by rats in isolation, outside of their normal sociable habitat. For human beings, addictions have subjective meanings, as does depression. Marcus Gilroy-Ware's study of social media suggests that what we encounter in our feeds is hedonic stimulation, various moods and sources of arousal- from outrage porn to food porn to porn- which enable us to manage our emotions. In addition that, however, it's also true that we can become attached to the miseries of online life, a state of perpetual outrage and antagonism. There is a sense in which our online avatar resembles a 'virtual tooth' in the sense described by the German surrealist artist Hans Bellmer. In the grip of a toothache, a common reflex is to make a fist so tight that the fingernails bite into the skin. This 'confuses' and 'bisects' the pain by creating a 'virtual center of excitation,' a virtual tooth that seems to draw blood and nervous energy away from the real center of pain. If we are in pain, this suggests, self-harming can be a way of displacing it so that it appears lessened- event though the pain hasn't really been reduced, and we still have a toothache. So if we get hooked on a machine that purports to tell us, among other things, how other people see us- or a version of ourselves, a delegated online image- that suggests something has already gone wrong in our relationships with others. The global rise in depression- currently the world's most widespread illness, having risen some 18 per cent since 2005- is worsened for many people by the social industry. There is a particularly strong correlation between depression and the use of Instagram among young people. But social industry platforms didn't invent depression; they exploited it. And to loosen their grip, one would have to explore what has gone wrong elsewhere.

В едно-две поддаващи се на описание отношения очите му приличаха на моите и на очите на Лес и Бу Бу, защото (а) цветът на очите на тези типове може да бъде определен скромно като много тъмна супа от волска опашка или като еврейско тъжнокафяво, и (б) защото всички ние имахме кръгове под очите, а в два случая — направо торби. С това обаче се изчерпват всички интрасемейни сравнения. Може би ще бъде малко некавалерско спрямо дамите от групата, но ако трябва да се гласува за най-хубавите очи в семейството, ще дам гласа си за Сиймор и Зуи. Въпреки че техните очи бяха съвсем различни, и не само по цвят. Преди няколко години публикувах един изключително досаден, запомнящ се, неприятно спорен и напълно безуспешен разказ за даровито момченце, което пътува с презокеански параход, и някъде в този разказ имаше подробно описание на очите на момчето. По едно щастливо съвпадение разполагам със същия разказ, който в момента е забоден с вкус на ревера, на банския ми халат. Цитирам: „Очите му, светлокафяви на цвят и не много големи, леко бягаха — лявото повече от дясното. Но не бягаха дотам, че да изглежда кривоглед или да се забелязва това от пръв поглед. Бягаха точно толкова, колкото да се отбележи този факт, и то само с уговорката, че човек би трябвало много дълго и сериозно да се замисли, преди да си каже, че повече биха му харесали, ако бяха по-прави, по-дълбоки, по-кафяви или по-раздалечени.“ (Дали да не спра за секунда, че да си поемем дъх?) Истината е (не се шегувам), че това изобщо не са очите на Сиймор. Неговите очи бяха тъмни, много големи и съразмерно разположени, да не говорим, че в тях нямаше и помен от кривогледство. Въпреки това най-малко двама от членовете на нашето семейство бяха убедени и го казваха, че с това описание съм се бил домогвал до очите на Сиймор; и дори намираха, че в известен смисъл съм се справил нелошо. В действителност над неговите очи се спускаше свръхефирен воал и се получаваше нещо като тук съм, няма ме — само дето нямаше никакъв воал и точно там е цялата мъчнотия. Друг един палав писател — Шопенхауер, се опитва в една от веселяшките си творби да опише подобни очи и забърква каша, която, драго ми е да го отбележа, по нищо не се различава от моята.