Essayists From The United States

"“These games are marvelous,” Amanda said. “I like them especially because they are so meaningless and boring, and trivial. These qualities, once regarded as less than desirable, are now everywhere enthroned as the key elements in our psychological lives, as reflected in the art of the period as well as—”"

"“The Continental Congress resolved that your famous plainneff and modefty would be ill ferved were it known that a houfe for your horfe was paid for from the public purfe.”"

"Who among us is not thinking about divorce, except for a few tiny-minded stick-in-the-muds who don’t count?"

"The ultimate meaning of the angry young man is not known. What is known is the shape of his greatest fear—that all of his efforts, from learning to speak to learning to write, to write well, to write badly, to write angrily, from learning to despise to learning to abominate, to abominate well, to abominate badly, to abominate abominably, to rant, to fulminate, to shout down the sea, to age, to age graefully, to age awkwardly, to age at all, to think, to regret, to list himself in the newspapers under “Lost and Found”, might culminate precisely in this: a roaring, raging, crazy mad passionate bibliography."

"When I was hired they showed me my desk, an old beat-up scarred wooden desk, and they told me that it had been O. Henry’s desk when O. Henry worked for the paper, as he had at one time. And I readily believed it. I could see the place where O. Henry had savagely stabbed the desk with his pen in pursuit of a slimy adjective just out of reach, and a kind of bashed-in-looking place where O. Henry had beaten his poor genius head on the desk in frustration over not being able to capture the noun leaping like a fawn just out of reach... So I sat down at the desk and I too began to chase those devils, the dancy nouns and come-hither adjectives, what joy."

"Instant gratification is not as good as that gratification which comes dripping slow, over the sere seasons."

"“True dragons are Danish and speak Danish, a tongue that the Danes themselves describe as less a language than a throat disease. To attract a dragon, one chains a naked maiden to a rock. The maiden must be chained to the rock in such a way that every part of her is visible to the dragon. Many famous paintings demonstrate the technique; Ingres’s Angelica Saved by Ruggiero is an example. After the dragon has inspected your maiden to its heart’s content, you issue one of the conventional formal challenges, in Danish—’Jeg udfordre dig til ridderlig camp’ is the way one usually puts it—and then the fight begins.”"

"“I smell fennel,” Launcelot said. “That reminds me, I should tell you I have discovered a specific for maims. You take salt, good-quality river mud, and bee urine, and slather it on the maim and hold it there for two days. Works like a charm. Gathering the bee urine is a bit of a bore.”"

"“Shouldness is being flouted here,” said Launcelot. “Shouldness is perhaps self-explanatory, but I have never seen it adequately dealt with, either in print or in the lecture hall. When that huntress got me in the bum with an arrow, it was an offense to shouldness. It shouldn’t have gone that way. I told the story to Sir Roger, and now he never tires of telling it, tells it to everyone who comes down the pike. That a knight of the Round Table could be pierced in that way by a female has a significance quite apart from the ludicrous. It’s in the realm of those things which should not happen—a category which holds much philosophical interest, as anyone who has ever looked into anomaletics will recognize. The insult to my dignity was not nearly so grave as the insult to shouldness.”"

"People always like to hear that they’re under stress, makes them feel better. You can imagine what they’d feel if they were told they weren’t under stress."

"My wife wants a dog. She already has a baby. The baby’s almost two. My wife says that the baby wants the dog. My wife has been wanting a dog for a long time. I have had to be the one to tell her that she couldn’t have one. But now the baby wants a dog, my wife says. This may be true. The baby is very close to my wife. They go around together all the time, clutching each other tightly. I ask the baby, who is a girl, “Whose girl are you? Are you Daddy’s girl?” The baby says, “Momma,” and she doesn’t just say it once, she says it repeatedly, “Momma momma momma.” I don’t see why I should buy a hundred-dollar dog for that damn baby."

"I didn’t go to church because I was a black sheep. There were five children in my family and the males rotated the position of black sheep among us, the oldest one being the black sheep for a while while he was in his DWI period or whatever and then getting grayer as he maybe got a job or was in the service and then finally becoming a white sheep when he got married and had a grandchild. My sister was never a black sheep because she was a girl."

"“How does one conquer fear, Don B.?” “One takes a frog and sews it to one’s shoe,” he said. “The left or the right?” Don B. gave me a pitying look. “Well, you’d look mighty funny going down the street with only one frog sewed to your shoes, wouldn’t you?" he said. “One frog on each shoe.”"

"The actors feel that the music played before the curtain rises will put the audience in the wrong mood. The playwright suggests that the (purposefully lugubrious) music be played at twice-speed. This peps it up somewhat while retaining its essentially dark and gloomy character. The actors listen carefully, and are pleased."

""Is that true," I asked, "that song?" "It is a metaphor," said Mrs. Davis, "it has metaphorical truth." "And the end of the mechanical age," I said, "is that a metaphor?" "The end of the mechanical age," said Mrs. Davis, "is in my judgment an actuality straining to become a metaphor. One must wish it luck, I suppose. One must cheer it on. Intellectual rigor demands that we give these damned metaphors every chance, even if they are inimical to personal well-being and comfort. We have a duty to understand everything, whether we like it or not–a duty I would scant if I could." At that moment the water jumped into the boat and sank us."

"The center will not hold if it has been spot-welded by an operator whose deepest concern is not with the weld but with his lottery ticket."

"My deranged mother has written another book. This one is called The Bough and is even worse that the others. I refer not to its quality—it exhibits the usual “coruscating wit” and “penetrating social observation”—but to the extent to which it utilizes, as a kind of mulch pile, the lives of her children."

"Will you be wanting to contest the divorce?" I asked Mrs. Davis. "I should think not," she said calmly, "although I suppose on of us should, for the fun of the thing. An uncontested divorce always seems to me contrary to the spirit of divorce."

"As Jules Renard said, no matter how much care an author takes to write as few books as possible, there will be people who haven’t heard of some of them."

"There are people on my block who are writers I'm very fond of, and I'm very close to, friends like Barthelme and Sales and people like that."

"Where is my daddy? asked the emerald. My da? Moll dropped a glass, which shattered. Your father. Yes, said the emerald, amn’t I supposed to have one? He’s not here. Noticed that, said the emerald. I’m never sure what you know and what you don’t know. I ask in true perplexity. He was Deus Lunus. The moon god. Sometimes thought of as the man in the moon. Bosh! said the emerald. I don’t believe it. Do you believe I’m your mother? I do. Do you believe you’re an emerald? I am an emerald. Used to be, said Moll, women wouldn’t drink from a glass into which the moon had shone. For fear of getting knocked up. Surely this is a superstition? Hoo, hoo, said Moll. I like superstition. I thought the moon was female. Don’t be culture-bound. It’s been female in some cultures at some times, and in others, not. What did it feel like? The experience. Not a proper subject for discussion with a child. The emerald sulking. Green looks here and there. Well it wasn’t the worst. Wasn’t the worst. I had an orgasm that lasted three hours. I judge that not the worst."

"Snatch them baldheaded, slap their teeth out. Little starved faces four feet from the screen, you’d speak to them in a loud, commanding voice, get not even a twitch. Use of the preemptive splint, not everyone knows about it. The world reminds us of its power, again and again and again. Going along minding your own business, and suddenly an act of God, right there in front of you. Great falls of snow and bursting birds. Getting guilty, letting it all slide. Sown here and there like little...petunias, one planted in Old Lyme, one in Fairbanks, one in Tempe. Alleged that he slept with her while she was asleep, I can see it, under certain circumstances. You may wink, but not at another person. You may wink only at pigeons. You may pound in your tent pegs, pitch your tent, gather wood for the fire, form the hush puppies. They seek to return? Back to the nest? The warm arms? The ineffable smells? Not on your tintype. Well, I think that’s a little harsh. Think that’s a little harsh do you? Yes, harsh. Harsh. Well that’s a sketch, that is, that’s a tin-plated sketch— They write and telephone. Short of cash? Give us a call, all inquiries handled with the utmost confidentiality. They call constantly, they’re calling still, saying williwaw, williwaw—"

"Barthelme is neither tall nor short, neither fat nor thin. He shields his blue eyes behind rimless glasses. He has red hair and a beard and dresses conservatively. He lives quietly in a floor-through walk-up on West 11th Street with his third wife, a Danish girl named Birgit, and his 4-year-old daughter, for whom he has made a most interesting pull-toy out of found objects. He is handy with carpenter’s tools. His manuscripts arrive at The New Yorker very neatly typed. He works in the morning and is often seen walking around the Village of an afternoon. His social life has been described as “incredibly commonplace”. ...He is known to grow quite restless confronted by the quiet of a country weekend. He is likely to become “aggressively silent” at large gatherings of literary people, but he is also a talkative and loyal intimate."

"Naked girls with the heads of Marx and Malraux prone and helpless in the glare of the headlights, tried to give them a little joie de vivre but maybe it didn’t take, their constant bickering and smallness, it’s like a stroke of lightning, the world reminds you of its power, tracheotomies right and left, I am spinning, my pretty child, don’t scratch, pick up your feet, the long nights, spent most of my time listening, this is a test of the system, this is only a test."

"… Dr. Lightman was an astrophysicist, a card-carrying wizard of space and time, with a Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology and subsequent posts at Cornell and Harvard. In 1989, at the peak of his prowess as a physicist, he began to walk away from the world of black holes to enter the world of black ink and the uncertain, lonely life of the writer."

"The relationship between science and the humanities is two-way. Science changes our view of the world and our place in it. In the other direction, the humanities provide the store of ideas and images and language available to us in understanding the world. The exploding star of A.D. 1054, the Crab Nebula, was sighted and documented by the Chinese, but nowhere mentioned in the West, where the Aristotelian notion of the immortality of stars still held sway. We often do not see what we do not expect to see."

"In the 1950s, academics forecast that as a result of new technology, by the year 2000 we could have a twenty-hour workweek. Such a development would be a beautiful example of technology at the service of the human being. ...According to the Bureau of Statistics, the goods and services produced per hour of work in the United States has indeed more than doubled since 1950. ...However, instead of reducing the workweek, the increased efficiencies and productivities have gone into increasing the salaries of workers. ...Workers... rather have used their increased efficiencies and resulting increased disposable income to purchase more material goods. ...Indeed, in a cruel irony, the workweek has actually lengthened. ...More work is required to pay for more consumption, fueled by more production, in an endless, vicious circle."

"There is no friction here. It's a kind and buoyant place. What you forget, living here, is that just because you have stopped sinking doesn't mean you're not still underwater."

"I would like to go for a ride with you, have you take me to stand before a river in the dark where hundreds of lightning bugs blink this code in sequence: right here, nowhere else! Right now, never again!"

"Her ex stops by when he's in town and we pretend he's welcome. The two of them, Holly and this ex of hers, sit around and depress each other. They know all of each other's weak points and failings, so they can bring each down in two-tenths of a second. When she see him, Holly says, it's like the sunsets at the beach--once the sun drops the sand chills quickly. Then it's like a lot of times that were good ten minutes ago and don't count now."

"She introduces me to a nurse as the Best Friend. The impersonal article is more intimate. It tells me that they are intimate, the nurse and my friend. 'I was telling her we used to drink Canada Dry ginger ale and pretend were were in Canada' 'That's how dumb we were,' I say. 'You could be sisters,' the nurse says. So how come, I'll bet they are wondering, it took me so long to get to such a glorious place? But do they ask? They do not ask. Two months, and how long is the drive? The best I can explain it is this - I have a friend who worked one summer in a mortuary. He used to tell me stories. The one that really got to me was not the gritiest, but it's the one that did. A man wrecked his car on 101 going south. He did not lose consciousness. But his arm was taken down to the bone - and when he looked at it - it scared him to death. I mean, he died. So I hadn't dared to look any closer. But now I'm doing it - and hoping that I will live through it.""

"When my mother died, my father's early widowhood gave him social cachet he would not have had if they had divorced. He was a bigger catch for the sorrow attached."

"Then the children went to bed, or at least went upstairs, and the men joined the women for a cigarette on the porch, absently picking ticks engorged like grapes off the sleeping dogs. And when the men kissed the women good night, and their weekend whiskers scratched the women's cheeks, the women did not think shave, they thought stay."

"I think of the chimp, the one with the talking hands. In the course of the experiment, that chimp had a baby. Imagine how her trainers must have thrilled when the mother, without prompting, began to sign her newborn. Baby, drink milk. Baby, play ball. And when the baby died, the mother stood over the body, her wrinkled hands moving with animal grace, forming again and again the words: Baby, come hug, Baby come hug, fluent now in the language of grief."

"Maybe this is not a come-down-from-the-ledge story. But I tell it with the thought that the woman on the ledge will ask herself a question, the question that occurred to that man in Bogota. He wondered how we know that what happens to us isn't good?"

"As a dedicated, successful writer, Lydia Sigourney violated essential elements of the very gender roles she celebrated. In the process, she offered young, aspiring women writers around the country an example of the possibilities of achieving both fame and economic reward."

"The glorified spirit of the infant is a star to guide the mother to its own blissful clime."

"A disposition to dwell on the bright side of character, is like gold to the possessor."

"Pride is a fruitful source of uneasiness. It keeps the mind in disquiet. Too high an opinion of ourselves, involves the desire of impressing others with the same opinion. This is often attended with difficulty. If we do not succeed in inspiring them with an equal idea of our own merits, we shall be expecting more deference and regard than they are inclined to pay. So, pride will be disappointed and offended."

"We speak of educating our children. Do we know that our children also educate us?"

"[T]he strength of a nation, especially of a republican nation, is in the intelligent and well-ordered homes of the people."

"Mothers, whatever you wish your children to become, strive to exhibit in your own lives and conversation."

"Should pale death with arrow dread Make the ocean caves our bed, Though no eye of love might see Where that shrouded grave shall be, Thou! who hear'st the surges roll, Deign to save the suppliant soul."

"Everyone can feel the nothingness, the void, just beneath the surface of everyday routines and securities."

"The attack of the Luddites was not occasioned by the introduction of new machinery, however, as is commonly thought, for there is no evidence of such in 1811 and 1812 when Luddism proper began. Rather, the destruction was leveled at the new slip-shod methods which were ordered into effect on the extant machinery. Not an attack against production on economic grounds, it was above all the violent response of the textile workers (soon joined by others) to their attempted degradation in the form of inferior work; shoddy goods — the hastily-assembled "cut-ups," primarily — was the issue at hand."

"To wonder what was so radical about a movement which seemed to demand "only" the cessation of fraudulent work, is to fail to perceive the inner truth of the valid assumption, made on every side, of the connection between frame-breaking and sedition. As if the fight by the producer for the integrity of his work-life can be made without calling the whole of capitalism into question. The demand for the cessation of fraudulent work necessarily becomes a cataclysm, an all-or-nothing battle insofar as it is pursued; it leads directly to the heart of the capitalist relationship and its dynamic."

"Never before have people been so infantalized, made so dependent on the machine for everything; as the earth rapidly approaches its extinction due to technology, our souls are shrunk and flattened by its pervasive rule. Any sense of wholeness and freedom can only return by the undoing of the massive division of labour at the heart of technological progress. This is the liberatory project in all its depth."

"We can either passively continue on the road to utter domestication and destruction or turn in the direction of joyful upheaval, passionate and feral embrace of wildness and life that aims at dancing on the ruins of clocks, computers and that failure of imagination and will called work. Can we justify our lives by anything less than such a politics of rage and dreams?"

"When Taylor began his efforts at the Midvale Steel Company in the 1880s, several members of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers were likewise interested in labor management. Industrial capitalism was running up against renewed resistance from the growing ranks of labor, still committed to a sense of work integrity and craftsmanship. Task management, or scientific management as it came to be called, began to take shape in the eighties as the way to break the worker's threatening resistance. The heart of this approach is the systematic reduction of work into discrete, routinized tasks, totally separated from any policy decisions about the job. ... For capitalism to be firmly in control, it must monopolize information and techniques as surely as it controls the rest of the means of production. The worker must be permitted only to perform certain specific narrow tasks as planned by management."

"If we once — and for so long — lived in balance with nature and each other, we should be able to do so again. The catastrophe that’s overtaking us has deep roots, but our previous state of natural anarchy reaches much further into our shared history."