Eng 232

-In the final analysis, was it I who won, he who lost? That I leave for you to decide.

Over my telephone lines, you have heard all I've said. I've been completely honest with you. I've put all m,y cards on the table. If there are loose ends in my story, you can gather them up and tie them in a bow yourselves .

My memory and my information are now yours. You have the right to criticize, to finish the story to reverse the tapestry and change the weave, to point out the lapses of logic, to imagine you had resolved all the mysteries that I, the narrator crushed under the press of reality, have let escape through the net of my telephones, which is the net of my words.Summary-

- The young man was always glad when his girlfriend was gay. This didn't happen too often; she had a quite tiresome job in an unpleasant environment, many hours of overtime without compensatory leisure and, at home, a sick mother. So she often felt tired. She didn't have either particularly good nerves or self-confidence and easily fell into a state of anxiety and fear.

For this reason he welcomed every manifestation of her gaiety with the tender solicitude of a foster parent. He smiled at her and said: "I'm lukcy today. I've been driving for five years, but I've never given a ride to such a pretty hitchhiker."

-Then he listened for his guest's breathing, become heavier and more regular. He listened to that breath so close to him and mused without being able to go to sleep.

In this room where he had been sleeping alone for a year, this presence bothered him. But it bothered him also by imposing on him a sort of brotherhood he knew well but refused to accept it in the present circumstances. Men who share the same rooms, soldiers or prisoners, develop a strange alliance as if, having cast off their armor with their clothing, they fraternized every evening, over and above their difference, in the ancient community of dream and fatigue. But Daru shook himself; he didn't like such musings, and it was essential to sleep.

-In other words-- and this is, I believe, the purport of all that we in France call radicalism-- nothing will be changed if God does not exist; we shall rediscover the same norms of honesty, progress, and humanity, and we shall have disposed of God as an out-of-date hypothesis which will die away quietly of itself.

- It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering , that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.

- If his myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the extent of his wretched conditon: It is what he thinks of during his descent.

The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at teh same time crown his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.-If the decent is thus sometimes preformed in sorrow it can also take place in joy. This word is not too much. Again I fancy Stsyphus returning toward his rock, and the sorrow was in the beginning.

When the images of earth cling too tightly to memory, when the call of happiness becomes too insistent. It happens that melancholy rises in man's heart: This is the rocks victory, this is the rock itself. The boundless grief is too heavy to bear these are our nights of Getsemane. But crushing truths perish from being acknowledged.

Thus, (Epdipus at the outset obeys fate with out knowing it. But from the moment he knows, his tragedy begins.Yet at the same moment, blind and seperate, he realizes that the only bond linking him to the world is the cool hand of a girl. Then a tremendous remark rings out: "Despite so many ordeals, my advanced age and the nobility of my soul make me conclude that all is well.

"

Although many young mothers suffer neurosis, the fact that they reject abortion and choose to go ahead and bear children shows the bravery of these young A-bomb victims. The overall picture, however, is not always so encouraging. Not a few couples among the A bomb victims have divorced because they could not have children; and some young wives, compelled by those around them to appear brave, must struggle secretly with neuroses.

-The musician took up his lute. "Such are saints or they would not be saints," he said, laughing.

"Do those who need him suffer as I do?""Such suffering is part of the cure!"-"Do not give in to defeat. This extraordinary man brings fatigue to all who seek him. It was easy enough with him in the old days when his place of abode was known. Today, though, the world has changed, and after having enjoyed a position attained only by potentates, he is now pursued by the police on a charge of false pretenses. It is therefore no longer an easy matter to reach him, but have patience and be sure that you will do so.

"

-Ah, but that morning, so breathlessly awaited it had hurt, what did it have to show to Aki? THings that for as long she had seen with her own eyes and touched with her own hands, and whose existence she had never even thought to doubt, taking their being there so much for granted, she now could find no more, except in some far corner of her memory, deep in her consciousness. with her lips slightly parted, Aki stood transfixed with horror. Broken stumps of old trees were still smouldering. Molten metal ran along the pavement. A great geyser gushed out where the lid of the water main had exploded. Al around as far as eye could see, nothing but ruin and rubble, and strewn on top of all, as if left behind there by mistake, strange objects of some whitish chalky substance.

The far-off hills, in some strange way seemed to be closing in upon the town.-There was a man's voice, low but somehow angry. At long intervals the thin voice of a woman mingled with is.THe hard to catch voice of the man grew louder and rougher.

The woman's voice presently changed to a low convulsive sobbing. Then there was a dull thumb as though part of one body had such a terrible blow at a part of the other body. Aki instinctively hid her head under the quilt. She had heard what she was not supposed to hear, hadnt she? A tingling started deep within her ears she had a strange feeling of being shot at with countless yellow arrows, all coming straight at her.-Why was she upsetting herself over that unknown woman who was undoubtedly cowering on the other side of the garden wall? Aki, still only a child, did not know, but in some obscure hurt way she felt a sense of identity with the woman beyond the wall.

Are all women doomed weep like that when they grow up? Even women whose tears I have never once seen; for example, that nurse so attentive and good with sick people and apparently trusted by the doctor, or the teacher of my elementary school class who stands on her platform every day looking as if she never gave a thought to anything but the government textbooks.-The greta anger, the deep hate, come after the event. The thing that parted me from Junko, that kept Kiyoko from me although she wanted to see me again, that made me cower all night in a hollow in the ground - if i could catch the real nature of that thing and fling the fullness of my anger and hate at it, I would not be in torment to this day, well over ten years after, tied to this fierce anger that still finds no proper outlet. I could not be tortured by this nameless hate that yet finds no clear object.

This is what Aki thinks. -She felt she saw it float up quite clearly, with no further need for doubt. I must not let this out of my sight! Now, how can I get my anger and indignation across to this, their object? Aki would begin to lay her plan with meticulous care. But as she pursued that object, its contours would grow vague, and then some other object more or less linked with it would intrude. THe new object was always inevitably linked with the old. One after another new objects would appear and then grow vague and blurred.

And a further trouble: Aki began to suspect uneasily that the hazy something that had lost its clear outlines might be her own self..

-She felt she saw it float up quite clearly, with no further need for doubt. I must not let this out of my sight! Now, how can I get my anger and indignation across to this, their object? Aki would begin to lay her plan with meticulous care. But as she pursued that object, its contours would grow vague, and then some other object more or less linked with it would intrude.

THe new object was always inevitably linked with the old. One after another new objects would appear and then grow vague and blurred. And a further trouble: Aki began to suspect uneasily that the hazy something that had lost its clear outlines might be her own self..

- " Any moment now, I am going to fall into that black abyss!" And then Noboru, anguish showing in his face, muttered in a low voice, "I know; but you must forget all about that kind of thingIf you really loved me, you would be able to put that sort of thing right our of your mind!"- But surely what I called unchanging, the abiding source one can always go home to, must be something richer far than either, rejecting neither of them but transcending both. It must be something solidly sustained but an imperturbable order, although it may real itself under the varying aspects of separate phenomena. Yes, I shall no doubt go to that place again, but I will not be ring home. WHat makes me think so is that host of things lost to my sight, no more reliable than fluff or down, and the uncertainty of all the things i see before me every day. To my regret, that imperturbable order is now known to me only within the world of wishful intimations.

But I must know if it really exists. If i could know it, even in a flash of intuitions, then perhaps i would no longer be the prey of this eery stillness that takes hold of me. I would be freed then from my terror of being sucked int that void that blocks out the light and of falling down, down, down into that black abyss. I want to know.

- Creole began to tell us what the blues were all about.

They were not about anything very new. He and his boys up there were keeping it new, at risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen. For, while the tale of how we suffer and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness.

..

.

- He imagines that the barking is the dog's protest against the limit of dog experience. "F0r, God's sake," the dog is saying, "open the universe a little more!" And because Bellow is, of course, not really talking about dogs, or not only about dogs, I have at the feeling that the dog's rage, and its desire, is also mine, ours, everyone's. "For God's sake, open the universe a little more!"

- It implies a certain kind of society, a certain kind of awakened spirit.

I don't imagine my father's hindu parents would have ben able to understand the idea. SO much is contained in it: The idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility hand achievement. it is an immense human idea. It cannot be reduced to a fixed system.

It cannot generate fanaticism. But it is known to exist, and because of that, other more rigid systems in the end blow away.

- I've made it. I'm making something of my life. I've left home, my husband, to get a Ph.

D in special ed. I have a multiple-entry visa and a small scholarship for two years. After that, well see. My mother was beaten buy her mother in law, my grandmother, when shed registered for french lessons at the alliance franchise. my grandmother, the eldest daughter of a rich zamindar, was illiterate.

- As for me, I'd told any number of white women that i was part Aztec and I'd told a few that I was completely Aztec. That gave me some mystery, some ethnic weight, a history of glorious color and mass executions. Strangely enough, there were aphrodisiacal benefits to claiming o be descend from ritual cannibals. in any event, pretending to be an Aztec warrior was a lot more impressive than revealing I was just some bright kid who'd fought his way off the Spokane Indian Reservation in Washington Staten and was now a corporate lawyer in Seattle who pretended to have a lot more money than he did.

- So, no. I've never married and never will. Not because I couldn't, but because I'm to romantic for marriage. Marriage has failed me, you could say. Not a man exists who hasn't disappointed me, whom I could trust to love the way I've loved. It's because I believe to much in marriage that I don't.

Better to not marry than live a lie.