same.”
“Did you eat any supper?”
“Yes.”
“There was a long thing in the paper on Sunday about how your generation thinks the world is terribly compromised.Do you think the world is terribly compromised?”
“No, I don’t think it’s compromised.”
“You don’t think this has anything to do with your trouble?”
“I love the world. I just feel sad, that’s all.”
“Well I suppose there’s plenty to be sad about if you look around, but it makes me sore to have people always chopping at the suburbs. I’ve never understood why. When you go to the theater they’re always chopping at the suburbs but I can’t see that playing golf and raising flowers is depraved. The living is cheaper out here and I’d be lost if I couldn’t get some exercise. People seem to make some connection between respectability and moral purity that I don’t get. For instance, the fact that I wear a vest doesn’t necessarily mean that I claim to be pure in heart. That doesn’t follow. All kinds of scandalous things happen everywhere but just because they happen to people who have flower gardens doesn’t mean that flower gardens are wicked. For instance, Charlie Stringer was indicted last year for sending pornography through the mails. He claims to be some kind of a publisher and I guess dirty pictures is his business. He lives in one of those Tudor houses on Hansen Circle and he has a pretty wife and three children. Flower gardens. Trees. A couple of poodles. The critics would say: Look, look, look what a big façade he’s constructed to conceal the fact that he deals in obsceneness and corruption, but what’s the point? Why should a man who deals in filth have to live in a cesspool? He’s a bastard for sure but why shouldn’t abastard want to water his grass and play softball with the kids?
“We talk an awful lot about freedom and independence. If you were going to define our national purpose I don’t guess you could avoid using words like freedom and independence. The President is always talking about freedom and independence, the army and navy are always fighting to defend freedom and independence and on Sundays at church Father Ransome thanks God for our freedom and independence but you and I know that the blacks who live in those firetraps down along the river don’t have any freedom or independence in the choice of what they do and where they live. Charlie Simpson is really a great fellow but he and Phelps Marsden and a half a dozen other prominent and wealthy men around here make their money in deals with Salazar, Franco, Union Minière and all those military juntas. They talk about freedom and independence more than anybody else but they furnish the money and the armaments and the technicians to crush freedom and independence whenever it appears. I hate lying and I hate falsehoods and when you get a world that admits so many liars I suppose you’ve got something to be sad about. I don’t, as a matter of fact, have as much freedom and independence as I’d like myself. What I wear, what I eat, my sex life and a lot of my thinking is pretty well regimented but there are times when I like being told what to do. I can’t figure out what’s right and wrong in every situation.
“The newspapers are sometimes very confusing. They keep running photographs of soldiers dying in jungles and mudholes right beside an advertisement for a forty-thousand-dollar emerald ring or a sable coat. It would be childish to say that the soldier died for emeralds and sables but there it is, day after day, the dying soldier and the emerald ring. And homosexuality. You read a lot about that these days and it bothers me. I wish it didn’t exist. Before I joined the Chemists Club I used to have to pump ship in Grand Central and I almost never went into those choppers without getting into trouble. Once when I was going up the stairs this guy came along and took my arm. I had on a Brooks suit and a Locke hat and Peal shoes and the
“Did you eat any supper?”
“Yes.”
“There was a long thing in the paper on Sunday about how your generation thinks the world is terribly compromised.Do you think the world is terribly compromised?”
“No, I don’t think it’s compromised.”
“You don’t think this has anything to do with your trouble?”
“I love the world. I just feel sad, that’s all.”
“Well I suppose there’s plenty to be sad about if you look around, but it makes me sore to have people always chopping at the suburbs. I’ve never understood why. When you go to the theater they’re always chopping at the suburbs but I can’t see that playing golf and raising flowers is depraved. The living is cheaper out here and I’d be lost if I couldn’t get some exercise. People seem to make some connection between respectability and moral purity that I don’t get. For instance, the fact that I wear a vest doesn’t necessarily mean that I claim to be pure in heart. That doesn’t follow. All kinds of scandalous things happen everywhere but just because they happen to people who have flower gardens doesn’t mean that flower gardens are wicked. For instance, Charlie Stringer was indicted last year for sending pornography through the mails. He claims to be some kind of a publisher and I guess dirty pictures is his business. He lives in one of those Tudor houses on Hansen Circle and he has a pretty wife and three children. Flower gardens. Trees. A couple of poodles. The critics would say: Look, look, look what a big façade he’s constructed to conceal the fact that he deals in obsceneness and corruption, but what’s the point? Why should a man who deals in filth have to live in a cesspool? He’s a bastard for sure but why shouldn’t abastard want to water his grass and play softball with the kids?
“We talk an awful lot about freedom and independence. If you were going to define our national purpose I don’t guess you could avoid using words like freedom and independence. The President is always talking about freedom and independence, the army and navy are always fighting to defend freedom and independence and on Sundays at church Father Ransome thanks God for our freedom and independence but you and I know that the blacks who live in those firetraps down along the river don’t have any freedom or independence in the choice of what they do and where they live. Charlie Simpson is really a great fellow but he and Phelps Marsden and a half a dozen other prominent and wealthy men around here make their money in deals with Salazar, Franco, Union Minière and all those military juntas. They talk about freedom and independence more than anybody else but they furnish the money and the armaments and the technicians to crush freedom and independence whenever it appears. I hate lying and I hate falsehoods and when you get a world that admits so many liars I suppose you’ve got something to be sad about. I don’t, as a matter of fact, have as much freedom and independence as I’d like myself. What I wear, what I eat, my sex life and a lot of my thinking is pretty well regimented but there are times when I like being told what to do. I can’t figure out what’s right and wrong in every situation.
“The newspapers are sometimes very confusing. They keep running photographs of soldiers dying in jungles and mudholes right beside an advertisement for a forty-thousand-dollar emerald ring or a sable coat. It would be childish to say that the soldier died for emeralds and sables but there it is, day after day, the dying soldier and the emerald ring. And homosexuality. You read a lot about that these days and it bothers me. I wish it didn’t exist. Before I joined the Chemists Club I used to have to pump ship in Grand Central and I almost never went into those choppers without getting into trouble. Once when I was going up the stairs this guy came along and took my arm. I had on a Brooks suit and a Locke hat and Peal shoes and the
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