Book: You Bright and Risen Angels
Quotes of Book: You Bright and Risen Angels
...but in 1917 we had no cares except the mundane ones of starvation and occupation and civil war, and for those of us in our armored trains traveling up and down the front waging brilliant campaigns, or for our young Natashas and Alyoshas experiencing the education and class steeling of the Komsomol for the first time, learning to ask in every historical situation: How many workers are there? how many peasants, intellectuals? how do they stand on this issue? it was a very exciting and romantic period; what I am getting at is that probably no one felt alone as Bug had felt alone; for everyone worked together and loved each other- oh, I hope that that was true. For if life is worth living at all you have your cake and eat it, too {съесть ее тунцом as the Russians say, и ее мудак- literally to eat out her tuna her asshole}; when you fight together you feel together; love and politics go hand in hand, and I can demonstrate this feasibly with another linguistic point. A girl's cherry is her . , to pop like a little cherry, means in fact to crack under interrogation. I want to draw your attention, comrades, to that highly significant trope. book-quoteAt the time that he had seriously begun to consolidate his organization, Parker was working in a custom photo lab. The reader who is not much taken by audiovisual pastimes may have a deficient picture of that place where Parker was employed; or perhaps not so much a deficient picture--the dyes faded, shoddily spotted, brutishly burned in and doltishly dodged by subhuman technicians under the glare of the enlargers--as an image which had been misfiled in the archives of the memory, representing instead one of those bleak Photo Drive-Ups and Presto Printses located nowadays on the corner of almost every large parking lot, in which the clerks wait sadly behind their glass counters, but no one comes in, and the air becomes darker and darker over the course of the morning as a result of exhaust fumes {there goes another brain cell; ping! - THAT thought will never be completed now}; and the pink chubby tots smiling at your from the walls in sample enlargements become steadily more grimy, and by the lunch break they are brown; and the day ticks off on the loud digital clock; and then finally a car creeps into the lot, and a popeyed couple locks that vehicle doors listlessly; they request a reprint of a washed-out snapshot of their son who was killed in the Indian Wars, and they go away; and after a long time here comes a slick-haired teenager who once took a few pix of his girlfriend holding a balloon at the zoo in front of the monkey cage on a dirty overcast day, and the clerk can tell just by looking at this customer that they won't come out, because the guy's a loser if the clerk knows anything at all about losers and in fact he knows a hell of a lot about losers because why else would he be stuck with this job? book-quoteIt sure if terrific to be in the back seat of a car full of all the people in your affinity group, and as you zip down the center of the road the radio is going boodeley-boodeley-boo in some bluegrass heart song to open space, and, whoopee, you're hugging all the committed girls who love you just as the boys love you but even more so, maybe, because Bug never forgot that a Swiss army knife, for instance, does everything well and nothing excellently; and to do something excellently a good navy surplus kelp-slitting blade is far superior to a thousand sawtoothed frogman's specials; and a gun is worth a thousand knives; and a good friend is worth a thousand guns; and ten minutes' bored talk about the weather with any girl is worth a thousand friends at your back on the Great Trek of 1836, at least at that time in his life, perhaps because until he joined the affinity group none of his friends had ever been girls; but now everyone was his friend, especially the girls {but he only thought that; he didn't say it, didn't want anyone to claim that he was a sexist}. book-quote
