They did not know even the simple things: a sense of victory, or satisfaction, or neccesary sacrifice. They did not know the feeling of taking a place and keeping it, securing a village and then raising the flag and calling it a victory. No sense of order or momentum. No front, no rear, no trenches laid out in neat parallels. No Patton rushing for the Rhine, no beachheads to storm and win and hold for the duration. They did not have targets. They did not have a cause. They did not know if it was a war of ideology or economics or hegemony or spite. On a given day, they did not know where they were in Quang Ngai, or how being there might influence larger outcomes. They did not know the names of most villages. They did not know which villages were crucial. They did not know strategies. They did not know the terms of the war, its architecture, the rules of fair play. When they took prisoners, which was rare, they did not know the questions to ask, whether to release a suspect or beat on him. They did not know how to feel. Whether, when seeing a dead Vietnamese, to be happy or sad or relieved; whether, in times of quiet, to be apprehensive or content; whether to engage the enemy or elude him. They did not know how to feel when they saw villages burning. Revenge? Loss? Peace of mind or anguish? They did not know. They knew the old myths about Quang Ngai–tales passed down from old-timer to newcomer–but they did not know which stories to believe. Magic, mystery, ghosts and incense, whispers in the dark, strange tongues and strange smells, uncertainties never articulated in war stories, emotion squandered on ignorance. They did not know good from evil.
American writer
from Going After Cacciato by Tim O’Brien
Oscar Johnson refused to back off from a claim that he was born and raised in center-city Detroit, where, he said, he first learned the principles of human diplomacy. He listed them in precise order–compromise, give-‘n’-take, courtesy, magnanimity. “An’ if you still don’ get what you want,” Oscar said, “then crack the sons of bitches with a sledgehammer.” Diplomacy, he was fond of saying, is the art of persuasion; and war–never citing his sources–is simply diplomacy continued through other means. . .
E.B. White on New York’s diverse population from his book Here Is New York
The collision and the intermingling of these millions of foreign-born people representing so many races and creeds make New York a permanent exhibit of the phenomenon of one world. The citizens of New York are tolerant not only from disposition but from necessity. The city has to be tolerant, otherwise it would explode in a radioactive cloud of hate and rancor and bigotry. If the people were to depart even briefly from the peace of cosmopolitan intercourse, the town would blow up higher than a kite. In New York smolders every race problem there is, but the noticeable thing is not the problem but the inviolate truce.
from Here Is New York by E.B. White
A block or two west of the new City of Man in Turtle Bay there is an old willow tree that presides over an interior garden. It is a battered tree, long suffering and much climbed, held together by strands of wire but beloved of those who know it. In a way, it symbolizes the city: life under difficulties, growth against odds, sap-rise in the midst of concrete, and the steady reaching for the sun.
from My Ears Are Bent by Joseph Mitchell
While I never drink anything stronger than Moxie, I often go to Dick’s to observe life, a subject in which I have been deeply interested since childhood. This place is down a narrow street near the Brooklyn Bridge; it is one of those places with a twitchy neon sign, a bar which sags here and there, possibly because it was moved in and out of several speakeasies during prohibition, and a grimy window on which are stuck greasy cardboard signs advertising specials, such as “Special Today. Chicken Pot Pie. Bread & Butter. 35C.” There are a large bowl of fresh roasted peanuts and a bottle of mulligan on the bar, and the tile floor is littered with peanut hulls and cigarette ends and bologna rinds from the free lunch. The cook uses olive oil for frying, and he burns a lot of it during the day. On damp days the place smells like a stable, and there is a legend in the neighborhood that truck-drivers in the street outside have to restrain their horses from entering.
The proprietor, Dick, is a sad-eyed and broad beamed Italian who often shakes his fat, hairy fists at the fly-specked ceiling and screams, “I am being crucified.” He hates all his customers, but he is liberal with credit and has a cigar box under the bar full of tabs. If he is feeling good, he slides the bottle toward the customer every third drink and says, “This is on me.”
One time Dorothy Hall, a society reporter, took Dick with her to the Beaux Arts Ball. The costumes were supposed to be Oriental, and she got him a eunuch costume. She told him to speak nothing but Italian and introduced him as a big Italian nobleman from Naples. He danced with Elsa Maxwell, who was dressed as a Grand Eunuch.
“She sure did have good manners,” he said later.
When he buys a newspaper, he spreads it out on the bar and looks for girls in bathing suits. When he finds one he likes, he says, “My God! Look at this baby. My God! This baby has everything. My God! I would die for her.”
The customers hardly ever call him by his name. He is called “The House.” For example, a customer will say to a bartender, “Go see if The House will cash a check for me.” When he is shaking dice, he always sings. He believes he has a good voice, and his favorite song is “Love in Bloom.” When he comes to work, he ties on his apron and looks down the bar at his customers. Then he shakes his head and says, “They must have forgot to lock the doors at the asylum.”
However, he believes he runs a classy place. “The last time Mr. Heywood Broun was in here, he said I make the best gin rickey he ever tasted.” One time someone stole a sign from one of the chain nut stores, the Chock Full o’ Nuts Company, and hung it on his door, and he was angry for days.
James Baldwin on the difference between being a preacher and being a writer
The two roles are completely unattached. When you are standing in the pulpit, you must sound as though you know what you’re talking about. When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something that you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.
John Gardner on moral art
The premise of moral art is that life is better than death; art hunts for avenues to life. The book succeeds if we’re powerfully persuaded that the focal characters, in their fight for life, have won honestly or, if they lose, are tragic in their loss, not just tiresome and pitiful.
Eudora Welty on one’s background
I’m a native Southerner, but as a writer I think background matters most in how well it teaches you to look around and see clearly what’s there and in how deeply it nourishes your imagination.
from The Wapshot Chronicle by John Cheever
Moses’s feelings were strenuous but not sad and he did not remember the skimming fleet at the ten-minute signal before a race or the ruined orchards where he hunted grouse or Parson’s Pond and the cannon on the green and the water of the river shining between the hardware store and the five-and-ten-cent store where Cousin Justina had once played the piano. We are all inured, by now, to those poetic catalogues where the orchid and the overshoe appear cheek by jowl; where the filthy smell of old plumage mingles with the smell of the sea. We have all parted from simple places by train or boat at season’s end with generations of yellow leaves spilling on the north wind as we spill our seed and the dogs and the children in the back of the car, but it is not a fact that at the moment of separation a tumult of brilliant and precise images–as though we drowned–streams through our heads. We have indeed come back to lighted houses, smelling on the north wind burning applewood, and seen a Polish countess greasing her face in a ski lodge and heard the cry of the horned owl in rut and smelled a dead whale on the south wind that carries also the sweet note of the bell from Antwerp and the dishpan summons of the bell from Altoona but we do not remember all this and more as we board the train.
from Islands in the Stream by Ernest Hemingway
“Tommy,” Willie said. “I love you, you son of a bitch, and don’t die.”
Thomas Hudson looked at him without moving his head.
“Try to understand if it isn’t too hard.”
Thomas Hudson looked at him. He felt far away now and there were no problems at all. He felt the ship gathering her speed and the lovely throb of her engines against his shoulder blades which rested against the boards. He looked up and there was the sky that he had always loved and he looked across the great lagoon that he was quite sure, now, he would never paint and he eased his position a little to lessen the pain. The engines were around three thousand now, he thought, and they came through the deck and into him.
“I think I understand, Willie,” he said.
“Oh shit,” Willie said. “You never understand anybody that loves you.”
Leonard Durso 