Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

I have never thought this life particularly salubrious or benign and I have never understood in the slightest why I was here. If there is an afterlife — and I pray most fervently that there is not — I can only hope that they wont sing . . . Suffering is a part of the human condition and must be borne. But misery is a choice.

— Cormac McCarthy / The Passenger

To remain silent
Is consent, is wrong, is more
Deadly than more bombs.

— Faisal Mohyuddin / “Ceasefire Haiku”

There was a time in my twenties when I derived voluptuous satisfaction from going around dripping blood everywhere. I am a bleeding bloody creature, see how I bleed and bleed, look at all the blood crinkle-oozing out of me, onto my ankles, onto the ground, onto the street, onto your smart shoes. Bright as a ruby, dark as a garnet.

— Claire-Louise Bennett / Checkout 19

And I’ve come to suspect that the ground we walk is less of our choosing than we imagine. And all the while a past we hardly even knew is rolled over into our lives like a dubious investment. The history of these times will be long in the sorting, Squire. But if there is a common keel to our understanding it is that we are flawed. At our core that is what we know.

— Cormac McCarthy / The Passenger

I’ve always thought that we should take Donald Trump at his word. When a candidate for President tells the American people that he is going to use his power to initiate mass deportations, when he threatens to pursue and punish the “enemy within,” we should take it seriously, and not simply wait for it to happen or wish it away.

— David Remnick / “It Can Happen Here” / The New Yorker Daily

Here is a story. The last of all men who stands alone in the universe while it darkens about him. Who sorrows all things with a single sorrow. Out of the pitiable and exhausted remnants of what was once his soul he’ll find nothing from which to craft the least thing godlike to guide him in these last of days.

— Cormac McCarthy / The Passenger

Don’t make too much meaning of the fact
Depeche Mode is playing each time you
should but do not die.

— Karyna McGlynn / “When You’re Seventeen Everything Sounds like a Secret Anthem to Doom”

What I’m Listening To:

Death is everywhere
The more I look
The more I see
The more I feel
A sense of urgency
Tonight

— Depeche Mode / “Fly On the Windscreen”