Christianity by fear and by rote

“Miss Abbott’s religion was Christianity by fear and by rote—so tenacious it got you by the extremities and never let go; it was a thing of interminable monologues, crazed soliloquies; she wanted you to believe she herself was in radio contact with the Deity, and had hung the moon for Him on day number six. . . .
    [A]t Christmastime one year, when my feeling against Miss Abbott were running strongest, I went looking for the biggest, darkest, foulest dog turd I could find. I took it home in a paper sack, and when no one was around I put it in a small box and gift-wrapped it in beautiful red paper. I put the box, containing its Christmas cheer, in a larger box and gift-wrapped that one, in fine green and white paper—then a larger box still, then two or three others, each one more elaborately wrapped and ribboned. When I had finished, I put all the six boxes in wrapping paper and, using my left hand, I wrote out Miss Abbott’s address. Then I took the parcel to the post office and mailed it. I felt good for days.”

—Willie Morris, recalling his Yazoo City, Mississippi childhood in North Toward Home, 1967.

a nervous-breakdown gun

“The only thing I want to be famous for is inventing a nervous-breakdown gun. You could just shoot it at someone and they’d have a nervous breakdown and start sobbing, in fetal position. Someone like Slobodan Milosevic—we don’t have to kill him. Just give him a nervous breakdown.”

our most valuable tulip

“I do not wish to by cynical; but if a stone is thrown into our garden, is it not sure to knock off the head of our most valuable tulip? If a cup of coffee is to be spilled, does it not make a point of falling on our richest brocade gown?”

—Emily Eden, The Semi-Attached Couple, 1859.

The best games

“The best games were at night. There was something about the pools of street light and the way the darkness surrounded us. Sound seemed to bounce. A couple of us might burst out singing, might do some dance moves. I believed the people in the airplanes passing over could see us and thought we looked cool. This was long before I grew up and found out you can’t see very much from an airplane window. Big things, yes, but the little things are lost.”

—Lynda Barry, One! Hundred! Demons!, 2002.

The histories of vampires and people

“The histories of vampires and people are not so different, really. How many of us can honestly see our own reflection?”

—Lynda Barry, One! Hundred! Demons!, 2002.

two souls in one body

“The self-conscious feedback mechanism of the cortex allows us the hallucination that we are two souls in one body—a rational soul and an animal soul, a rider and a horse, a good guy with better instincts and finer feelings and a rascal with rapacious lusts and unruly passions. Hence the marvelously involved hypocrisies of guilt and penitence, and the frightful cruelties of punishment, warfare, and even self-torment in the name of taking the side of the good soul against the evil. The more it sides with itself, the more the good soul reveals its inseparable shadow, and the more it disowns its shadow, the more it becomes it.”

—Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, 1966.

China Facing Olympic Heat

China struggles with Tibetan unrest

Vernacular Baton Rouge: PERSONAL TOUCH

A greenish-white light

“Otoko went out on the veranda and kicked a cage of fireflies into the garden with her bare foot.
    All the fireflies seemed to glow at once. A greenish-white light was streaming out as the cage landed on a patch of moss. The sky was clouding at the end of a long summer day, and an evening haze had begun to hover faintly over the garden, but it was still daylight. It seemed unlikely that the fireflies could have glowed so brilliantly, perhaps she had only imagined the light streaming out of the cage, perhaps it had been conjured up by her own feelings. She stood there rigidly as if paralyzed and stared unblinkingly at the firefly cage lying on its side on the moss.”

—Yasunari Kawabata, Beauty & Sadness, translated by Howard Hibbett, 1975.