Quotations from *Bloodsong*, 1 of 2
Jill Neimark
American

“I wanted to cut my life off like a bad arm, and I did, and Christ I was proud of myself, but you know how they say an amputated arm aches? Well, I ached for my old life. I always seem to be aching for something.”
—Jill Neimark, Bloodsong

Everyone has a first and then a last love, he wrote, and it’s the last love that stamps the soul. The first is simple, it’s a flying leap into life. The last must be Gordian in its knot, it permeates every memory, seeps into every pore; counterpoint to fate. It becomes fate. And so the last love is always a shock and an exception. She might be his last love.

“But I’m not gonna fuck you,” she’d retort.

“I don’t need that now.”
—Jill Neimark, Bloodsong

“Y poco a poco me olvide de vivir,” he said. And little by little I forgot how to live.
—Jill Neimark, Bloodsong

Virgins, bulls, men and gods; the world must be made to bleed.
—Jill Neimark, Bloodsong

And Nadal said those who have endured some misfortune will always be set apart by it. They can follow the call of that misfortune, they can seed affliction in others, until they are so alone that no one can reach them.

But it is that same misfortune that is their gift, and their bridge back to humanity. They must make their way back. He’d tried to make his way back through love. In a tin hut in La Perla on a sunny afternoon he knew he could not.
—Jill Neimark, Bloodsong

“Encounter”
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
1933- Russian

We were sitting about taking coffee
in the aerodrome cafe in Copenhagen
where everything was brilliance and comfort
and stylish to the point of tedium.
The old man suddenly appeared
or rather happened like an event of nature,
in an ordinary greenish anorak
his face scarred by the salt and burning wind,
ploughing a furrow through the crowded room
and walking like a sailor from the wheel.
His beard was like the white foam of the sea
brimming and glistening around his face.
His gruffness and his winner's certainty
sent up a wave around him as he walked
through the old fashions aping modern fashions
and modern fashions aping old fashions.
He in his open collar and rough shirt
stepping aside from vermouth and pernod
stood at the bar demanding Russian vodka
and waving away soda with a 'No'.
He with the scars marking his tanned forearms
his filthy trousers and his noisy shoes
had better style than anyone in the crowd.
The solid ground seemed to quiver under
the heavy authority of that tread.
Somebody smiled across: 'Look at that!
you'd think that was Hemingway,' he said.
Expressed in details of his short gestures
and heavy motions of his fisherman's walk.
He was a statue sketched in a rough rock,
one treading down bullets and centuries,
one walking like a man hunched in a trench,
pushing aside people and furniture.
It was the very image of Hemingway.
(Later I heard that it was Hemingway.)

Quotations from *Bloodsong*, 2 of 2
Jill Neimark
American

He never asked my last name. When I asked if he’d ever been in love, he said, Yes, but I loved the wrong person, and he said it as simply as someone would say, Yes, but I took the wrong turn and that’s why I’m late. I wanted to ask the most stupid, obvious question: Why did you choose the wrong person? But instead I asked him how he liked New York, and he said, I’ve been in New York before and I can tell you, New York and I are not in love with each other. I like the desert and the ocean.
—Jill Neimark, Bloodsong

On a train to Wyoming. It’s surprising how we’re all alike at least on trains.
—Jill Neimark, Bloodsong

I’m twenty-nine and I feel absent from my own life.
—Jill Neimark, Bloodsong

I don’t remember—what’s it like to be the most important person to someone? To say, I’ll never get over you. I’ll never recover.
—Jill Neimark, Bloodsong

“Every puertorriqueno,” says Popi, “is born split in two. He’s like the yagrumo, the tree whose leaves turn from dark to light in the wind. Every one of us is born with this divided self.”

“Divided between what?” I ask, watching him pour milk into his coffee until it’s the color of butterscotch.

“Latin and Anglo,” he says quickly, as if pleased at my indulgence. “Being part American and always the poor cousin. . .”
—Jill Neimark, Bloodsong

“Siesta time in sultry summer”
Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso)
43 BCE – 17 CE Roman
translated by Guy Lee

Siesta time in sultry summer.
I lay relaxed on the divan.

One shutter closed, the other ajar,
made sylvan semi-darkness,

a glimmering dusk, as after sunset,
or between night’s end and day’s beginning—

the half light shy girls
need to hide their hesitation.

At last—Corinna. On the loose in a short dress,
long hair parted and tumbling past the pale neck—

lovely as Lais of the many lovers,
Queen Semiramis gliding in.

I grabbed the dress; it didn’t hide much,
but she fought to keep it,

only half-heartedly though.
Victory was easy, a self-betrayal.

There she stood, faultless beauty
in front of me, naked.

Shoulders and arms challenging eyes and fingers.
Nipples firmly demanding attention.

Breasts in high relief above the smooth belly.
Long and slender waist. Thighs of a girl.

Why list perfection?
I hugged her tight.

The rest can be imagined—we fell asleep.
Such afternoons are rare.

Quotations from *Everything Is Illuminated*, 1 of 2
Jonathan Safran Foer
1977- American

He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded and as impossible as it actually was, happy. And during the course of each day his heart would descend from his chest into his stomach. By early afternoon he was overcome by the feeling that nothing was right, or nothing was right for him, and by the desire to be alone. By evening he was fulfilled: alone in the magnitude of his grief, alone in his aimless guilt, alone even in his loneliness.
—Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

And by midafternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else.
—Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

She was like a drowning person, flailing, reaching for anything that might save her. Her life was an urgent, desperate struggle to justify her life.
—Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

She spent an afternoon staring at their front door.
—Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

“Dream Deferred”
Langston Hughes
1902-1967 American

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

“The Million-Pound Bank-Note”
Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
1835-1910 American

When I was twenty-seven years old, I was a mining-broker’s clerk in San Francisco, and an expert in all the details of stock traffic. I was alone in the world, and had nothing to depend upon but my wits and a clean reputation; but these were setting my feet in the road to eventual fortune, and I was content with the prospect.

My time was my own after the afternoon board, Saturdays, and I was accustomed to put it in on a little sail-boat on the bay. One day I ventured too far, and was carried out to sea. Just at nightfall, when hope was about gone, I was picked up by a small brig which was bound for London. It was a long and stormy voyage, and they made me work my passage without pay, as a common sailor. When I stepped ashore in London my clothes were ragged and shabby, and I had only a dollar in my pocket. This money fed and sheltered me twenty-four hours. During the next twenty-four I went without food and shelter.

About ten o’clock on the following morning, seedy and hungry, I was dragging myself along Portland Place, when a child that was passing, towed by a nurse-maid, tossed a luscious big pear—minus one bite—into the gutter. I stopped, of course, and fastened my desiring eye on that muddy treasure. My mouth watered for it, my stomach craved it, my whole being begged for it. But every time I made a move to get it some passing eye detected my purpose, and of course I straightened up then, and looked indifferent, and pretended that I hadn’t been thinking about the pear at all. This same thing kept happening and happening, and I couldn’t get the pear. I was just getting desperate enough to brave all the shame, and to seize it, when a window behind me was raised, and a gentleman spoke out of it, saying:

“Step in here, please.”

I was admitted by a gorgeous flunkey, and shown into a sumptuous room where a couple of elderly gentlemen were sitting. They sent away the servant, and made me sit down. They had just finished their breakfast, and the sight of the remains of it almost overpowered me. I could hardly keep my wits together in the presence of that food, but as I was not asked to sample it, I had to bear my trouble as best I could.

Now, something had been happening there a little before, which I did not know anything about until a good many days afterwards, but I will tell you about it now. Those two old brothers had been having a pretty hot argument a couple of days before, and had ended by agreeing to decide it by a bet, which is the English way of settling everything.

You will remember that the Bank of England once issued two notes of a million pounds each, to be used for a special purpose connected with some public transaction with a foreign country. For some reason or other only one of these had been used and canceled; the other still lay in the vaults of the Bank. Well, the brothers, chatting along, happened to get to wondering what might be the fate of a perfectly honest and intelligent stranger who should be turned adrift in London without a friend, and with no money but that million-pound bank-note, and no way to account for his being in possession of it. Brother A said he would starve to death; Brother B said he wouldn’t. Brother A said he couldn’t offer it at a bank or anywhere else, because he would be arrested on the spot. So they went on disputing till Brother B said he would bet twenty thousand pounds that the man would live thirty days, anyway, on that million, and keep out of jail, too. Brother A took him up. Brother B went down to the Bank and bought that note. Just like an Englishman, you see; pluck to the backbone. Then he dictated a letter, which one of his clerks wrote out in a beautiful round hand, and then the two brothers sat at the window a whole day watching for the right man to give it to.

They saw many honest faces go by that were not intelligent enough; many that were intelligent, but not honest enough; many that were both, but the possessors were not poor enough, or, if poor enough, were not strangers. There was always a defect, until I came along; but they agreed that I filled the bill all around; so they elected me unanimously, and there I was now waiting to know why I was called in. They began to ask me questions about myself, and pretty soon they had my story. Finally they told me I would answer their purpose. I said I was sincerely glad, and asked what it was. Then one of them handed me an envelope, and said I would find the explanation inside. I was going to open it, but he said no; take it to my lodgings, and look it over carefully, and not be hasty or rash. I was puzzled, and wanted to discuss the matter a little further, but they didn’t; so I took my leave, feeling hurt and insulted to be made the butt of what was apparently some kind of a practical joke, and yet obliged to put up with it, not being in circumstances to resent affronts from rich and strong folk.

I would have picked up the pear now and eaten it before all the world, but it was gone; so I had lost that by this unlucky business, and the thought of it did not soften my feeling towards those men. As soon as I was out of sight of that house I opened my envelope, and saw that it contained money! My opinion of those people changed, I can tell you! I lost not a moment, but shoved note and money into my vest pocket, and broke for the nearest cheap eating house. Well, how I did eat! When at last I couldn’t hold any more, I took out my money and unfolded it, took one glimpse and nearly fainted. Five millions of dollars! Why, it made my head swim.

I must have sat there stunned and blinking at the note as much as a minute before I came rightly to myself again. The first thing I noticed, then, was the landlord. His eye was on the note, and he was petrified. He was worshiping, with all his body and soul, but he looked as if he couldn’t stir hand or foot. I took my cue in a moment, and did the only rational thing there was to do. I reached the note towards him, and said, carelessly:

“Give me the change, please.”

Then he was restored to his normal condition, and made a thousand apologies for not being able to break the bill, and I couldn’t get him to touch it. He wanted to look at it, and keep on looking at it; he couldn’t seem to get enough of it to quench the thirst of his eye, but he shrank from touching it as if it had been something too sacred for poor common clay to handle. I said:

“I am sorry if it is an inconvenience, but I must insist. Please change it; I haven’t anything else.”

But he said that wasn’t any matter; he was quite willing to let the trifle stand over till another time. I said I might not be in his neighborhood again for a good while; but he said it was of no consequence, he could wait, and, moreover, I could have anything I wanted, any time I chose, and let the account run as long as I pleased. He said he hoped he wasn’t afraid to trust as rich a gentleman as I was, merely because I was of a merry disposition, and chose to play larks on the public in the matter of dress. By this time another customer was entering, and the landlord hinted to me to put the monster out of sight; then he bowed me all the way to the door, and I started straight for that house and those brothers, to correct the mistake which had been made before the police should hunt me up, and help me do it. I was pretty nervous; in fact, pretty badly frightened, though, of course, I was no way in fault; but I knew men well enough to know that when they find they’ve given a tramp a million-pound bill when they thought it was a one-pounder, they are in a frantic rage against him instead of quarreling with their own near-sightedness, as they ought. As I approached the house my excitement began to abate, for all was quiet there, which made me feel pretty sure the blunder was not discovered yet. I rang. The same servant appeared. I asked for those gentlemen.

“They are gone.” This in the lofty, cold way of that fellow’s tribe.

“Gone? Gone where?”

“On a journey.”

“But whereabouts?”

“To the Continent, I think.”

“The Continent?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Which way—by what route?”

“I can’t say, sir.”

“When will they be back?”

“In a month, they said.”

“A month! Oh, this is awful! Give me some sort of idea of how to get a word to them. It’s of the last importance.”

“I can’t, indeed. I’ve no idea where they’ve gone, sir.”

“Then I must see some member of the family.”

“Family’s away, too; been abroad months—in Egypt and India, I think.”

“Man, there’s been an immense mistake made. They’ll be back before night. Will you tell them I’ve been here, and that I will keep coming till it’s all made right, and they needn’t be afraid?”

“I’ll tell them, if they come back, but I am not expecting them. They said you would be here in an hour to make inquiries, but I must tell you it’s all right, they’ll be here on time and expect you.”

So I had to give it up and go away. What a riddle it all was! I was like to lose my mind. They would be here “on time.” What could that mean? Oh, the letter would explain, maybe. I had forgotten the letter; I got it out and read it. This is what it said:

“You are an intelligent and honest man, as one may see by your face. We conceive you to be poor and a stranger. Enclosed you will find a sum of money. It is lent to you for thirty days, without interest. Report at this house at the end of that time. I have a bet on you. If I win it you shall have any situation that is in my gift—any, that is, that you shall be able to prove yourself familiar with and competent to fill.”

No signature, no address, no date.

Well, here was a coil to be in! You are posted on what had preceded all this, but I was not. It was just a deep, dark puzzle to me. I hadn’t the least idea what the game was, nor whether harm was meant me or a kindness. I went into a park, and sat down to try to think it out, and to consider what I had best do.

At the end of an hour my reasonings had crystallized into this verdict.

Maybe those men mean me well, maybe they mean me ill; no way to decide that—let it go. They’ve got a game, or a scheme, or an experiment, of some kind on hand; no way to determine what it is—let it go. There’s a bet on me; no way to find out what it is—let it go. That disposes of the indeterminable quantities; the remainder of the matter is tangible, solid, and may be classed and labeled with certainty. If I ask the Bank of England to place this bill to the credit of the man it belongs to, they’ll do it, for they know him, although I don’t; but they will ask me how I came in possession of it, and if I tell the truth, they’ll put me in the asylum, naturally, and a lie will land me in jail. The same result would follow if I tried to bank the bill anywhere or to borrow money on it. I have got to carry this immense burden around until those men come back, whether I want to or not. It is useless to me, as useless as a handful of ashes, and yet I must take care of it, and watch over it, while I beg my living. I couldn’t give it away, if I should try, for neither honest citizen nor highwayman would accept it or meddle with it for anything. Those brothers are safe. Even if I lose their bill, or burn it, they are still safe, because they can stop payment, and the Bank will make them whole; but meantime I’ve got to do a month’s suffering without wages or profit—unless I help win that bet, whatever it may be, and get that situation that I am promised. I should like to get that; men of their sort have situations in their gift that are worth having.

I got to thinking a good deal about that situation. My hopes began to rise high. Without doubt the salary would be large. It would begin in a month; after that I should be all right. Pretty soon I was feeling first- rate. By this time I was tramping the streets again. The sight of a tailor-shop gave me a sharp longing to shed my rags, and to clothe myself decently once more. Could I afford it? No; I had nothing in the world but a million pounds. So I forced myself to go on by. But soon I was drifting back again. The temptation persecuted me cruelly. I must have passed that shop back and forth six times during that manful struggle. At last I gave in; I had to. I asked if they had a misfit suit that had been thrown on their hands. The fellow I spoke to nodded his head towards another fellow, and gave me no answer. I went to the indicated fellow, and he indicated another fellow with his head, and no words. I went to him, and he said:

“’Tend to you presently.”

I waited till he was done with what he was at, then he took me into a back room, and overhauled a pile of rejected suits, and selected the rattiest one for me. I put it on. It didn’t fit, and wasn’t in any way attractive, but it was new, and I was anxious to have it; so I didn’t find any fault, but said, with some diffidence:

“It would be an accommodation to me if you could wait some days for the money. I haven’t any small change about me.”

The fellow worked up a most sarcastic expression of countenance, and said:

“Oh, you haven’t? Well, of course, I didn’t expect it. I’d only expect gentlemen like you to carry large change.”

I was nettled, and said:

“My friend, you shouldn’t judge a stranger always by the clothes he wears. I am quite able to pay for this suit; I simply didn’t wish to put you to the trouble of changing a large note.”

He modified his style a little at that, and said, though still with something of an air:

“I didn’t mean any particular harm, but as long as rebukes are going, I might say it wasn’t quite your affair to jump to the conclusion that we couldn’t change any note that you might happen to be carrying around. On the contrary, we can.”

I handed the note to him, and said:

“Oh, very well; I apologize.”

He received it with a smile, one of those large smiles which goes all around over, and has folds in it, and wrinkles, and spirals, and looks like the place where you have thrown a brick in a pond; and then in the act of his taking a glimpse of the bill this smile froze solid, and turned yellow, and looked like those wavy, wormy spreads of lava which you find hardened on little levels on the side of Vesuvius. I never before saw a smile caught like that, and perpetuated. The man stood there holding the bill, and looking like that, and the proprietor hustled up to see what was the matter, and said, briskly:

“Well, what’s up? what’s the trouble? what’s wanting?”

I said: “There isn’t any trouble. I’m waiting for my change.”

“Come, come; get him his change, Tod; get him his change.”

Tod retorted: “Get him his change! It’s easy to say, sir; but look at the bill yourself.”

The proprietor took a look, gave a low, eloquent whistle, then made a dive for the pile of rejected clothing, and began to snatch it this way and that, talking all the time excitedly, and as if to himself:

“Sell an eccentric millionaire such an unspeakable suit as that! Tod’s a fool—a born fool. Always doing something like this. Drives every millionaire away from this place, because he can’t tell a millionaire from a tramp, and never could. Ah, here’s the thing I am after. Please get those things off, sir, and throw them in the fire. Do me the favor to put on this shirt and this suit; it’s just the thing, the very thing—plain, rich, modest, and just ducally nobby; made to order for a foreign prince—you may know him, sir, his Serene Highness the Hospodar of Halifax; had to leave it with us and take a mourning-suit because his mother was going to die— which she didn’t. But that’s all right; we can’t always have things the way we—that is, the way they—there! trousers all right, they fit you to a charm, sir; now the waistcoat; aha, right again! now the coat—lord! look at that, now! Perfect—the whole thing! I never saw such a triumph in all my experience.”

I expressed my satisfaction.

“Quite right, sir, quite right; it’ll do for a makeshift, I’m bound to say. But wait till you see what we’ll get up for you on your own measure. Come, Tod, book and pen; get at it. Length of leg, 32”—and so on. Before I could get in a word he had measured me, and was giving orders for dress-suits, morning suits, shirts, and all sorts of things. When I got a chance I said:

“But, my dear sir, I can’t give these orders, unless you can wait indefinitely, or change the bill.”

“Indefinitely! It’s a weak word, sir, a weak word. Eternally—that’s the word, sir. Tod, rush these things through, and send them to the gentleman’s address without any waste of time. Let the minor customers wait. Set down the gentleman’s address and—”

“I’m changing my quarters. I will drop in and leave the new address.”

“Quite right, sir, quite right. One moment—let me show you out, sir. There—good day, sir, good day.”

Well, don’t you see what was bound to happen? I drifted naturally into buying whatever I wanted, and asking for change. Within a week I was sumptuously equipped with all needful comforts and luxuries, and was housed in an expensive private hotel in Hanover Square. I took my dinners there, but for breakfast I stuck by Harris’s humble feeding house, where I had got my first meal on my million-pound bill. I was the making of Harris. The fact had gone all abroad that the foreign crank who carried million-pound bills in his vest pocket was the patron saint of the place. That was enough. From being a poor, struggling, little hand-to-mouth enterprise, it had become celebrated, and overcrowded with customers. Harris was so grateful that he forced loans upon me, and would not be denied; and so, pauper as I was, I had money to spend, and was living like the rich and the great. I judged that there was going to be a crash by and by, but I was in now and must swim across or drown. You see there was just that element of impending disaster to give a serious side, a sober side, yes, a tragic side, to a state of things which would otherwise have been purely ridiculous. In the night, in the dark, the tragedy part was always to the front, and always warning, always threatening; and so I moaned and tossed, and sleep was hard to find. But in the cheerful daylight the tragedy element faded out and disappeared, and I walked on air, and was happy to giddiness, to intoxication, you may say.

And it was natural; for I had become one of the notorieties of the metropolis of the world, and it turned my head, not just a little, but a good deal. You could not take up a newspaper, English, Scotch, or Irish, without finding in it one or more references to the “vest-pocket million-pounder” and his latest doings and saying. At first, in these mentions, I was at the bottom of the personal-gossip column; next, I was listed above the knights, next above the baronets, next above the barons, and so on, and so on, climbing steadily, as my notoriety augmented, until I reached the highest altitude possible, and there I remained, taking precedence of all dukes not royal, and of all ecclesiastics except the primate of all England. But mind, this was not fame; as yet I had achieved only notoriety. Then came the climaxing stroke—the accolade, so to speak—which in a single instant transmuted the perishable dross of notoriety into the enduring gold of fame: Punch caricatured me! Yes, I was a made man now; my place was established. I might be joked about still, but reverently, not hilariously, not rudely; I could be smiled at, but not laughed at. The time for that had gone by. Punch pictured me all a-flutter with rags, dickering with a beef-eater for the Tower of London. Well, you can imagine how it was with a young fellow who had never been taken notice of before, and now all of a sudden couldn’t say a thing that wasn’t taken up and repeated everywhere; couldn’t stir abroad without constantly overhearing the remark flying from lip to lip, “There he goes; that’s him!” couldn’t take his breakfast without a crowd to look on; couldn’t appear in an opera box without concentrating there the fire of a thousand lorgnettes. Why, I just swam in glory all day long—that is the amount of it.

You know, I even kept my old suit of rags, and every now and then appeared in them, so as to have the old pleasure of buying trifles, and being insulted, and then shooting the scoffer dead with the million- pound bill. But I couldn’t keep that up. The illustrated papers made the outfit so familiar that when I went out in it I was at once recognized and followed by a crowd, and if I attempted a purchase the man would offer me his whole shop on credit before I could pull my note on him.

About the tenth day of my fame I went to fulfil my duty to my flag by paying my respects to the American minister. He received me with the enthusiasm proper in my case, upbraided me for being so tardy in my duty, and said that there was only one way to get his forgiveness, and that was to take the seat at his dinner-party that night made vacant by the illness of one of his guests. I said I would, and we got to talking. It turned out that he and my father had been schoolmates in boyhood, Yale students together later, and always warm friends up to my father’s death. So then he required me to put in at his house all the odd time I might have to spare, and I was very willing, of course.

In fact, I was more than willing; I was glad. When the crash should come, he might somehow be able to save me from total destruction; I didn’t know how, but he might think of a way, maybe. I couldn’t venture to unbosom myself to him at this late date, a thing which I would have been quick to do in the beginning of this awful career of mine in London. No, I couldn’t venture it now; I was in too deep; that is, too deep for me to be risking revelations to so new a friend, though not clear beyond my depth, as I looked at it. Because, you see, with all my borrowing, I was carefully keeping within my means—I mean within my salary. Of course, I couldn’t know what my salary was going to be, but I had a good enough basis for an estimate in the fact, that if I won the bet I was to have choice of any situation in that rich old gentleman’s gift provided I was competent—and I should certainly prove competent; I hadn’t any doubt about that. And as to the bet, I wasn’t worrying about that; I had always been lucky. Now my estimate of the salary was six hundred to a thousand a year; say, six hundred for the first year, and so on up year by year, till I struck the upper figure by proved merit. At present I was only in debt for my first year’s salary. Everybody had been trying to lend me money, but I had fought off the most of them on one pretext or another; so this indebtedness represented only £300 borrowed money, the other £300 represented my keep and my purchases. I believed my second year’s salary would carry me through the rest of the month if I went on being cautious and economical, and I intended to look sharply out for that. My month ended, my employer back from his journey, I should be all right once more, for I should at once divide the two years’ salary among my creditors by assignment, and get right down to my work.

It was a lovely dinner-party of fourteen. The Duke and Duchess of Shoreditch, and their daughter the Lady Anne-Grace-Eleanor-Celeste-and-so-forth-and-so-forth-de-Bohun, the Earl and Countess of Newgate, Viscount Cheapside, Lord and Lady Blatherskite, some untitled people of both sexes, the minister and his wife and daughter, and his daughter’s visiting friend, an English girl of twenty-two, named Portia Langham, whom I fell in love with in two minutes, and she with me—I could see it without glasses. There was still another guest, an American—but I am a little ahead of my story. While the people were still in the drawing-room, whetting up for dinner, and coldly inspecting the late comers, the servant announced: “Mr. Lloyd Hastings.”

The moment the usual civilities were over, Hastings caught sight of me, and came straight with cordially outstretched hand; then stopped short when about to shake, and said, with an embarrassed look:

“I beg your pardon, sir, I thought I knew you.”

“Why, you do know me, old fellow.”

“No. Are you the—the—”

“Vest-pocket monster? I am, indeed. Don’t be afraid to call me by my nickname; I’m used to it.”

“Well, well, well, this is a surprise. Once or twice I’ve seen your own name coupled with the nickname, but it never occurred to me that you could be the Henry Adams referred to. Why, it isn’t six months since you were clerking away for Blake Hopkins in Frisco on a salary, and sitting up nights on an extra allowance, helping me arrange and verify the Gould and Curry Extension papers and statistics. The idea of your being in London, and a vast millionaire, and a colossal celebrity! Why, it’s the Arabian Nights come again. Man, I can’t take it in at all; can’t realize it; give me time to settle the whirl in my head.”

“The fact is, Lloyd, you are no worse off than I am. I can’t realize it myself.”

“Dear me, it is stunning, now isn’t it? Why, it’s just three months today since we went to the Miners’ restaurant—”

“No; the What Cheer.”

“Right, it was the What Cheer; went there at two in the morning, and had a chop and coffee after a hard six-hours grind over those Extension papers, and I tried to persuade you to come to London with me, and offered to get leave of absence for you and pay all your expenses, and give you something over if I succeeded in making the sale; and you would not listen to me, said I wouldn’t succeed, and you couldn’t afford to lose the run of business and be no end of time getting the hang of things again when you got back home. And yet here you are. How odd it all is! How did you happen to come, and whatever did give you this incredible start?”

“Oh, just an accident. It’s a long story—a romance, a body may say. I’ll tell you all about it, but not now.”

“When?”

“The end of this month.”

“That’s more than a fortnight yet. It’s too much of a strain on a person’s curiosity. Make it a week.”

“I can’t. You’ll know why, by and by. But how’s the trade getting along?”

His cheerfulness vanished like a breath, and he said with a sigh:

“You were a true prophet, Hal, a true prophet. I wish I hadn’t come. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“But you must. You must come and stop with me to-night, when we leave here, and tell me all about it.”

“Oh, may I? Are you in earnest?” and the water showed in his eyes.

“Yes; I want to hear the whole story, every word.”

“I’m so grateful! Just to find a human interest once more, in some voice and in some eye, in me and affairs of mine, after what I’ve been through here—lord! I could go down on my knees for it!”

He gripped my hand hard, and braced up, and was all right and lively after that for the dinner—which didn’t come off. No; the usual thing happened, the thing that is always happening under that vicious and aggravating English system—the matter of precedence couldn’t be settled, and so there was no dinner. Englishmen always eat dinner before they go out to dinner, because they know the risks they are running; but nobody ever warns the stranger, and so he walks placidly into trap. Of course, nobody was hurt this time, because we had all been to dinner, none of us being novices excepting Hastings, and he having been informed by the minister at the time that he invited him that in deference to the English custom he had not provided any dinner. Everybody took a lady and processioned down to the dining-room, because it is usual to go through the motions; but there the dispute began. The Duke of Shoreditch wanted to take precedence, and sit at the head of the table, holding that he outranked a minister who represented merely a nation and not a monarch; but I stood for my rights, and refused to yield. In the gossip column I ranked all dukes not royal, and said so, and claimed precedence of this one. It couldn’t be settled, of course, struggle as we might and did, he finally (and injudiciously) trying to play birth and antiquity, and I “seeing” his Conqueror and “raising” him with Adam, whose direct posterity I was, as shown by my name, while he was of a collateral branch, as shown by his, and by his recent Norman origin; so we all processioned back to the drawing-room again and had a perpendicular lunch—plate of sardines and a strawberry, and you group yourself and stand up and eat it. Here the religion of precedence is not so strenuous; the two persons of highest rank chuck up a shilling, the one that wins has first go at his strawberry, and the loser gets the shilling. The next two chuck up, then the next two, and so on. After refreshment, tables were brought, and we all played cribbage, sixpence a game. The English never play any game for amusement. If they can’t make something or lose something—they don’t care which—they won’t play.

We had a lovely time; certainly two of us had, Miss Langham and I. I was so bewitched with her that I couldn’t count my hands if they went above a double sequence; and when I struck home I never discovered it, and started up the outside row again, and would have lost the game every time, only the girl did the same, she being in just my condition, you see; and consequently neither of us ever got out, or cared to wonder why we didn’t; we only just knew we were happy, and didn’t wish to know anything else, and didn’t want to be interrupted. And I told her—I did, indeed—told her I loved her; and she—well, she blushed till her hair turned red, but she liked it; she said she did. Oh, there was never such an evening! Every time I pegged I put on a postscript; every time she pegged she acknowledged receipt of it, counting the hands the same. Why, I couldn’t even say “Two for his heels” without adding, “My, how sweet you do look!” and she would say, “Fifteen two, fifteen four, fifteen six, and a pair are eight, and eight are sixteen—do you think so?” —peeping out aslant from under her lashes, you know, so sweet and cunning. Oh, it was just too-too!

Well, I was perfectly honest and square with her; told her I hadn’t a cent in the world but just the million-pound note she’d heard so much talk about, and it didn’t belong to me, and that started her curiosity; and then I talked low, and told her the whole history right from the start, and it nearly killed her laughing. What in the nation she could find to laugh about I couldn’t see, but there it was; every half-minute some new detail would fetch her, and I would have to stop as much as a minute and a half to give her a chance to settle down again. Why, she laughed herself lame —she did, indeed; I never saw anything like it. I mean I never saw a painful story—a story of a person’s troubles and worries and fears—produce just that kind of effect before. So I loved her all the more, seeing she could be so cheerful when there wasn’t anything to be cheerful about; for I might soon need that kind of wife, you know, the way things looked. Of course, I told her we should have to wait a couple of years, till I could catch up on my salary; but she didn’t mind that, only she hoped I would be as careful as possible in the matter of expenses, and not let them run the least risk of trenching on our third year’s pay. Then she began to get a little worried, and wondered if we were making any mistake, and starting the salary on a higher figure for the first year than I would get. This was good sense, and it made me feel a little less confident than I had been feeling before; but it gave me a good business idea, and I brought it frankly out.

“Portia, dear, would you mind going with me that day, when I confront those old gentlemen?”

She shrank a little, but said:

“N-o; if my being with you would help hearten you. But—would it be quite proper, do you think?”

“No, I don’t know that it would—in fact, I’m afraid it wouldn’t; but, you see, there’s so much dependent upon it that—”

“Then I’ll go anyway, proper or improper,” she said, with a beautiful and generous enthusiasm. “Oh, I shall be so happy to think I’m helping!”

“Helping, dear? Why, you’ll be doing it all. You’re so beautiful and so lovely and so winning, that with you there I can pile our salary up till I break those good old fellows, and they’ll never have the heart to struggle.”

Sho! you should have seen the rich blood mount, and her happy eyes shine!

“You wicked flatterer! There isn’t a word of truth in what you say, but still I’ll go with you. Maybe it will teach you not to expect other people to look with your eyes.”

Were my doubts dissipated? Was my confidence restored? You may judge by this fact: privately I raised my salary to twelve hundred the first year on the spot. But I didn’t tell her; I saved it for a surprise.

All the way home I was in the clouds, Hastings talking, I not hearing a word. When he and I entered my parlor, he brought me to myself with his fervent appreciations of my manifold comforts and luxuries.

“Let me just stand here a little and look my fill. Dear me! it’s a palace —it’s just a palace! And in it everything a body could desire, including cosey coal fire and supper standing ready. Henry, it doesn’t merely make me realize how rich you are; it makes me realize, to the bone, to the marrow, how poor I am—how poor I am, and how miserable, how defeated, routed, annihilated!”

Plague take it! this language gave me the cold shudders. It scared me broad awake, and made me comprehend that I was standing on a halfinch crust, with a crater underneath. I didn’t know I had been dreaming —that is, I hadn’t been allowing myself to know it for a while back; but now—oh, dear! Deep in debt, not a cent in the world, a lovely girl’s happiness or woe in my hands, and nothing in front of me but a salary which might never—oh, would never—materialize! Oh, oh, oh! I am ruined past hope! nothing can save me!

“Henry, the mere unconsidered drippings of your daily income would—”

“Oh, my daily income! Here, down with this hot Scotch, and cheer up your soul. Here’s with you! Or, no—you’re hungry; sit down and—”

“Not a bite for me; I’m past it. I can’t eat, these days; but I’ll drink with you till I drop. Come!”

“Barrel for barrel, I’m with you! Ready? Here we go! Now, then, Lloyd, unreel your story while I brew.”

“Unreel it? What, again?”

“Again? What do you mean by that?”

“Why, I mean do you want to hear it over again?”

“Do I want to hear it over again? This is a puzzler. Wait; don’t take any more of that liquid. You don’t need it.”

“Look here, Henry, you alarm me. Didn’t I tell you the whole story on the way here?”

“You?”

“Yes, I.”

“I’ll be hanged if I heard a word of it.”

“Henry, this is a serious thing. It troubles me. What did you take up yonder at the minister’s?”

Then it all flashed on me, and I owned up like a man.

“I took the dearest girl in this world—prisoner!”

So then he came with a rush, and we shook, and shook, and shook till our hands ached; and he didn’t blame me for not having heard a word of a story which had lasted while we walked three miles. He just sat down then, like the patient, good fellow he was, and told it all over again. Synopsized, it amounted to this: He had come to England with what he thought was a grand opportunity; he had an “option” to sell the Gould and Curry Extension for the “locators” of it, and keep all he could get over a million dollars. He had worked hard, had pulled every wire he knew of, had left no honest expedient untried, had spent nearly all the money he had in the world, had not been able to get a solitary capitalist to listen to him, and his option would run out at the end of the month. In a word, he was ruined. Then he jumped up and cried out:

“Henry, you can save me! You can save me, and you’re the only man in the universe that can. Will you do it? Won’t you do it?”

“Tell me how. Speak out, my boy.”

“Give me a million and my passage home for my ‘option’! Don’t, don’t refuse!”

I was in a kind of agony. I was right on the point of coming out with the words, “Lloyd, I’m a pauper myself—absolutely penniless, and in debt!” But a white-hot idea came flaming through my head, and I gripped my jaws together, and calmed myself down till I was as cold as a capitalist. Then I said, in a commercial and self-possessed way:

“I will save you, Lloyd—”

“Then I’m already saved! God be merciful to you forever! If ever I—”

“Let me finish, Lloyd. I will save you, but not in that way; for that would not be fair to you, after your hard work, and the risks you’ve run. I don’t need to buy mines; I can keep my capital moving, in a commercial center like London, without that; it’s what I’m at, all the time; but here is what I’ll do. I know all about that mine, of course; I know its immense value, and can swear to it if anybody wishes it. You shall sell out inside of the fortnight for three millions cash, using my name freely, and we’ll divide, share and share alike.”

Do you know, he would have danced the furniture to kindling-wood in his insane joy, and broken everything on the place, if I hadn’t tripped him up and tied him.

Then he lay there, perfectly happy, saying:

“I may use your name! Your name—think of it! Man, they’ll flock in droves, these rich Londoners; they’ll fight for that stock! I’m a made man, I’m a made man forever, and I’ll never forget you as long as I live!”

In less than twenty-four hours London was abuzz! I hadn’t anything to do, day after day, but sit at home, and say to all comers: “Yes; I told him to refer to me. I know the man, and I know the mine. His character is above reproach, and the mine is worth far more than he asks for it.”

Meantime I spent all my evenings at the minister’s with Portia. I didn’t say a word to her about the mine; I saved it for a surprise. We talked salary; never anything but salary and love; sometimes love, sometimes salary, sometimes love and salary together. And my! the interest the minister’s wife and daughter took in our little affair, and the endless ingenuities they invented to save us from interruption, and to keep the minister in the dark and unsuspicious—well, it was just lovely of them!

When the month was up at last, I had a million dollars to my credit in the London and County Bank, and Hastings was fixed in the same way. Dressed at my level best, I drove by the house in Portland Place, judged by the look of things that my birds were home again, went on towards the minister’s and got my precious, and we started back, talking salary with all our might. She was so excited and anxious that it made her just intolerably beautiful. I said:

“Dearie, the way you’re looking it’s a crime to strike for a salary a single penny under three thousand a year.”

“Henry, Henry, you’ll ruin us!”

“Don’t you be afraid. Just keep up those looks, and trust to me. It’ll all come out right.”

So, as it turned out, I had to keep bolstering up her courage all the way. She kept pleading with me, and saying:

“Oh, please remember that if we ask for too much we may get no salary at all; and then what will become of us, with no way in the world to earn our living?”

We were ushered in by that same servant, and there they were, the two old gentlemen. Of course, they were surprised to see that wonderful creature with me, but I said:

“It’s all right, gentlemen; she is my future stay and helpmate.”

And I introduced them to her, and called them by name. It didn’t surprise them; they knew I would know enough to consult the directory. They seated us, and were very polite to me, and very solicitous to relieve her from embarrassment, and put her as much at her ease as they could. Then I said:

“Gentlemen, I am ready to report.”

“We are glad to hear it,” said my man, “for now we can decide the bet which my brother Abel and I made. If you have won for me, you shall have any situation in my gift. Have you the million-pound note?”

“Here it is, sir,” and I handed it to him.

“I’ve won!” he shouted, and slapped Abel on the back. “Now what do you say, brother?”

“I say he did survive, and I’ve lost twenty thousand pounds. I never would have believed it.”

“I’ve a further report to make,” I said, “and a pretty long one. I want you to let me come soon, and detail my whole month’s history; and I promise you it’s worth hearing. Meantime, take a look at that.”

“What, man! Certificate of deposit for £200,000. Is it yours?”

“Mine. I earned it by thirty days’ judicious use of that little loan you let me have. And the only use I made of it was to buy trifles and offer the bill in change.”

“Come, this is astonishing! It’s incredible, man!”

“Never mind, I’ll prove it. Don’t take my word unsupported.”

But now Portia’s turn was come to be surprised. Her eyes were spread wide, and she said:

“Henry, is that really your money? Have you been fibbing to me?”

“I have, indeed, dearie. But you’ll forgive me, I know.”

She put up an arch pout, and said:

“Don’t you be so sure. You are a naughty thing to deceive me so!”

“Oh, you’ll get over it, sweetheart, you’ll get over it; it was only fun, you know. Come, let’s be going.”

“But wait, wait! The situation, you know. I want to give you the situation,” said my man.

“Well,” I said, “I’m just as grateful as I can be, but really I don’t want one.”

“But you can have the very choicest one in my gift.”

“Thanks again, with all my heart; but I don’t even want that one.”

“Henry, I’m ashamed of you. You don’t half thank the good gentleman. May I do it for you?”

“Indeed, you shall, dear, if you can improve it. Let us see you try.”

She walked to my man, got up in his lap, put her arm round his neck, and kissed him right on the mouth. Then the two old gentlemen shouted with laughter, but I was dumfounded, just petrified, as you may say. Portia said:

“Papa, he has said you haven’t a situation in your gift that he’d take; and I feel just as hurt as—”

“My darling, is that your papa?”

“Yes; he’s my step-papa, and the dearest one that ever was. You understand now, don’t you, why I was able to laugh when you told me at the minister’s, not knowing my relationships, what trouble and worry papa’s and Uncle Abel’s scheme was giving you?”

Of course, I spoke right up now, without any fooling, and went straight to the point.

“Oh, my dearest dear sir, I want to take back what I said. You have got a situation open that I want.”

“Name it.”

“Son-in-law.”

“Well, well, well! But you know, if you haven’t ever served in that capacity, you, of course, can’t furnish recommendations of a sort to satisfy the conditions of the contract, and so—”

“Try me—oh, do, I beg of you! Only just try me thirty or forty years, and if—”

“Oh, well, all right; it’s but a little thing to ask, take her along.”

Happy, we two? There are not words enough in the unabridged to describe it. And when London got the whole history, a day or two later, of my month’s adventures with that bank-note, and how they ended, did London talk, and have a good time? Yes.

My Portia’s papa took that friendly and hospitable bill back to the Bank of England and cashed it; then the Bank canceled it and made him a present of it, and he gave it to us at our wedding, and it has always hung in its frame in the sacredest place in our home ever since. For it gave me my Portia. But for it I could not have remained in London, would not have appeared at the minister’s, never should have met her. And so I always say, “Yes, it’s a million-pounder, as you see; but it never made but one purchase in its life, and then got the article for only about a tenth part of its value.”

Quotations from *Everything Is Illuminated*, 2 of 2
Jonathan Safran Foer
1977- American

Nothing felt like anything more than what it actually was. Everything was just a thing, mired completely in its thingness.
—Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

There was no convincing reason to exist.
—Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

Love me, because love doesn’t exist, and I have tried everything that does.
—Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

But each was the closest thing to a deserving recipient of love that the other would find. So they gave each other all of it.
—Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

They reciprocated the great and saving lie—that our love for things is greater than our love for our love for things—willfully playing the parts they wrote for themselves, willfully creating and believing fictions necessary for life.
—Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

If God exists, He is not to be believed in.
—Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

“He Loved...”
Anna Akhmatova
1889-1966 Russian
translated by Judith Hemschemeyer

He loved three things in life:
Evensong, white peacocks
And old maps of America.

He hated it when children cried,
He hated tea with raspberry jam
And women’s hysterics.

...And I was his wife.

“Richard Cory”
Edwin Arlington Robinson
1869-1935 American

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich—yes, richer than a king—
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.

Quotations

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.
—Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods

Nowadays most men lead lives of noisy desperation.
—James Thurber, Fables for Our Time and Famous Poems Illustrated

Quotations from *Behold the Man*
Michael Moorcock
1939- English

Lying in the hot, sweaty bed with Monica. Once again, another attempt to make normal love had metamorphosed into the performance of minor aberrations, which seemed to satisfy her better than anything else.

Their real courtship and fulfillment was yet to come. As usual, it would be verbal. As usual, it would find its climax in argumentative anger.
—Michael Moorcock, Behold the Man

It was strange. He was not a religious man in the usual sense. He was an agnostic. It was not conviction that had led him to defend religion against Monica’s cynical contempt for it; it was rather lack of conviction in the ideal in which she had set her own faith, the ideal of science as a solver of all problems.
—Michael Moorcock, Behold the Man

“I can’t accept it.”

“That’s because you’re sick. I’m sick, too, but at least I can see the promise of health.”

“I can only see the threat of death...”
—Michael Moorcock, Behold the Man

“O Captain! My Captain!”
Walt Whitman
1819-1892 American

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weather'd every rack, the prize we sought is won;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring:
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up--for you the flag is flung--for you the bugle trills;
For you bouquets and ribbon'd wreaths--for you the shores a-crowding;
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head;
It is some dream that on the deck,
You've fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still;
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will;
The ship is anchor'd safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;
From fearful trip, the victor ship, comes in with object won;
Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells!
But I, with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

Quotations

Why are not more gems from our great authors scattered over the country... Let every bookworm, when in any fragrant, scarce, old tome he discovers a sentence, a story, an illustration, that does his heart good, hasten to give it.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Have you ever observed that we pay much more attention to a wise passage when it is quoted than when we read it in the original author?
—Philip Gilbert Hamerton

Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations.
—Oscar Wilde

Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language.
—Samuel Johnson

It is rather to be chosen than great riches, unless I have omitted something from the quotation.
—Robert Benchley

“Epigram”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
1772-1834 English

Sir, I admit your general rule,
That every poet is a fool,
But you yourself may serve to show it,
That every fool is not a poet.

“The Use of Force”
William Carlos Williams
1883-1963 American

They were new patients to me, all I had was the name, Olson. Please come down as soon as you can, my daughter is very sick.

When I arrived I was met by the mother, a big startled looking woman, very clean and apologetic who merely said, Is this the doctor? and let me in. In the back, she added. You must excuse us, doctor, we have her in the kitchen where it is warm. It is very damp here sometimes.

The child was fully dressed and sitting on her father's lap near the kitchen table. He tried to get up, but I motioned for him not to bother, took off my overcoat and started to look things over. I could see that they were all very nervous, eyeing me up and down distrustfully. As often, in such cases, they weren't telling me more than they had to, it was up to me to tell them; that's why they were spending three dollars on me.

The child was fairly eating me up with her cold, steady eyes, and no expression to her face whatever. She did not move and seemed, inwardly, quiet; an unusually attractive little thing, and as strong as a heifer in appearance. But her face was flushed, she was breathing rapidly, and I realized that she had a high fever. She had magnificent blonde hair, in profusion. One of those picture children often reproduced in advertising leaflets and the photogravure sections of the Sunday papers.

She's had a fever for three days, began the father and we don't know what it comes from. My wife has given her things, you know, like people do, but it don't do no good. And there's been a lot of sickness around. So we tho't you'd better look her over and tell us what is the matter.

As doctors often do I took a trial shot at it as a point of departure. Has she had a sore throat?

Both parents answered me together, No... No, she says her throat don't hurt her.

Does your throat hurt you? added the mother to the child. But the little girl's expression didn't change nor did she move her eyes from my face.

Have you looked?

I tried to, said the mother, but I couldn't see.

As it happens we had been having a number of cases of diphtheria in the school to which this child went during that month and we were all, quite apparently, thinking of that, though no one had as yet spoken of the thing.

Well, I said, suppose we take a look at the throat first. I smiled in my best professional manner and asking for the child's first name I said, come on, Mathilda, open your mouth and let's take a look at your throat.

Nothing doing.

Aw, come on, I coaxed, just open your mouth wide and let me take a look. Look, I said opening both hands wide, I haven't anything in my hands. Just open up and let me see.

Such a nice man, put in the mother. Look how kind he is to you. Come on, do what he tells you to. He won't hurt you.

At that I ground my teeth in disgust. If only they wouldn't use the word "hurt" I might be able to get somewhere. But I did not allow myself to be hurried or disturbed but speaking quietly and slowly I approached the child again.

As I moved my chair a little nearer suddenly with one catlike movement both her hands clawed instinctively for my eyes and she almost reached them too. In fact she knocked my glasses flying and they fell, though unbroken, several feet away from me on the kitchen floor.

Both the mother and father almost turned themselves inside out in embarrassment and apology. You bad girl, said the mother, taking her and shaking her by one arm. Look what you've done. The nice man...

For heaven's sake, I broke in. Don't call me a nice man to her. I'm here to look at her throat on the chance that she might have diphtheria and possibly die of it. But that's nothing to her. Look here, I said to the child, we're going to look at your throat. You're old enough to understand what I'm saying. Will you open it now by yourself or shall we have to open it for you?

Not a move. Even her expression hadn't changed. Her breaths however were coming faster and faster. Then the battle began. I had to do it. I had to have a throat culture for her own protection. But first I told the parents that it was entirely up to them. I explained the danger but said that I would not insist on a throat examination so long as they would take the responsibility.

If you don't do what the doctor says you'll have to go to the hospital, the mother admonished her severely.

Oh yeah? I had to smile to myself. After all, I had already fallen in love with the savage brat, the parents were contemptible to me. In the ensuing struggle they grew more and more abject, crushed, exhausted while she surely rose to magnificent heights of insane fury of effort bred of her terror of me.

The father tried his best, and he was a big man but the fact that she was his daughter, his shame at her behavior and his dread of hurting her made him release her just at the critical times when I had almost achieved success, till I wanted to kill him. But his dread also that she might have diphtheria made him tell me to go on, go on though he himself was almost fainting, while the mother moved back and forth behind us raising and lowering her hands in an agony of apprehension.

Put her in front of you on your lap, I ordered, and hold both her wrists.

But as soon as he did the child let out a scream. Don't, you're hurting me. Let go of my hands. Let them go I tell you. Then she shrieked terrifyingly, hysterically. Stop it! Stop it! You're killing me!

Do you think she can stand it, doctor! said the mother.

You get out, said the husband to his wife. Do you want her to die of diphtheria?

Come on now, hold her, I said.

Then I grasped the child's head with my left hand and tried to get the wooden tongue depressor between her teeth. She fought, with clenched teeth, desperately! But now I also had grown furious--at a child. I tried to hold myself down but I couldn't. I know how to expose a throat for inspection. And I did my best. When finally I got the wooden spatula behind the last teeth and just the point of it into the mouth cavity, she opened up for an instant but before I could see anything she came down again and gripping the wooden blade between her molars she reduced it to splinters before I could get it out again.

Aren't you ashamed, the mother yelled at her. Aren't you ashamed to act like that in front of the doctor?

Get me a smooth-handled spoon of some sort, I told the mother. We're going through with this. The child's mouth was already bleeding. Her tongue was cut and she was screaming in wild hysterical shrieks. Perhaps I should have desisted and come back in an hour or more. No doubt it would have been better. But I have seen at least two children lying dead in bed of neglect in such cases, and feeling that I must get a diagnosis now or never I went at it again. But the worst of it was that I too had got beyond reason. I could have torn the child apart in my own fury and enjoyed it. It was a pleasure to attack her. My face was burning with it.

The damned little brat must be protected against her own idiocy, one says to one's self at such times. Others must be protected against her. It is a social necessity. And all these things are true. But a blind fury, a feeling of adult shame, bred of a longing for muscular release are the operatives. One goes on to the end.

In a final unreasoning assault I overpowered the child's neck and jaws. I forced the heavy silver spoon back of her teeth and down her throat till she gagged. And there it was--both tonsils covered with membrane. She had fought valiantly to keep me from knowing her secret. She had been hiding that sore throat for three days at least and lying to her parents in order to escape just such an outcome as this.

Now truly she was furious. She had been on the defensive before but now she attacked. Tried to get off her father's lap and fly at me while tears of defeat blinded her eyes.

Quotations from *The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia*, 1 of 6
Nick Middleton
British

The country has developed quickly since 1921, when the revolutionary leader Sukhe Bator rode into Mongolia with a Soviet Red Army back-up. From that date the country has embraced Communism, and in doing so has necessitated a rewrite of the Marxist-Leninist textbooks, because the pre-revolutionary country had never left the ‘feudal’ state. Thus, the phrase that lingers on the tip of every Mongolian interpreter was born: Mongolia had ‘bypassed capitalism’. It is this rapid shift from old to new that gives today’s Mongolia its mystical air as a sort of People’s Republic of Shangri-La.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

Just outside the airport a Chinese-looking gateway straddles the road and the Cyrillic script on the large hoarding beside it proclaims the entrance to the city. But as we drove through the arch the view all around was the same one of grassy treeless hills with not a soul in sight.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

I opened the windows, double frames against the bitter continental winter, and surveyed the city. Across the park outside the hotel the valley hills were fading fast at the end of the day. The neon sign on the building opposite flickered into life. In my Western ignorance I imagined it to be advertising a shop. Later I discovered it said: ‘Let’s make our capital a good socialist city.’
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

Mongolia is waking up from its long history of domination by foreign powers. It is probably fair to say that today the country is looking forward to a future which will be more autonomous than at any time in the seven centuries since Genghis Khan, their national hero who has been resurrected from a shady Communist past, to be revered once more as a symbol of truly Mongolian independence.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

The declaration of Mongolia’s independence in 1911 had encountered a problem: it was ignored.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

“How Do I Love Thee?”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
1806-1861 English

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of every day's
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love with a passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

Quotations from *The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia*, 2 of 6
Nick Middleton
British

Her eyes wandered back to the screen of a television set on the other side of the landing. It was surrounded by a dozen or so students, all in track suits and all from North Korea. They were engrossed in what I assumed to be a comedy programme, judging from the laughter and chuckles coming from their ranks. I followed the floor hostess’s gaze and looked at the TV set. The programme was showing graphic footage of a seal cull in the Arctic.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

‘Listen to this for a reasoned explanation of why the socialists did away with the Mongolian alphabet: “In the final analysis, life demonstrated the expediency of using the Russian alphabet.”

‘Life demonstrated the expediency?’ I repeated.

‘Sure,’ replied Bulcsu. ‘What he means is that if you didn’t change to Cyrillic they shot you. Really very simple.’

We both laughed but Bulcsu had not been joking.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

We chatted in English about the Russian influence in Mongolia. Norbu told us he could take us to see the Russian military camp, tucked away up a side valley, and there was a gold mine on the outskirts of Ulan Bator from which the refined gold was flown out to the Soviet Union every night on a special jet.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

To say that Mongolian Buddhism has taken a bit of a pasting in the years after the Revolution is an understatement: it was almost totally annihilated.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

‘...The march of time would sort everything out. Once the Revolution had taken place, once Communist parties were in power, once collectivisation had been accomplished, once the means of production were in the hands of the self-appointed representatives of the people, then religion would disappear of its own accord. The fact that this train of events simply didn’t happen threw the Communists into disarray. Their reaction to the obvious failure of their ideology was predictable. They couldn’t admit failure, so they resorted to violence.’

‘Reach for the revolver,’ I chipped in.

‘Well, reach for the armoured cars, the high explosives and the entire Soviet Army if necessary, more like,’ Bulcsu replied. ‘Of course the Mongolians never acted without good advice from Moscow, but the ultimate fate of Buddhism in Mongolia was sealed because the theory that said it would disappear was wrong, and yet it had to be proved right.’
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

“Not Marble Nor the Gilded Monuments”
Archibald MacLeish
1892-1982 American

The praisers of women in their proud and beautiful poems,
Naming the grave mouth and the hair and the eyes,
Boasted those they loved should be forever remembered:
These were lies.

The words sound but the face in the Istrian sun is forgotten.
The poet speaks but to her dead ears no more.
The sleek throat is gone -- and the breast that was troubled to listen:
Shadow from door.

Therefore I will not praise your knees nor your fine walking
Telling you men shall remember your name as long
As lips move or breath is spent or the iron of English
Rings from a tongue.

I shall say you were young, and your arms straight, and your mouth scarlett:
I shall say you will die and none will remember you:
Your arms change, and none remember the swish of your garments,
Nor the click of your shoe.

Not with my hand's strength, not with difficult labor
Springing the obstinate words to the bones of your breast
And the stubborn line to your young stride and the breath to your breathing
And the beat to your haste
Shall I prevail on the hearts of unborn men to remember.

(What is a dead girl but a shadowy ghost
Or a dead man's voice but a distant and vain affirmation
Like dream words most)

Therefore I will not speak of the undying glory of women.
I will say you were young and straight and your skin fair
And you stood in the door and the sun was a shadow of leaves on your shoulders
And a leaf on your hair --

I will not speak of the famous beauty of dead women:
I will say the shape of a leaf lay once on your hair.
Till the world ends and the eyes are out and the mouths broken
Look! It is there!

Quotations from *The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia*, 3 of 6
Nick Middleton
British

All governments are guilty of double standards, but Mongolia was the first country I had seen in any detail where the contradictions of the Soviet system were quite so evident. While the Soviet Union had long championed the cause of anti-Imperialism, and had for decades been issuing venomous statements about the West’s exploitation of their empires, here in Mongolia they had quietly been doing exactly the same thing for the past sixty-nine years.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

For Russian advisers and their families a brand of Soviet apartheid was in force. They lived in separate housing blocks with their own shops, stocked with ‘riches’ unavailable to the average Mongolian. These shops had guards on the door who scrutinized passes before allowing entry. The Russians also had their own bus system, always much less crowded than their Mongolian counterparts, and the wages paid to the Russian advisers were greater than those paid to Mongolians in similar positions.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

While the Central Committee in Ulan Bator could hail the founding of some 400 collectives throughout the country in just two years as a great victory for socialism, in reality the boast meant little more than a collapse of herding, the country’s main source of wealth. By 1932 socialism’s victory had cost Mongolia seven million beasts, or roughly one-third of the national herd. The ‘Great Leap Forward’ had turned into a crippled backward somersault.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

The so-called ‘New Turn’ that followed in the second half of the 1930s saw a complete about-face with regard to agriculture. All the collectives were dismantled and private herds were encouraged in a desperate attempt to save the country from disaster.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

When the Revolution came in 1921, Mongolia had few if any of the symptoms of a society ready for development along Marxist lines. ‘It was the antithesis of the industrial society in which the proletariat would be the vanguard of the revolution,’ comments one Western historian of the country’s affairs. Whereas on paper Marxist development should be ignited by a working class revolt, Mongolia bucked the system by not having a working class to do the revolting.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia