Bluebeard

I was forced to fight at last on the border of Germany, and was wounded and captured without having fired a shot. There was this white flash.

I was forced to fight at last on the border of Germany, and was wounded and captured without having fired a shot. There was this white flash.

Does Franklin Cooley, that poor, dumb bastard with six kids, his ears filled with the clashing gibberish of the mowers, have the least suspicion that earthshaking work is going on in here?

Just think! This one house by the seaside, so empty and dead only a few months ago, is now giving birth to a book about how to revolt successfully, a book about how poor girls feel about rich boys, and the memoirs of a painter whose pictures all came unstuck from canvas.

“And what is literature, Rabo,” he said, “but an insider’s newsletter about affairs relating to molecules, of no importance to anything in the Universe but a few molecules who have the disease called ‘thought.’”

‘Why should I teach him the language of painting, since there seems to be absolutely nothing which he is desperate to talk about?’”

I, born in America far from any other Armenians, save for my parents, eventually became a member of two artificial extended families which were reasonably respectable, although surely not the social equals of Harvard or Yale:

The Officer Corps of the United States Army in time of war,

the Abstract Expressionist school of painting after the war.

John Singer Sargent’s full-length “Portrait of Madame X,” with her famous milk-white shoulders and ski-jump nose and so on.

Contentedly adrift in the cosmos,’ were you?” Kitchen said to me. “That is a perfect description of a non-epiphany, that rarest of moments, when God Almighty lets go of the scruff of your neck and lets you be human for a little while.

The trouble with God isn’t that He so seldom makes Himself known to us,” he went on. “The trouble with God is exactly the opposite: He’s holding you and me and everybody else by the scruff of the neck practically constantly.