T.Patrick Lynch Times

I'm an aspiring novelist. This blog contains original work, excerpts from work that I admire, and other stuff.

[tpatricklynch]

from Letters to Earth by Mark Twain

Make a note of it: in man’s heaven there are no exercises for the intellect, nothing for it to live upon. It would rot there in a year--rot and stink. Rot and stink--and at that stage become holy. A blessed thing: for only the holy can stand the joy of that bedlam.

[tpatricklynch]

from The Nose by Nikolai Gogol

But there is nothing enduring in this world, and therefore even joy in the second minute is already not as acute as in the first; in the third minute it becomes still weaker and finally merges unnoticeably with the usual condition of the soul, as a circle on the water, caused by the fall of a pebble, finally merges with the smooth surface.

[tpatricklynch]

from Moby Dick by Herman Melville

It is not, perhaps, entirely because the whale is so excessively unctuous that landsmen seem to regard the eating of him with abhorrence; that appears to result, in some way, from the consideration before mentioned: i.e. that a man should eat a newly murdered thing of the sea, and eat it too by its own light. But no doubt the first man that ever murdered an ox was regarded as a murderer; perhaps he was hung; and if had been put on trial by oxen, he certainly would have been; and he certainly deserved it if any murderer does. Go to a meat-market of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds. Does not that sight take a tooth out of the cannibal’s jaw? Cannibals? who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that provident Fejee, I say, in the day of judgement, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy pate-de-foie-gras.

[tpatricklynch]

from In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway

While the bombardment was knocking the trench to pieces at Fossalta, he lay very flat and sweated and prayed oh jesus christ get me out of here. Dear jesus please get me out. Christ please please please christ. If you’ll only keep me from getting killed I’ll do anything you say. I believe in you and I’ll tell every one in the world that you are the only one that matters. Please please dear jesus. The shelling moved further up the line. We went to work on the trench and in the morning the sun came up and the day was hot and muggy and cheerful and quiet. The next night back at Mestre he did not tell the girl he went upstairs with at the Villa Rossa about Jesus. And he never told anybody.

[tpatricklynch]

from The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

Toilets in modern water closets rise up from the floor like white water lilies. The architect does all he can to make the body forget how paltry it is, and to make man ignore what happens to his intestinal wastes after the water from the tank flushes them down the drain. Even though the sewer pipelines reach far into our houses with their tentacles, they are carefully hidden from view, and we are happily ignorant of the invisible Venice of shit underlying our bathrooms, bedrooms, dance halls, and parliaments.

[tpatricklynch]

from Micromegas by Voltaire

“If it weren’t for the fact that you’re a philosopher,” said Micromegas, “I’d be afraid of making you feel even more distressed by telling you that we live seven times longer than you. But you well understand  that when the time comes for us to return our body to the elements, giving life back to nature in another form, which we call dying, when this moment of metamorphosis comes, there’s not the slightest difference between living for a day and living for an eternity. I’ve been to countries where people live a thousand times longer than in mine and I discovered that they still weren’t happy. But there are sensible people everywhere who are able to accept their lot and give thanks to the great Author of Nature.”

[tpatricklynch]

Question everything you’re told.

[tpatricklynch]

from Catch 22 by Joseph Heller

And suddenly it made sense. Why not every night indeed? It made sense to cry out in pain every night. It made more sense than Appleby, who was a stickler for regulations and had ordered Kraft to order Yoassarian to take his Atabrine tablets on the flight overseas after Yossarian and Appleby had stopped talking to each other. Hungry Joe made more sense than Kraft, too, who was dead, dumped unceremoniously into doom over Ferrara by an exploding engine after Yossarian took his flight of six planes in over the target a second time. The group had missed the bridge at Ferrara again for the seventh straight day with the bombsight that could put booms into a pickle barrel at forty thousand feet, and one whole week had already passed since Colonel Cathcart had volunteered to have his men destroy the bridge in twenty-four hours. Kraft was a skinny, harmless kid from Pennsylvania who wanted only to be liked, and was destined to be disappointed in even so humble and degrading an ambition. Instead of being liked, he was dead, a bleeding cinder on the barbarous pile whom nobody had heard in those last precious moments while the plane with one wing plummeted.He had lived innocuously for a little while and then had gone down in flame over Ferrara on the seventh day, while God was resting, when McWatt turned and Yossarian guided him in over the target on a second bomb run because Aarfy was confused and Yossarian had been unable to drop his bombs the first time.

[tpatricklynch]

from Pere Goriot by Honore de Balzac

"Henceforth there is war between us."

And by way of throwing down the glove to Society, Rastignac went to dine with Mme. de Nucingen.

[tpatricklynch]

from Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

I said there was a society of men among us, bred up from their youth in the art of proving by words multiplied for the purpose, that white is black, and black is white, according as they are paid. To this society all the rest of the people are slaves. For example, if my neighbor hath a mind to my cow, he hires a lawyer to prove that he ought to have my cow from me. I must then hire another to defend my right, it being against all rules of law that any man should be allowed to speak for himself. Now in this case I who am the right owner lie under two great disadvantages. First, my lawyer,  being practiced almost from his cradle in defending falsehood, is quite out of his element when he would be an advocate for justice, which as an office unnatural, he always attempts with ill-will. The second disadvantage is that my lawyer must proceed with great caution, or else he will be reprimanded by the judges, and abhorred by his brethren, as one that would lessen the practice of the law.

[tpatricklynch]

from If I Die in a Combat Zone by Tim O'Brien

The tracks stopped and everyone waded to paddy dikes to sit down and wait. One of my friends walked over and showed me a two-inch hole in his canteen where shrapnel had hit.

"Not bad, huh?" Barney said. He was a very young soldier, and he was more amazed than frightened. He grinned. "Pretty lucky, there it is. I'll have some good stories to tell when the ol' freedom bird takes me home."

Captain Smith ambled over and sat down on the dike. "Got me a little scratch from that mine. Here, take a look. Got myself a Purple Heart." He showed me a hole in his shirt. It looked like a moth had done it, that small. "My first big operation, and I get a Purple Heart. Gonna be a year long, Timmy. But wow, I've lost a lot of men today."

Two Vietnamese scouts had been killed by the mine. When the dust-off choppers came in, we loaded up the dead scouts and eight wounded GIs. In half an hour Alpha had lost seventeen men.

After the helicopters had gone, Captain Smith and the track commander argued again. We sat on paddy dikes, the enemy presumably still around, while the two officers debated issues of honor and competence. Smith said the track commander should have informed him that they had a policy of backing up when taking incoming fire. "Damn it, I'm going to suffer for this," Smith said. "What's my commander to think? He's gonna see a damn casualty list a mile long, and it's only my first operation. My career is in real jeopardy now." And the track commander swore and said Smith should have known the rudiments of track warfare. He muttered something about ROTC.

[tpatricklynch]

from the Fall by Albert Camus

"You'll pay for this!" a daughter said to her father who had prevented her from marrying a too well groomed suitor. And she killed herself. But the father paid for nothing. He loved fly-casting. Three Sundays later he went back to the river--to forget, as he said. He was right; he forgot. To tell the truth, the contrary would have been surprising. You think you are dying to punish your wife and actually you are freeing her. It's better not to see that. Besides the fact that you might hear the reasons they gave for your action. As far as I am concerned, I can hear them now: "He killed himself because he couldn't bear . . ." Ah, cher ami, how poor in invention men are! They always think one commits suicide for a reason. But it's quite possible to commit suicide for two reasons. No, that never occurs to them. So what's the good of dying intentionally, of sacrificing yourself to the idea you want people to have of you? Once you are dead, they will take advantage of it to attribute idiotic or vulgar motives to your action. Martyrs, cher ami, must choose between being forgotten, mocked, or made use of. As for being understood--never!

[tpatricklynch]

from Erostratus by Jean-Paul Sartre

I suppose you might be curious to know what a man can be like who does not love men. Very well, I am such a man, and I love them so little that soon I am going out and kill half a dozen of them: perhaps you might wonder why only half a dozen? Because my revolver has only six cartridges.

[tpatricklynch]

"You can get away with murder if you got a badge…"

[tpatricklynch]

from The Time Machine by H.G. Wells

'I could work at a problem for years, but to wait inactive for twenty-four hours--that is another matter.'

[centuriespast]

The Assassination

James Ensor (Belgian, 1860 - 1949)

1890. Oil on canvas

Columbus Art Museum

[supersonicart]

Johan Andersson.

Johan Andersson’s portraiture focuses on the outcasts of society and those affected by war.  The body of work proves to be a substantially powerful motivator towards resolving differences and peace:

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