Sublime

And so he stopped trying to tell the truth. He said he was doing it on a bet—that he stood to win a hundred dollars. Everyone liked him then and believed him. They asked him in to dinner and gave him a bed and they put lunches up for him and wished him good luck and thought he was a hell of a fine fellow. Doc still loved true things but he knew it

“An old habit,” God said. “That’s the trouble with habits. They tend to outlive their usefulness.”

He told me once that there was no better faith than a wounded faith and sometimes I wonder if that is what he was doing all along—trying to wound his faith in order to test it—and I was just another stone in the way of his God.

“Don’t call anyone a liar. You’re not sure and if you are sure why advertise it? Let the lie die. Use silence.”

And now here is my pocket Petrarch,

this enemy, this demon of which I have told you; the force of my words has put it to flight, take care that in quitting me it does not hurl itself on one of you and possess him.” No one dared to touch it; after the sermon, the zealous sophist recovered his “beng.”7

I would seriously recommend to the government of the United States that when a man commits a crime so heinous that the law provides no adequate punishment for it, they make him Consul General to Tangier.

God speaks in the least of creatures. The kid thought him to mean birds or things that crawl but the expriest, watching, his head slightly cocked, said: No man is give leave of that voice. The kid spat into the fire and bent to his work. I aint heard no voice, he said. When it stops, said Tobin, you’ll know you’ve heard it all your life.

‘Have you any hunch,’ he asked, ‘why they killed him? and who?’ Suddenly I was angry; I was tired of the whole pack of them with their private stores of Coca-Cola and their portable hospitals and their too wide cars and their not quite latest guns. I said, ‘Yes. They killed him because he was too innocent to live. He was young and ignorant and sill