Sublime

Our generations rise and break like foam on shores. Yet death, at least in the West, apparently astonishes and blind-sides every man-bubble of us, every time. “One of the main reasons that it is so easy to march men off to war,” says Ernest Becker, is that “each of them feels sorry for the man next to him who will die.”

People burst like foam. If yo

felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.

“Baby, just about anywhere you die there’s somebody watching. It doesn’t make any difference whether they’re watching you die in bed or in a chair, somebody’s going to be there. It’s strictly a spectator sport.”

Because grief, at its worst, is unreal. And it calls for a surreal response. The queens—in this way—are unicorns. Unicorns stamping in a graveyard.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by payment plans

The table was loaded with yellowing newspapers and empty bottles and it held a single brown and wrinkled potato in which even the sprouting eyes were rotten. Red wine had been spilled on the floor, it had been allowed to dry and it made the air in the room sweet and heavy. But it was not the room’s disorder which was frightening; it was the fact th

these towns I have come to know only by what leaves them, myself included. The