"Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go."

--T. S. Eliot

I wanted to write down a couple of passages of interest from The Keepers of Truth, by Michael Collins. The book is about a young man who works as a newspaper reporter in the '70s in a dying auto manufacturing town, where a gruesome murder has just taken place.

"And it passes itself off, this violence, this madness, as nothing to do with politics. Somehow we are an apolitical nation. There are no collective actions of warfare. Everything can be dismantled to the level of the individual. Each act of violence is isolated; it forms no mood; it feeds into no general rebellion. It's maybe the greatest secret we possess as a nation, our sense of alienation from everyone else around us, our ability to have no sympathy, no empathy for others' suffering, a decentralized philosophy of individual will, a culpability that always lands back on each of us."

"It was getting to be like that all over, this new currency of appreciation, where you didn't get a raise. What you got were accolades, awards, and certificates of merit, your name up on a neon sign or on a plaque. It was weird as hell, how it meant so goddamn much to them, how money was eclipsed by a need for respect, an insatiable need to be honored. People were being robbed of a decent living, but they didn't even seem to understand that. Managers and trainee managers were presenting so many goddamn certificates and plaques, it was just plain hard to complain. People were being appreciated and honored every time they opened their mouths....Our Orwellian nightmare had arrived, the newsspeak of postindustrialism. Who among us was equipped to understand that serf and prole were now manager or trainee manager, in this world?"

"Frieda's probably an angry drunk."

* * *

And also....

Rob: It's like the trainer said. She chooses not to kill us.

Me: Yes, but she's not choosing not to kill your shoe.