Unkept promises and unkempt premises — Hair Shirt Chronicles

I don’t want to be neutralized by what makes the world commensurable, made me get out of bed and pace when I first read it. And brew coffee and throw darts and play imaginary chess games until daybreak.

I was right in the middle of Will the pursuit of “deep feelings,” of “intense life” what seems to be so many desperate people’s last reason to live, ever fully distract them from the fundamental emotional when the phone in my office rang and I was called upon to help defend an innocent man accused of an orthodox crime.

I had tucked the bottom corner of the sheet under the mattress when I recalled The curiously superstitious notion that to have no reason to believe a proposition is the same as having a reason to assert that the proposition is false.

The Cowboys were driving with less than a minute to go, and Exley was pouring Tabasco directly into his eyes, cursing the giants but unable to do anything but listen to the play call and stare out through the bloodied webs blooming around each iris, when I heard it echo in a somnolent Spalding Gray monotone:

In the American grain, it is gregariousness, suspicion of privacy, a therapeutic distaste in the face of personal apartness and self-exile, which are dominant. In the new Eden, God’s creatures move in herds.