Only a good father, the very finest of fathers, could have delivered his second child with his own hands. No ordinary father could have nursed and nurtured the two, the baby and the infant, so tenderly and so well. No child was ever so protected from evil as Alicia; and when she joined forces with her father, a mighty structure of purity was created for Evelyn. "Purity triple-distilled," Mr. Kew said to Alicia on her nineteenth birthday. "I know good through the study of evil, and have taught you only the good. And that good teaching has become your good living, and your way of life is Evelyn's star. I know all the evil there is and you know all the evil which must be avoided; but Evelyn knows no evil at all."
At nineteen, of course, Alicia was mature enough to understand these abstracts, this "way of life" and "distillation" and the inclusive "good" and "evil." When she was sixteen he had explained to her how a man went mad if he was alone with a woman, and how the poison sweat appeared on his body, and how he would put it on her, and then it would cause the horror on her skin. He had pictures of skin like that in his books. When she was thirteen she had a trouble and told her father about it and he told her with tears in his eyes that this was because she had been thinking about her body, as indeed she had been. She confessed it and he punished her body until she wished she had never owned one. And she tried, she tried not to think like that again, but she did in spite of herself; and regularly, regretfully, her father helped her in her efforts to discipline her intrusive flesh. When she was eight he taught her how to bathe in darkness, so she would be spared the blindness of those white eyes of which he also had magnificent pictures. And when she was six he had hung in her bedroom the picture of a woman, called Angel, and the picture of a man, called Devil. The woman held her palms up and smiled and the man had his arms out to her, his hands like hooks, and protruding point-outward from his breastbone was a crooked knife blade with a wetness on it.
from More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon
Alicia Kew stood in the deepest shade by the edge of the meadow. "Father, Father, forgive me!" she cried. She sank down on the grass, blind with fried and terror, torn, shaken with conflict.
"Forgive me," she whispered with passion. "Forgive me," she whispered with scorn.
She thought, Devil, why won't you be dead? Five years ago you killed yourself, you killed my sister, and still it's "Father, forgive me." Sadist, pervert, murderer, devil... man, dirty poisonous man!
I've come a long way, she thought, I've come no way at all. How I ran from Jacobs, gentle Lawyer Jacobs, when he came to help with the bodies; oh, how I ran, to keep from being alone with him, so that he might not go mad and poison me. And when he brought his wife, how I fled from her too, thinking women were evil and must not touch me. They had a time with me, indeed they did; it was so long before I could understand that I was mad, not they...it was so long before I knew how very good, how very patient, Mother Jacobs was with me; how much she had to do with me, for me. "But child, no one's worn clothes like those for forty years!" And in the cab, when I screamed and couldn't stop, for the people, the hurry, the bodies, so many bodies, all touching and so achingly visible; bodies on the streets, the stairs, great pictures of bodies in the magazines, men holding women who laughed and were brazenly unfrightened...Dr. Rothstein who explained and explained and went back and explained again; there is no poison sweat, and there must be men and women else there would be no people at all. ...I had to learn this, Father, dear devil Father, because of you; because of you I had never seen an automobile or a breast or a newspaper or a railroad train or a sanitary napkin or a kiss or a restaurant or an elevator or a bathing suit or the hair on--oh forgive me, Father.
I'm not afraid of the whip, I'm afraid of hands and eyes, thank you Father. One day, one day, you'll see, Father, I shall live with people all around me, I shall ride on their trains and drive my own motorcar; I shall go among thousands on a beach at the edge of a sea which goes out and out without wall, I shall step in and out among them with a tiny strip of cloth here and here and let them see my navel, I shall meet a man with white teeth, Father, and round strong arms, Father, and I shall oh what will become of me, what have I become now, Father forgive me.
I live in a house you never saw, one with windows overlooking a road, where the bright gentle cars whisper past and children play outside the hedge. The hedge is not a wall and, twice for the drive and once for the walk, it is open to anyone. I look through the curtains whenever I choose, and see strangers. There is no way to make the bathroom black dark and in the bathroom is a mirror as tall as I am; and one day, Father, I shall leave the towel off.
But all that will come later, the moving about among strangers, the touchings without fear. Now I must live alone, and think; I must read and read of the world and its works, yes, and of madmen like you, Father, and what twists them so terribly; Dr. Rothstein insists that you were not the only one, that you were so rare, really, only because you were so rich.
Evelyn...
The picture of her father, dead, calmed her strangely. She rose and looked back into the woods, looked carefully around the meadow, shadow by shadow, tree by tree. "All right, Evelyn, I will, I will. ..."
She took a deep breath and held it. She shut her eyes so tight there was red in the blackness of it. Her hands flickered over the buttons on her dress. It fell away. She slid out of underwear and stockings with a single movement. The air stirred and its touch on her body was indescribable; it seemed to blow through her. She stepped forward into the sun and with tears of terror pressing through her closed lids, she danced naked, for Evelyn, and begged and begged her dead father's pardon.
from More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon
Janie lay in bed as stiff and smooth and contained as a round toothpick. Nothing would get in, nothing could get out; somewhere she had found this surface that went all the way through, and as long as she had it, nothing was going to happen.
But if anything happens, came a whisper, you'll break. But if I don't break, nothing will happen, she answered.
But if anything...
The dark hours came and grew black nad the black hours labored by.
Her door crashed open and the light blazed. "He's gone and baby, I've got business with you. Get out here!" Wima's bathrobe swirled against the doorpost as she turned and went away.
Janie pushed back the covers and thumped her feet down. Without understand quite why, she began to get dressed. She got her good plaid dress and the shoes with the two buckles, and the knit pants and the slip with the lace rabbits. There were little rabbits' fuzzy nubbin tails.
Wima was on the couch, pounding and pounding with her fist. "You wrecked my cel," she said, and drank from a square-stemmed glass, "ebration, so you ought to know what I'm celebrating. You don't know it but I've had a big trouble and I didn't know how to hannel it, and now it's all done for me. And I'll tell you all about it right now, little baby Miss Big Ears. Big Mouth. Smarty. Because your father, I can hannel him any time, but what was I going to do with your big mouth going day and night? That was my trouble, what was I going to do about your big mouth when he got back. Well it's all fixed, he won't be back, the Heinies fixed it up for me." She waved a yellow sheet. "Smart girls know that's a telegram, and the telegram says, says here, 'Regret to inform you that your husband.' They shot your father, that's what they regret to say, and now this is the way it's going to be from now on between you and me. Whatever I want to do I do, an' whatever you want to nose into, nose away. Now isn't that fair?"
She turned to be answered but there was no answer. Janie was gone.
Wima knew before she started that there wasn't any use looking, but something made her run to the hall closet and look in the top shelf. There wasn't anything up there but Christmas tree ornaments and they hadn't been touched in three years.
She stood in the middle of the living room, not knowing which way to go. She whispered, "Janie?"
She put her hands on the sides of her face and lifted her hair away from it. She turned around and around, and asked, "What's the matter with me?"
from More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon
Lone's next conscious thought was, Well, that's finished.
What's finished? he asked himself.
He looked around. "Mowing," he said. Only then he realized that he had been working for more than three hours since Prodd spoke to him, and it was as if some other person had done it. He himself had been--gone in some way.
Absently he took his whetstone and began to dress the scythe. It made a sound like a pot boiling over when he moved it slowly, and like a shrew dying when he moved it fast.
Where had he known this feeling of time passing, as it were, behind his back?
He moved the stone slowly. Cooking and warmth and work. A birthday cake. A clean bed. A sense of... "Membership" was not a word he possessed but that was his thought.
No, obliterated time didn't exist in those memories. He moved the stone faster.
Death-cries in the wood. Lonely hunter and its solitary prey. The sap falls and the bear sleep and the birds fly south, all doing it together, not because they are all members of the same thing, but only because they are all solitary things hurt by the same thing.
That was where time had passed without his awareness of it. Almost always, before he came here. That was how he had lived.
Why should it come back to him now, then?
He swept his gaze around the land, as Prodd had done, taking in the house and its imbalancing bulge, and the land, and the woods which held the farm like water in a basin. When I was alone, he thought, time passed me like that. Time passes like that now, so it must be that I am alone again.
And then he knew that he had been alone the whole time. Mrs. Prodd hadn't raised him up, not really. She had been raising up her Jack the whole time.
Once in the wood, in water and agony, he had been a part of something, and in wetness and pain it had been torn from him. And if, for eight years now, he had thought he had found something else to belong to, then for eight years he had been wrong.
Anger was foreign to him; he had only felt it once before. But now it came, a wash of it that made him swell, that drained and left him weak. And he himself was the object of it. For hadn't he known? Hadn't he taken a name for himself, knowing that the name was a crystallization of all he had ever been and done? All he had ever been and done was alone. Why should he have let himself feel any other way?
Wrong. Wrong as a squirrel with feathers, or a wolf with wooden teeth; not injustice, not unfairness--just a wrongness that, under the sky, could not exist...the idea that such as he could belong to anything.
Hear that, son? Hear, that, man?
Hear that, Lone?
He picked up three long fresh stalks of timothy and braided them together. He upended the scythe and thrust the handle deep enough into the soft earth so it would stand upright. He tired the braided grass to one of the grips and slipped the whetstone into the loops so it would stay. Then he walked off into the woods.
from More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon
Alone. Lone Lone alone. Prodd was alone now and Janie was alone and the twins, well they had each other but they were like one split person who was alone. He himself, Lone, was still alone, it didn't make any difference about the kids being there.
Maybe Prodd and his wife had not been alone. He wouldn't have any way of knowing about that. But there was nothing like Lone anywhere in the world except right here inside of him. The whole world threw Lone away, you know that? Even the Prodds did, when they got around to it. Janie got thrown out, the twins too, so Janie said.
Well, in a funny way it helps to know you're alone, thought Lone.
from More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon
hope is a waking dream
Aristotle
people demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which they avoid." Soren Kierkegaard
i have never let my schooling interfere with my education
Mark Twain [Samuel Langhornne Clemens]
honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress
Gandhi
the authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn
Cicero
the difference between genius and stupidity is genius has its limits
Albert Einstein
a rattlesnake that doesn't bite teaches you nothing
Jessamyn West
we are always getting ready to live, but never living
Ralph Waldo Emerson
i am not wise, i am too intelligent for that. i know too much to be anything but absolutely terrified
Whitley Strieber
the cure for anything is salt water - sweat, tears, or the sea
Isak Dinesen
if you smile when no one else is around, you really mean it
Andy Rooney
clothes make the man. naked people have little or no influence on society
Mark Twain [Samuel Langhornne Clemens]
a free society is a place where it's safe to be unpopular
Adlai Stevenson
in our society those who are in reality superior in intelligence can be accepted by their fellows only if they pretend they are not
Marya Manne
when you take charge of your life, there is no longer need to ask permission of other people or society at large. when you ask permission, you give someone veto power over your life
Geoffrey F. Abert
i will shove society's face into a blender and create slushees for all the children
Jennifer Gryczkowski
solitude shows us what should be; society shows us what we are
Robert Cecil
anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. if we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power
P.J. O'Rourke
experience is that marvelous thing that enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again
F.P. Jones
i'm going to pray to god that we're wrong... wait! i don't believe in god! shit, we're fucked!
Jennifer Gryczkowski
one morning you wake up afraid you are going to live
Elizabeth Wurtzel
in the end one loves one's desire and not what is desired
of the delights of this world man has cared most for sexual intercourse, yet he has left it out of his heaven
Mark Twain [Samuel Langhornne Clemens]
love is the distance between reality and pain
Jennifer Gryczkowski
