THE COUNTERLIFE Revisited

3. Aloft

"... they looked like their objective was to pray at supersonic speed .... It was hard to imagine another human drama as intimate and frenzied being enacted so shamelessly in a public conveyance. Had a pair of passengers thrown off their clothes and, in a fit of equally unabashed fervor, begun making love out in the aisle, watching them wouldn't have seemed any more voyeuristic."

"... I couldn't help but be gripped by the sight of this rock-worship, exemplifying as it did to me the most awesomely retarded aspect of the human mind. Rock is just right, I thought: what on earth could be less responsive? .... Had I thought it was rock they were addressing I might have even joined in."

"In Israel it's enough to live --you don't have to do anything else and you go to bed exhausted. Have you ever noticed that Jews shout? .... Here everything is black and white, everybody is shouting and everybody is always right. Here the extremes are too great for a country so small."

"What people envy in the novelist aren't the things that the novelists think are so enviable but the performing selves that the author indulges, the slipping irresponsibly in and out of his skin, the reveling not in 'I' but in escaping 'I,' even if it involves -- especially if it involves -- piling imaginary afflictions upon himself. What's envied is the gift for theatrical self-transformation, the way they are able to loosen and make ambiguous their connection to a real life through the imposition of talent. The exhibitionism of the superior artist is connected to his imagination; fiction is form him at once playful hypothesis and serious supposition, an imaginative form of inquiry -- everything that exhibitionism is not. Isn't it true that, contrary to general belief, it is the distance between the writer's life and his novel that is the most intriguing aspect of his imagination?"

"The Nativity has always struck me as a close second to the Resurrection in nakedly addressing the most childish need .... a virgin's womb, being materializing on this planet without the heaving and the squirting, the smells and the excretions, without the plundering satisfaction of the orgasmic shudder -- what sublime, offensive kitsch, with its fundamental abhorrence of sex."