For some time now the impression has been growing upon me that everyone is dead.
It happens when I speak to people. In the middle of a sentence it will come over me: yes, beyond a doubt this is death. There is little to do but groan and make an excuse and slip away as quickly as one can. At such times it seems that the conversation is spoken by automatons who have no choice in what they say. I hear myself or someone else saying things like: "In my opinion the Russian people are a great people, but--" or "Yes, what you say about the hypocrisy of the North is unquestionably true. However--" and I think to myself: this is death. Lately it is all I can do to carry on such everyday [dinner] conversations, because my cheek has developed a tendency to twitch of its own accord.
-Binx Bolling, 1960
4 comments:
Awesome.
There seem to be two deadly sins in America; communism and silence. I can sort of understand the first one but why "dead air" is so fearful to you people?
Nothing more spectacular than plain ol' existential dread. There are two televisions in the locker room of the place where I swim, two big LCDs blaring, usually, two different 24-hour news networks.
Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about
T. S. Eliot, East Coker
CKR
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