Some lines from Mother Night to consider:
"Three people in all the world knew me for what I was--" I said. "And all the rest--" I shrugged.
"They knew you for what you were too," he said abruptly.
"That wasn't me," I said, startled by his sharpness.
“Be careful what you pretend to be, because you are what you pretend to be.”
“Future civilizations - better civilizations than this one - are going
to judge all men by the extent to which they've been artists. You and I,
if some future archaeologist finds our works miraculously preserved in
some city dump, will be judged by the quality of our creations. Nothing
else about us will matter.”
“When you're dead you're dead.”
“I have never seen a more sublime demonstration of the
totalitarian mind, a mind which might be linked unto a system of gears
where teeth have been filed off at random. Such snaggle-toothed thought
machine, driven by a standard or even by a substandard libido, whirls
with the jerky, noisy, gaudy pointlessness of a cuckoo clock in Hell.
The boss G-man concluded wrongly that there were no teeth on the gears in the mind of Jones. 'You're completely crazy,' he said.
Jones
wasn't completely crazy. The dismaying thing about classic totalitarian
mind is that any given gear, thought mutilated, will have at its
circumference unbroken sequences of teeth that are immaculately
maintained, that are exquisitely machined.
Hence the cuckoo clock in
Hell - keeping perfect time for eight minutes and twenty-three seconds,
jumping ahead fourteen minutes, keeping perfect time for six seconds,
jumping ahead two seconds, keeping perfect time for two hours and one
second, then jumping ahead a year.
The missing teeth, of course, are
simple, obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible even to
ten-year-olds, in most cases.
The wilful filling off a gear teeth, the wilful doing without certain obvious pieces of information -
That
was how a household as contradictory as one composed of Jones, Father
Keeley, Vice-Bundesfuehrer Krapptauer, and the Black Fuehrer could exist
in relative harmony -
That was how my father-in-law could contain in one mind an indifference toward slave women and love fora a blue vase -
That
was how Rudolf Hess, Commandant of Auschwitz, could alternate over the
loudspeakers of Auschwitz great music and calls for corpse-carriers -
That was how Nazi Germany sense no important difference between civilization and hydrophobia -
That is the closest I can come to explaining the legions, the nations of lunatics I've seen in my time.”
“There are plenty of good reason for fighting," I said, "but no good
reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty
Himself hates with you, too. Where's evil? It's that large part of
every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God
on its side. It's that part of every man that finds all kinds of
ugliness so attractive. "It's that part of an imbecile," I said, "that
punishes and vilifies and makes war.”
“What can any one person do?' he said.
'Each person does a little something,' I said, 'and there you are.”
“I saw a huge steam roller,
It blotted out the sun.
The people all lay down, lay down;
They did not try to run.
My love and I, we looked amazed
Upon the gory mystery.
"Lie down, lie down!" the people cried.
"The great machine is history!"
My love and I, we ran away,
The engine did not find us.
We ran up to a mountain top,
Left history far behind us.
Perhaps we should have stayed and died,
But somehow we don't think so.
We went to see where history'd been,
And my, the dead did stink so. ”
“Dear Friends: As one who has experimented extensively with life in the
home and community, using real people in true-life situations, I doubt
that any playthings could prepare a child for one millionth of what is
going to hit him in the teeth, ready or not.
...Let there be nothing harmonious about our children's playthings, lest they grow up expecting peace and order and be eaten alive."
“Since there is no one else to praise me, I will praise myself -- will
say that I have never tampered with a single tooth in my thought
machine, such as it is. There are teeth missing, God knows -- some I was
born without, teeth that will never grow. And other teeth have been
stripped by the clutchless shifts of history -- But never have I
willfully destroyed a tooth on a gear of my thinking machine. Never have
I said to myself, 'This fact I can do without.”
“[Hating America] would be as silly as loving it,” I said. “It’s
impossible for me to get emotional about it, because real estate doesn’t
interest me. It’s no doubt a great flaw in my personality, but I can’t
think in terms of boundaries. Those imaginary lines are as unreal to me
as elves and pixies. I can’t believe that they mark the end or the
beginning of anything of real concern to the human soul. Virtues and
vices, pleasures and pains cross boundaries at will.”
“So I am about to be a free man again, to wander where I please.
I find the prospect nauseating.
I think that tonight I will hand Howard W, Campbell, Jr., for crimes against himself.”
