verbava все записи автора Gore Vidal – Messiah

Much of the luminous crockery which was seen in the sky was never entirely explained. And explanation, in the end, was all that the people required. It made no difference how extraordinary the explanation was, if only they could know what was happening: that the shining globes which raced in formation over Sioux Falls, South Dakota, were mere residents of the Andromeda Galaxy, at home in space, omnipotent and eternal in design, on a cultural visit to our planet... if only this much could definitely be stated, the readers of newspapers would have felt secure, able in a few weeks' time to turn their attention to other problems, the visitors from farther space forgotten. It made little difference whether these mysterious blobs of light were hallucinations, inter-galactic visitors or military weapons, the important thing was to explain them.

***

There is a certain dignity and excitement in possessing a dangerous secret life. To lose it in maturity is hard... and once promiscuously shared, it does become ordinary, no more troublesome than obvious dentures.

***

The sky that day was like an idiot's mind, wild with odd clouds, but lovely too, guileless, natural, allusive.

***

I had a small income which made modest living and careful travel easy for me... a fortunate state of affairs since, in my youth, I was of an intense disposition, capable of the passions and violence of a Rimbaud without, fortunately, the will to translate them into reality; had I had more money, or none, I might have died young, leaving behind the brief memory of a minor romanticist.

***

I was of course interested in the movies, though they no longer had the same hold over the public imagination that they had had in earlier decades when a process of film before light could project, larger than life, not only on vast screens but also upon the impressionable minds of an enormous audience made homogeneous by a common passion, shadowy figures which, like the filmy envelopes of the stoic deities, floated to earth in public dreams, suggesting a braver more perfect world where love reigned and only the wicked died. But then time passed and the new deities lost their worshipers: there were too many gods and the devotees got too used to them, realizing finally that they were only mortals, involved not in magical rites but in a sordid business. Television (the home altar) succeeded the movies and their once populous and ornate temples, modeled tastefully on baroque and Byzantine themes, fell empty, the old gods moving to join the new hierarchies, becoming the domesticated godlings of television which, although it held the attention of the majority of the population, did not enrapture, did not possess dreams or shape days with longing and with secret imaginings the way the classic figures of an earlier time had.

***

I must warn you, Iris, that I'm not a believer. And though I'm sure that the revelations of other men must be a source of infinite satisfaction to them, individually, I shouldn't for one second be so presumptuous as to make a choice among the many thousands of recorded revelations of truth, accepting one at the expense of all the others: I might so easily choose wrong and get into eternal trouble.

***

The unimaginative are the stuff from which heroes and martyrs are invariably made.

***

"Look what Cave is doing. Of course making death popular is not so difficult since, finally, people want it to be nice: they do the real work or, rather, their terror does. In place of superstition, which they've nearly outgrown, he offers them madness."
"Now really, Clarissa..."
"I don't disapprove. I'm all for him, as you know. To make death preferable to life is of course utter folly though a perfectly logical reaction for these poor bewildered savages who, having lost their old superstitions, are absolutely terrified at the prospect of nothing."

***

"But you think it good for people to follow Cave? you think what he says is right?"
"Nothing is good. Nothing is right. But though Cave is wrong, it is a new wrong and so it is better than the old; in any case, he will keep the people amused and boredom, finally, is the one monster the race will never conquer... the monster which will devour us in time."

***

You may as well be on the side of the future as against it. Not that it much matters anyway.

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