01UndatedFear finds its prey in adolescents for the exact same reason fearlessness does. Every cut, scrape, broken arm or cancer is a cut, scrape, broken arm or cancer that has yet to arrive, that is on the sidelines waiting, along with fate and the story of your life, of everything bad that can happen, some of which will happen—but right now, they’re purely theoretical. It is up to the adolescent’s imagination to make them bleed, to make them hurt.John M. Keller / quote ↗
02UndatedWe had traveled far and long to get here but were still the same still-born, unreconstructed people who had once met on this landscape that began somewhere not too far south of the south and ended all the way up in the northernmost extremes of the north, and every soul begotten upon this land was a bastard child of that interminable human equation: colonizer and colony, slave and master, rapist and victim, and any pledge to loyalty and patriotism was an oath to both parts of this equation—we were the seconds obliviously turned up on the old, unregenerate battlefield, here to fight in history’s redundant, never-ending duel, always carrying someone else’s sword and flag in the name of the myth.John M. Keller / quote ↗
03UndatedSpeculation was now news. News had been confused with fact. Fact had been replaced by expert opinion. People had been replaced by their biographies. Ability had been replaced by disability. Thinking had been replaced by psychology. History had been reduced to story. And while the news media pumped out a new story every week on things that could kill you, Hollywood simultaneously created stories that showed that everything could be prevailed over. Meaning, he said, was so malleable that it could be turned inside out, and no one would know the difference—and it would—and, just like the universe that had expanded to its maximum size, everything that had ever been would happen in reverse and revert back to its original form until existence would disappear without leaving a trace of itself as the Big Bang backfired.John M. Keller / quote ↗
04UndatedIn literature, the reader standing at the threshold of the end of a book harbors no illusion that the end has not come—he or she can see where it finishes, the abyss the other side of the last chunk of text. Which means that the writer is never in danger of ending too soon—or if he does the reader has been so forewarned. This is the advantage a book has over a film—it is the brain that marshals forward the text and controls the precise moment of conclusion of the book, as the density of the pages thins. A film can end without you if you’ve fallen asleep or, because you can’t wait any longer to use the bathroom, slipped out of the darkness of the theatre salon, and missed it. There will never be a form more perfect than the book, which always moves at your pace, that sits waiting for you exactly where you’ve left it and never goes on without you.John M. Keller / quote ↗
05UndatedBut now books and men had gone their separate ways. Who has the patience for a book? Only a book.John M. Keller / quote ↗
06UndatedThe beauty of theatre was that it was a moving, changing art form—only those who watch the same performance night in after night out see the real naturalistic drama at work—the small changes, adjustments, changes in articulation or intonation, the addition of a cough or hiccup, a longer pause rife with more (or less) meaning, the character’s movement across the stage a step slower, a step closer to the audience, the change of a word here and there, an overall change in mood and tone, the actors becoming (or not) the characters more fully, blending in with them, losing themselves in the lines, in the characterizations, in a drama that is simultaneously unfolding and becoming more and more verisimilitudinous as time marches on. This is the real narrative—while the character changes on stage in an instant, the play changes slowly, unnoticeably (unnoticeable to those closest to it perhaps), like the face of a man in his thirties, like his beliefs about life, his motives, all slowly as if duplicating itself day by day, filling itself and becoming more and more itself, the rehearsal of Self, the dress rehearsal of Self, the performance of Self, the extended performance of Self, the encore…—it appears to be the same show, played over and over again with the same details to different crowds, and yet something happens. Something changes. It is not the same show.John M. Keller / quote ↗
