Page 123

Ron Davison (RWorld, see Recommended sidebar) has decided to play the most recent meme’ thing going around: copy the sixth, seventh and eighth lines on page 123 of the book that is closest to your left elbow, and then, though he doesn’t dictate what comes next, talk about it, I suppose.

I'll play; but, as I fired up the laptop, I'm horizontal on the couch, facing nominally south. The book closest to my left elbow is "The 47th" by Stephen Hunter, a novel about a sniper, Bobby Lee Swagger. I've not started it, and had no plan to do so soon. I read mysteries and spy stuff; but, as Big Rick will tell you, I’m a bit behind on our traded book schedule.

Had I opened this at work, the closest book to my left elbow would have been, without exacting measurements, one of a bunch of legal junk, which might have made for a more interesting response.

The truth, I'm not reading much for other than work lately. The current book that that I'm working on, slowly is "Soul on Ice" by Eldridge Cleaver from back in the Sixties, and I'm only sixty or seventy pages into it. It was maybe six inches further away, than the novel. It made a huge impression on me when I read it in '71 or '72.Here are the required lines:

"Long before, I had become a student of Norman Mailer's 'The White Negro' which seemed to me to be prophetic and penetrating of its understanding of the psychology involved in the accelerating confrontation of black and white in America. I was therefore personally insulted by Baldwin's flippant, school marmish dismissal of 'The White Negro.' Baldwin committed a literary crime by is arrogant repudiation of one of the few gravely important expressions of our time."

There's a lot of anger, and era sensitive stuff in the book, the quote being part of it.Here's seven lines from another chapter that I loved way back when and still resonate for me (even though I used them in a post not too long ago):

“Getting to know someone, entering that new world, is an ultimate, irretrievable step into the unknown. The prospect is terrifying. The stakes are high. The emotions are overwhelming. The two people are reluctant to really strip themselves naked in front of each other, because in doing so they make themselves vulnerable and give enormous power over themselves one to the other. How often they inflict pain and torment upon each other! Better to maintain shallow superficial affairs; that way the scars are not too deep. No blood is hacked from the soul.”

Cleaver, writing as an imprisoned black man talked in terms of white and black, male and female, the state versus the individual; but, if you parse him, he talked about our fears, just substitute what he was afraid of or angry about for the fear and anger we face.

And to end on a lighter note, here are the lines from page 123 of the novel:

"'A jelly belly. You can see why.'

'Yes, of course.'"