SiameseQuadraped: I’ve been focusing on thought and compassion and the meaning of love all week, and the incidents in NY/DC/PA came at at a time when we were talking about Holden Caufield in The Catcher in the Rye, and the book, Brave New World. Anyway, next week we are reading “All Quiet on the Western Front,” and I came across this quote, marked as “great” by a student of mine in her journal. “It is very queer that the unhappiness of the world is so often brought on by small men.” And this one: “Our bodies are a thin skin stretched painfully over repressed madness.”
Here is a poem by Randall Jarrell:
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
originally posted by xowie
