American Appetites by Joyce Carol Oates

excerpts from American Appetites by Joyce Carol Oates, 1989 Harper & Row

p6

Though he never admitted it in public, but spoke of it readily enough in private, to his friends, Ian had always thought it rather terrifying that unrelated individuals, wholly unaware of one another, nonetheless cooperated in a collective destiny

p7

…they were, like Ian McCullogh, successes “in their fields,” well into middle age yet “still youthful,” comfortably well off beyond all dreams and expectations of graduate-student days yet still “ambitious”—though ambitious for what, none could have said.

p12

Ian, whose energy was drained by his work, whose imagination floundered when confronted by the mere prospect of cultivating a new friend, envied Glynnis both her will and her ability; …

p27

He had been a scared boy of twenty-two, skinny and round-shouldered and chronically perplexed, overworked in his graduate studies and exhausted by self-imposed deadlines and tyrannical dreams of perfection, prematurely weary of living, like a creature in whom spasms of life articulate themselves even as the creature sinks, ebbs, dies, like a pebble tossed carelessly into a pond: its very weight, its quidditas, dooming it to extinction.

p115

But he too had lost weight; his clothes felt pleasantly loose on him, like a stranger’s. The feeling seemed to him penitential and therefore beneficent.

p116

He had studied American political history as if reading a long, lurid, clamorous novel in which self-proclaiming figures contended, each isolated from the other yet citizens of the same enormous landscape. The American continent was large enough to absorb all, yet not so large not to be domesticated.

p133

She wondered why the soul could not make its own way after death, why it required a guide.  Why reincarnation—returning to the phenomenal world, getting born again, and again—must always be hell.

p137

And his voice trailed off, weak, faltering, for he seemed not to know what he meant to say (Ian had of late fallen into his old habit of failing to complete sentences, a mannerism of speech from which Glynnis had presumably weaned him, an infuriating habit, he knew, for it left his listeners waiting expectantly, never quite certain if he meant to continue or if, in fact, he had stopped)…

p174

Time was a sea in which a single enormous wave moved relentlessly forward, not bearing men and women along but simply passing through them.

Ian gave up the search within an hour. Glynnis’s things in her absence had become—mere things.

p179

Now he was posthumous; his life contained no future.

p184

“They look flat , too,” Ian continued. “But then, I suppose, if you look at objects hard enough, people as well, they begin to go flat. Into two dimensions.”

p210

He could not have said why he’d felt the need to escape the conference, why the desperation to flee that happy milling gregarious place where his hand was shaken at every turn, and warm wishes and congratulations heaped upon him: the fruition of his dream as a young ambitious scholar, hungry for advancement, praise, the adulation of his peers. But he’d felt impatient, restless, his nerves abraded by the sound of his won name: particularly in the mouths of strangers. It seemed to him that his life was being stolen from him, his blood drained from him drop by drop, and in its place…

p239

“…And you?—yes—you have bifocals don’t you? In my case it’s something else, as if, now and then, the light and color drained out of things, I keep glancing up at the sky, or an eclipse. Then there is a glowering hazy light, this light in fact, as if a photograph were overexposed. A scrim of bubbles, sparks, emptinesses, like black holes—except they are filled with light, blinding light, and not…nothing. I’m on the stairs and suddenly the stairs disappear, and I reach for the railing that both is and is not there; not that I stumble, exactly, because ninety percent of my life is automatic; I’m on automatic pilot like most of us, I suppose; but I know, and it’s disconcerting. When I read there sometimes seem to be patches of blank on the page, that are filled in, slowly, with words; or, if I manage to read quickly enough, at my usual pace, I can keep ahead of the patches of blank. Even my dreams are affected, sometimes,” Denis said, laughing, “fading out, blanking out, dissolving to nothing. Have you ever heard of anything more absurd?”

Ian said, “But didn’t the optometrist refer you to a—“

“Oh, yes. Of course. An ophthalmologist. I’ll see the bastard after Labor Day. But I doubt he’ll be able to help me.”

“Why do you say that?”

Denis shrugged loftily. “It’s a feeling I have.”

p275

…as Vaughn led them through his “poetics of space,” a magnum opus of some thousand pages, still in progress, of course, a work entirely visual in concept yet, here and there, amplified by words; but the words, at least to Ian’s confused eye, were of no language he knew: rather like hieroglyphics. Buildings…landscapes…cities…”temporal dimension”…”spatial hypotheses”: the drawings were architectural in execution yet fantastical in conception, elaborate—indeed, dizzyingly elaborate—composed of numberless fine filose lines, like a spider’s web. 

p275

The problem of course was that he did not know when it would be complete, or if. “A posthumous celebrity would be a melancholy thing,” he said slowly, in so neutral a tone that Ian thought he must be joking, and laughed; as Meika did, fairly dissolving in a spasm of giggles. She pinched her husbands’s ruddy cheek and said,” A posthumous celebrity is better than no celebrity, isn’t it? Just as nouveau riche, like us is a fucking lot better than no riche. Isn’t it!”

p301

The most articulate of these witnesses was a young woman friend of Sigrid Hunt’s who had attended dance classes with her in Manhattan, years ago, and was now, like Hunt, an ex-dancer “on the fringes of the dance world”: living in SoHo and working as a waitress in a Seventh Avenue jazz club. 

p331

They were talking about Maine, and the end of summer, and how abruptly, in this northerly climate, the summer would end: in another few days, in fact. “The seasons careen by more quickly all the time, don’t they,” Denis said, sighing. “It’s exactly as our elders told us: time accelerates near the point of impact. It really does.”

“Yet time is theoretically reversible,” Ian said. He had been silent for so long, the others looked at him as if he were obliged to say something crucial. “The mechanics of the cosmos, it’s said, can run as easily backward as forward, in the universes of both Newton and Einstein; the past and the future are allegedly fixed. But I have never understood this, and though I’ve had physicists explain it to me, I have never had the impression that they understood it either….”