"Life is like invading Russia. A blitz start, massed shakos, plumes dancing like a flustered henhouse; a period of svelte progress recorded in ebullient dispatches as the enemy falls back."
—Young Barnes, Talking It Over
"The Christian religion has lasted because it is a beautiful lie . . . . a tragedy with a happy ending"
"A man can fear his own death but what is he anyway? Simply a mass of neurons. The brain is a lump of meat and the soul is merely 'a story the brain tells itself.' Individuality is an illusion. Scientists find no physical evidence of 'self' — it is something we’ve talked ourselves into. We do not produce thoughts, thoughts produce us. 'The I of which we are so fond properly exists only in grammar.' Stripped of the Christian narrative, we gaze out on a landscape that, while fascinating, offers nothing that one could call Hope."
—Agnostic and old Barnes
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I, the grammar, had read his Talking It Over, and though I had not had a full grip with his intentions (having characters directly spewing words to the readers), I had considerable guffaws with his choices of words, his masochists' characters, and the hypocrisy evolving in the world of Gillian, Stuart, and Oliver (Have no copy of the sequel, Love, etc. yet.) And his definition of love, which my friends would vehemently argued—love is someone for you to call darling after sex (or close to that).
And the quoted material from the young Barnes, I had lifted it from my fiction class notebook (fun of doodling the lines from recently read books), professored by no other than, my admired putot teacher, for his choices of words, too, Januar Yap.
