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Maggots in corpses. He'd seen. Whitely churning, in the mouths of dead soldiers, where their noses had been, their ears and blasted-away jaws. Most o… - Joyce Carol Oates
" "Maggots in corpses. He'd seen. Whitely churning, in the mouths of dead soldiers, where their noses had been, their ears and blasted-away jaws. Most of the soldiers had been men as young as he himself had been. Italians fallen after the Austrian offensive of 1918. You do not forget such sights. You do not un-see such sights. He himself had been wounded, but he had not died. The distinction was profound. Between what lived and what died the distinction was profound. Yet it remained mysterious, elusive. You did not wish to speak of it. Especially you did not wish to pray about it, to beg God to spare you. For it disgusted him to think of God. It disgusted him to think of prayers to such a god. Fumbling his big, bare toe against the trigger of the shotgun he was damned if he would think, in his last quivering moment of his life, of God.
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About Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oates (born June 16, 1938) is an American author who has published 58 novels, plays and novellas, as well as volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. Oates taught at Princeton University from 1978 to 2014 and is the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor Emerita in the Humanities with the Program in Creative Writing. She is a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley where she teaches short fiction.
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In any case, raw aggression is thought to be the peculiar province of men, as nurturing is the peculiar province of women... The psychologist Erik Erikson discovered that, while little girls playing with blocks generally create pleasant interior spaces and attractive entrances, little boys are inclined to pile up the blocks as high as they can and then watch them fall down: "the contemplation of ruins," Erikson observes, "is a masculine specialty."
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