It is the occupation of politicians to deny this ubiquity, nay, universality of corroded hearts, to discount the barren laboriousness of all paths. R… - William T. Vollmann

Death is ordinary. Behold it, subtract its patterns and lessons from those of the death that weapons bring, and maybe the residue will show what violence is.

How free am I? Don’t I skulk like a rat through trainyards? Don’t I doze in boxcars with my boots on and without a sleeping bag, so that I can disappear more quickly when emergency strikes? Don’t I long for my train to move? How I love shadow-shows! Particularly beguiling is the way that freeway overpasses fill a rushing boxcar’s doorway with silhouetted diagonals. Do I love shadows because I fear the third dimension? Am I a writer and a printmaker in an effort to control my perception of the world by constricting it to my level? And aren’t all these questions, which rush through my mind and depart unanswered, nothing but shadow-shows themselves?

As for my father, his epoch was the heyday of the Organization Man, and he respected rules, hierarchies and technocratic methods more than he knew; he simply happened to be good enough to make some of the rules.