Rabbit at Rest

He could have gone over that night and faced the music but how much music is a man supposed to face?

The smell of good advice always makes Rabbit want to run the other way.

No matter how hard you climb, there are always the rich above you, who got there without effort. Lucky stiffs, holding you down, making you discontent so you buy more of the crap advertised on television.

"Tell me, Nelson, I'm just curious. How does it feel to have smoked up your parents' house in crack?"

[Harry listening to car radio] ...he resents being made to realise, this late, that the songs of his life were as moronic as the rock the brainless kids now feed on, or the Sixties and Seventies stuff that Nelson gobbled up – all of it designed for empty heads and overheated hormones, an ocean white with foam, and listening to it now is like trying to eat a double banana split the way he used to. It's all disposable, cooked up to turn a quick profit. They lead us down the garden path, the music manufacturers, then turn around and lead the next generation down with a slightly different flavour of glop.

One thing he knows is if he had to give parts of his life back the last thing he'd give back is the fucking.

[coming away from the doctor's after a check-up] Get interested is the advice, but in truth you are interested in less and less. It's Nature's way.

Once when Harry asked Ed why they didn't go back to Toledo, Ed looked at him with that smartass squint and asked, "You ever been to Toledo?"

...he tries to view his life as a brick of sorts, set in place with a slap in 1933 and hardening ever since, just one life in rows and walls and blocks of lives.

Hard to believe God is always listening, never gets bored.

Late in the game as it is, you keep trying.

[Harry, to Nelson] "Don't forget, there's a Depression coming."

[Harry, talking about the doctor who came to the ward and then went away.] "That guy has a thing about potato chips and hot dogs. If God didn't want us to eat salt and fat, why did He make them taste so good?"

Life is a hill that gets steeper the more you climb.

"...Nelson'll be thirty-three in a couple of months." He thinks it would be a waste of breath, and maybe offensive, to explain to Mr Shimada that at that same age Jesus Christ was old enough to be crucified and redeem mankind.

[Nelson] "...One nice thing about Florida, it makes Pennsylvania look unspoiled."

In show business you learn to let it slide off your back. You know, fuck 'em. Otherwise you'd kill yourself.

Not his problem. Fewer and fewer things are.

Weeds don't know they're weeds.

[At news that Nelson got himself a counsellor] Harry feels a jealous, resentful pang. His boy is being taken over. His fatherhood hasn't been good enough. They're calling in the professionals.

[re a woman on TV on 'Wheel of Fortune'] She makes you proud to be a two-legged mammal.

When you feel irresistable, you're hard to resist.

[about the past, and Mary Ann, before Harry went to do his two years in the army] Maybe she sensed something about him. A loser. Though at eighteen he looked like a winner.

She closes her eyes and wordlessly thinks of all the misery sex has caused the world...

"Who wants to fish, if you're halfway civilised? Dangling some dead meat in front of some poor brainless thing and then pulling him up by a hook in the roof of his mouth? Cruellest thing people do is fish."

Mim has hung up. She has a life to get on with.

Something about being helpless in bed, people hit you up for sympathy. They've got you where they want you.

[Pru] "...He's still trying to work out what you two did to him, as if you were the only parents in the world who didn't keep wiping their kid's ass until he was thirty. I tell him: Get real, Nelson. Lousy parents are par for the course. My God. Nothing's ideal."

Women are actresses, tuning their part to each little audience.

You can't say anything honest to women, they have minds like the FBI.

His wife is, it occurs to Harry, a channel that can't be switched. The same slightly too-high forehead, the same dumb stubborn slot of a mouth, day after day, same time, same station.

[Harry having drawn at golf] The shape of his collapse clings to him. Who says the universe isn't soaked in disgrace?

There's more to being a human being than having your own way.

[A grandchild barely able to remember Harry's own mother] But can Ma be no more than that in this child's memory? Do we dwindle so fast to next to nothing?

...a sense of defeat the years have brought back to him, after what seemed for a while to be triumphs.

Charlie interrupts impatiently, "Pain is where it's at for punks. Mutilation, self-hatred, slam dancing. For these kids today, ugly is beautiful. That's their way of saying what a lousy world we're giving them. No more rain forests. Toxic waste. You know the drill."

Rabbit feels as if the human race is a vast colourful jostling bristling parade in which he is limping and falling behind.

When she was a girl nobody had money but people had dreams.

[Nelson, to Harry] "...I keep feeling hassled."

He didn't have a worry in the world back then. He was in paradise and didn't know it.

[Judy, 8, is watching TV] He tells Judy, "Better pack it in, sweetie. Another big day tomorrow: we're going to go to the beach and sailing." But his voice comes out listless, and perhaps that is the saddest loss time brings, the lessening of excitement about anything.

...he feels a stifling uselessness in things, a kind of atomic decay whereby the precious glowing present turns, with each tick of the clock, into the leaden slag of history.

[Re Florida] Just not being senile is considered great down here.

"Things change," says Mr Shimada. "Is world's sad secret."

[Thelma] "...We're too old to keep being foolish."

...the Japanese interest him professionally. How do they and the Germans do it, when America's going down the tubes?

He supposes they pretty much have the picture. Most people do, in life. People know more than they let on.

[Nelson] "...I get none of the things a man's supposed to get from a wife."

God's country. He could have made it smaller and still made the same point.

"The papers exaggerate. They exaggerate everything, just to sell papers. The government exaggerates, to keep our minds off what morons they are."

[Thelma] "...You make your own punishments in life, I honest to God believe that. You get exactly what you deserve. God sees to it."

He learned this much selling cars: offer the customer something he doesn't want, to make what he half-wants look better.

..."That disease he has does an awful job on you. Your lungs fill up."

Charlie asks her for a Perrier with lime. She says that San Pellegrino is what they have. He says it's all the same to him. Fancy water is fancy water.

"...This is a hideous thing. None of us will ever be the same."

[Mr Shimada] "Toyota does not enjoy bad games prayed with its ploduct."

[re the human heart] That little electric twitch: without it we're so much rotting meat.

[Harry to Janice, about the financial situation] "...You're in real trouble."

Women: you never know which side they want to dance on.

Your children's losing battle with time seems even sadder than your own.

[Pru, to Harry] She tells him, "You were one of the things I liked about Nelson. Maybe I thought Nelson would grow into somebody like you."

This is the last night when he is nowhere. Tomorrow, life will find him again.

[Dr Breit] "It's irrational, but so's the human species."

A woman you've endured such a gnawing of desire for, you can't help bearing a little grudge against, when the ache is gone.

There is very little thanks in history. Dog eat dog.

Now nuns have blended into everybody else or else faded away. Vocations drying up, nobody wants to be selfless any more, everybody wants their fun. No more nuns, no more rabbis. No more good people, waiting to have their fun in the afterlife. The thing about the afterlife, it kept this life within bounds somehow, like the Russians. Now there's just Japan, and technology, and the profit motive, and getting all you can while you can.

[at the hospital, Janice speaking to Dr Olman in Harry's presence in the ward] "What's wrong with his heart, exactly?" Janice asks.

But the fast lane too gets to be a rut.

[Mr Shimada, a Toyota bigwig, visiting the lot] "Young people now most interesting," he decides to say. ""Not scared of starving as through most human history. Not scared of atom bomb as until recently. But scared of something – not happy. In Japan, too. Brue jeans, rock music not make happiness enough. In former times, in Japan, very simple things make men happy. Moonright on fish pond at certain moment. Cricket singing in bamboo grove. Very small things bring very great feering. Japan a rittle ireand country, must make do with very near nothing. Not rike endless China, not rike U.S. No oiru wells, no great spaces. We have only our people, their disciprine. Riving now five years in Carifornia, it disappoints me, the rack of disciprine in people of America. [...] In war, people need disciprine. Not just in war. Peace a kind of war also. We fight now not Americans and British but Nissan, Honda, Ford. Toyota agency must be a prace of disciprine, a prace of order.

[Harry, to Thelma, about Janet] "She never really figured out how the world is put together but she's still working at it."

You don't know what you don't know.

...there ought to be a law that we change identities and families every ten years or so.

This airport has been designed with big windows viewing the runways, so if there's a crash everybody can feast upon it with their own eyes. The fireball, the fuselage doing a slow skidding twirl, shedding its wings.

"...Cocaine. The stuff is everywhere."

"Whenever somebody tells me to do something my instinct's always to do the opposite. It's got me into a lot of trouble, but I've had a lot of fun."

When you're retired, you get into your routines and other people, even so-called loved ones, become a strain.

"...If you could ever get the poor to vote in this country, you'd have socialism. But people want to think rich. That's the genius of the capitalist system: either you're rich, or you want to be, or you think you ought to be."

There had been a lot of death in the newspapers lately. [...] and then before Christmas that Pan Am Flight 103 ripping open like a rotten melon five miles above Scotland and dropping all these bodies and flaming wreckage all over the golf course and the streets of this little town like Glockamorra, what was its real name, Lockerbie. Imagine sitting there in your seat being lulled by the hum of the big Rolls-Royce engines and the stewardesses bringing the clinking drinks caddy and the feeling of having caught the plane and nothing to do now but relax and then with a roar and a giant ripping noise and scattered screams this whole cozy world dropping away and nothing under you but black space and your chest squeezed by the terrible unbreathable cold, that cold you can scarcely believe is there but that you sometimes actually feel still packed into the suitcases, stored in the unpressurised hold, when you unpack your clothes, the dirty underwear and beach towels with the merciless chill of death from outer space still in them. [...] Those bodies with hearts pumping tumbling down in the dark. How much did they know as they fell, through air dense like tepid water, tepid gray like this terminal where people blow through like dust in an air duct, to the airline we're all just numbers on the computer, one more or less, who cares? A blip on the screen, then no blip on the screen. Those bodies tumbling down like wet melon seeds.

"I mean," he says, "how the hell do you think it feels? Sitting there and having the plane explode?"

Figure out where you're going before you go there: he was told that a long time ago.

"Driving is boring," Rabbit pontificates, "but it's what we do. Most of American life is driving somewhere and then driving back wondering why the hell you went."