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Nick Tosches
Mar. 28th, 2013 07:12 amWe are ready to get our quotes from Nick Tosches’s novel “Me and the Devil”. It is about an aging writer, a New Yorker. As old age and death start to bear down on him, in his late middle-age, he falls under the dark illusion that he can regain his youth and vigour through drinking the blood of his young lovers. I imagine that Tosches decided to play off the vampire theme that has been getting a lot of play in pop-culture over the last ten years or so.
In this excerpt, from early on in the novel, our protagonist is feeling his age and has fallen into a misanthropic mood. As he has his breakfast, he looks out his upper-floor window upon the bustling population of his fellow upper-middle-class denizens. It is worth bearing in mind that he is a gourmet and a fine cook.
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As I ate at the little table by the window, I looked down across the street at those who scurried to their daily servitude, with their Styrofoam cups of bitter watery coffee, their dupe’s containers of treacly Starbucks swill, their industrially dyed and flavored sugar-water “energy drinks,” their assembly line donuts, their stale rubbery bagels, their tasteless doughy croissants.
[...]
I looked down at the scurrying submissives, the divested. Some of them jostled for taxis. At this time of day, it took a lot longer to get anywhere by taxi than by subway. I figured they were too lazy to walk the few blocks to the subway station. They were fool enough to jog along the West Side Highway or on stationary treadmills, presenting a droll spectacle either way, panting toward their one true destination, which was nowhere. But they sat in taxis in traffic rather than walk, rather even than walk to the subway. Did they avoid the subway from fear of crime? Or from a fear of black people, even though they would never admit to it, even though the women they poorly paid to take care of their homes and chores and children, whom they themselves saw no more of than the designer dogs they paid others to walk for them, were invariably black? I think, in many cases, this was so. They were a funny lot, these white slaves of ignoble careers of lucrative indolence. To say that they were deserving of death would be to demean death. It would be without meaning as well, for they were in a way already dead. The jogging dead. Carbohydrate-conscious cadavers with frozen smiles of chilling insensate fake vibrancy on their dull scrubbed pampered faces. A slave who believes himself free conceives of no escape, for he conceives of no freedom beyond that which his station in life allows him. A slave who espouses the freedoms of slavery is a right good slave indeed.
-- “Me and the Devil” by Nick Tosches
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In this excerpt, from early on in the novel, our protagonist is feeling his age and has fallen into a misanthropic mood. As he has his breakfast, he looks out his upper-floor window upon the bustling population of his fellow upper-middle-class denizens. It is worth bearing in mind that he is a gourmet and a fine cook.
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
As I ate at the little table by the window, I looked down across the street at those who scurried to their daily servitude, with their Styrofoam cups of bitter watery coffee, their dupe’s containers of treacly Starbucks swill, their industrially dyed and flavored sugar-water “energy drinks,” their assembly line donuts, their stale rubbery bagels, their tasteless doughy croissants.
[...]
I looked down at the scurrying submissives, the divested. Some of them jostled for taxis. At this time of day, it took a lot longer to get anywhere by taxi than by subway. I figured they were too lazy to walk the few blocks to the subway station. They were fool enough to jog along the West Side Highway or on stationary treadmills, presenting a droll spectacle either way, panting toward their one true destination, which was nowhere. But they sat in taxis in traffic rather than walk, rather even than walk to the subway. Did they avoid the subway from fear of crime? Or from a fear of black people, even though they would never admit to it, even though the women they poorly paid to take care of their homes and chores and children, whom they themselves saw no more of than the designer dogs they paid others to walk for them, were invariably black? I think, in many cases, this was so. They were a funny lot, these white slaves of ignoble careers of lucrative indolence. To say that they were deserving of death would be to demean death. It would be without meaning as well, for they were in a way already dead. The jogging dead. Carbohydrate-conscious cadavers with frozen smiles of chilling insensate fake vibrancy on their dull scrubbed pampered faces. A slave who believes himself free conceives of no escape, for he conceives of no freedom beyond that which his station in life allows him. A slave who espouses the freedoms of slavery is a right good slave indeed.
-- “Me and the Devil” by Nick Tosches
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