The World Is the Home of Love and Death

by Brodkey, Harold

  He saw women as ugly-but-pretty—just as he was good-looking-but-repellent: there is a kind of odd stitching of sanity to be found in the embrace of reality, sanity as a style; but that isn’t what he did—his sanity was desperate, his style was powerful and riddled with fantasy. If a man is attached to his own ugliness he might substitute being in the world of yearning for the actuality of his never having been a child-object of embraces and a source of comfort once upon a time. He faked the comfort he gave. He was not pleasant. He gained a tremendous energy from this, and his mental acuity was sorely tried; he wasn’t as miserable as Moira was. This stuff represents the limits of my mind and feelings that year. I hadn’t Kellow’s gift for substitutive algebra. I figured that in him this stuff generated few emotions except for pride and a sense of what-is-appropriate and then the excited sense of what-is-not-appropriate-but-is-fascinating-anyway. I figured he felt those things strongly.

  To be honest, I have a good time mostly, but life scares me.

  If you enjoyed The World Is the Home of Love and Death, why not try …

  This Wild Darkness

  ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

  First Love and Other Sorrows

  Stories in an Almost Classical Mode

  The Runaway Soul

  Profane Friendship

  This Wild Darkness

  COPYRIGHT

  Fourth Estate

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  First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 1998

  Copyright © Ellen Brodkey 1986, 1987, 1990, 1991, 1993, 1995, 1996, 1997

  These stories originally appeared, some of them in different form, in the following publications: ‘The Bullies’(The New Yorker, 30 June 1986); ‘Spring Fugue’ (The New Yorker, 23 April 1990); What I Do For Money’ (The New Yorker, 18 October 1993); ‘Religion’ (Glimmer Train, Spring 1995); ‘Dumbness Is Everything’ The New Yorker, 7 October 1996).

  Harold Brodkey asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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  Source ISBN: 9781857028362

  Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2012 ISBN: 9780007401796

  Version: 2013–12–03

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