A Few Mystery- or Crime-related Epigrams

Monk, first panel: Remember, it’s better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.
Hagar, second panel: But I enjoy cursing the darkness!


                        ---Chris Browne, Hagar, the Horrible
                                    11/27/93


One can see only what one observes, and one observes only things which are already in the mind.


                        ---Alphonse Bertillon, French criminologist.


Mr. and Mrs. America you are wrong.  I am not the King of the Jews, nor am I a hippie cult leader.  I am what you have made of me and the mad dog devil killer fiend leper is a reflection of your society…Whatever the outcome of this madness that you call a fair trial or Christian justice, you can know this: In my mind's eye, my thoughts light fires in your cities.


                        ---Charles Manson.


According to the U.S. Department of Justice, roughly one-third of all homicides become cold.


                        ---Marilyn vos Savant,
                        Parade, Oct. 7, 2007

Two Existentialist Epigrams

Photo: Soren Kierkegaard.  Very, very awesome existentialist.  Read his Fear and Trembling and Either/Or.  Very good Wikipedia page about him, too.


A quick shout out to my writers group.  Thanks for the help Tuesday, and thanks for coming here.  You rule!

And now, because I'm in a mood caused by the fall breeze and the falling leaves, two of my favorite epigrams:

But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near;
And all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.

Andrew Marvel, "To His Coy Mistress"

We live, as we dream--alone.

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

These express one of my favorite (and most empowering, and sometimes depressing) things: existentialism.  These epigrams are not about loneliness, but they are about alone-ness.  If you're in a plane that's going down, you're going to die alone, even if you're surrounded by 200 other people.  If you understand that--if you get that you're always alone, even in a crowded room, then you get all there is to know of existentialism.

Thank You, T. & F., and Stephen King Epigrams

This will be a writing/literature-related post, but I have to break protocol by thanking T. and F. for their support today.  Bad day--bad week!--and these two friends took me out for dinner and wine, said awesome things, and overall encouraged and held me up.  What great friends!  And one of them emailed later, saying:
 

sorry to hear that you've had a crazy week...In any case, I know you are bothered by this cluster f*** but it'll pass. You are a talented, organized, dedicated, extremely knowledgeable [guy]. You need to keep that in your head and in your heart.Have a restful and worry-free weekend!

Undoubtedly, this person was kidding about the "organized" part, but still...I got by with a little help from my friends today.  Thanks, guys.  You rule.  **sniffle, sniffle**  GROUP HUG!!!

Okay, so now...How about some of my favorite Stephen King lines?  In recognition of his next book coming out on the 9th--because he SO needs my support!!!--here are some of the Stephen King keepers since 1974:

Friends come in and out of your lives like busboys in a restaurant, did you ever notice that? But when I think of that dream, the corpses under the water pulling implacably at my legs, it seems right that it should be that way. Some people drown, that’s all. It s not fair, but it happens. Some people drown.

---"The Body"/ Different Seasons

Mommy, he said thickly. How did the monster in my closet get out? Is it a dream? Is it my nap?

---Cujo.

Well, we all do what we can, and it has to be good enough. And if it isn’t good enough, it has to do.

---The Dead Zone.

So you understand that when we increase the number of variables, the axioms themselves never change.

---Rage.

He never made it out of the cock-a-doodie car!

---Misery

And my all-time favorite, which Stuttering Bill Denbrough says:

He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts.

---It.

Epigrams: From Comic Strips to Montaigne

I love epigrams, those often small obtuse statements of forced weight and thematic issues that authors use to introduce their own works.  They are the author's way of hitting their readers over their heads with the literary two by four as they scream: Do ya get it?!?  As an example, for his novel Firestarter, Stephen King uses the first line of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451: "It was a pleasure to burn."  One of the best opening lines for a novel, I think.  You just know Bradbury used that during his pitch session.  As another example, I shamelessly offer my use of comic strips to introduce my novel, Cursing the Darkness, the epigrams, prologue and first chapter of which you can find here.  Here, if you get what the monk is saying to Hagar the Horrible, you get the essence of Foster's psyche, not too far from Ahab's, in its own way, a fist clenched in hateful rebellion against the skies.

So, in that vein, today's entry starts what I hope will be a continuing series of the occasional epigram, introduced and quickly pondered.  These may or may not be famous snippets of genius; though many are very well-known, others are just favorites of mine, for reasons not always literary, but hopefully always interesting.  For every last stanza of a famous Frost poem, for example, there may be a line from Lorrie Moore, or a quote from Charles Manson.  Whatever floats my boat at the time, don't you know.  What tickles my fancy from my collection of epigrams right now is:

Writing does not cause misery, it is born of misery.--Montaigne

Rather apt for this discussion, wouldn't you say?  Stephen King also grabbed this one for his novel, Misery.  Very fitting for his own work.  A true statement, from what I've seen and studied.  In my masters class right now, it has been often remarked by the professor that 20th Century literature--specifically for this class, the short story--is borne of the writer's innate misery, whether it be loneliness, isolation, parental issues, alcoholism (another form of self-expressed misery), lousy relationships (yet another), or any thousands of other expressions of self-torment.  

We write to connect, I believe, and often that connection is a tenuous arm outstretched to an uncaring (or so it seems) society, parent, or universe.  Maybe that's the most obvious difference between writing and what some, with a bit of elitism, call literature.  Literature is an open hand that says Pull me up, but be careful that I don't instead just grab onto you and pull you down with me.  Writing, like The Da Vinci Code, let's say, is still a connection, but it's an open hand that says I hope you find this as interesting as I do, so we can connect, share a passion, and so you can make me a millionaire.  Both equally worthy, I should say, and point out that I have read the latter and find it maybe the exemplar of its type, the escapist brain candy.  And Montaigne's quote still holds: Dan Brown, one could say, reaches out to connect to his readers, the misery possibly caused by the fact that he couldn't connect his passion for (extreme revisionist) history with his family or loved ones, so he had to write them down into opaque cliffhangers and share them with us.

It's the weight of the shared or implied misery that separates writing from literature.  The ponderous, perhaps profound misery of the writer is the bridge that makes some writing literary.  There's a solid whiff of pretentiousness in that.  But that doesn't make it not so.

Besides: Of all the writers who you know, are any one of them truly happy?