Common Prayer - A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals

This is the prayer book for Shane Claiborne's "new monastic" community - a Christian commune of sorts. It contains a detailed morning devotion for each day of the year, with readings from the Old Testament, New Testament and Psalms, prayers, songs, and a quote from a saint. It also contains special prayers, and outline for night devotions, and a songbook.

Perhaps what distinguishes this one from other devotional guides is the attempt to integrate into the traditional calendar of church saints, some of the more modern ones, like Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King, Doris Day, Dom Helder Câmara, Oscar Romero, and Gandhi, among others. It draws from activist and mystical strains in Christian history in a way that matches the goals of the new monastic movement itself. Even the songbook by itself is worth having.

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Quotes:

God has created an economy in which there is enough, that God has not created a world of scarcity with too many people or too little stuff. As Gandhi said, “There is enough for everyone’s need but not enough for everyone’s greed.”

One of the signs of the birthday of the church is that they ended poverty. But it was not just a systemic thing; it was a love thing.

“When I fed the poor they called me a saint, when I asked why they were poor, they called me a Communist.” (Dom Helder Câmara)

Peace is the generous, tranquil contribution of all to the good of all. Oscar Romero

Liturgy is public poetry and art.

So it is with worship. More important than whether something is old or new, winsome or classic is whether it is real.

We pledge allegiance to the Lamb : and to the kingdom for which he stands.

Desert father Abba Anthony said, “A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him saying, ‘You are mad, you are not like us.’”

“It helps, now and then, to step back and take the long view. The Kingdom is not only beyond our efforts: it is beyond our vision. We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is the Lord’s work. Nothing we do is complete, which is another way of saying that the Kingdom always lies beyond us. No sermon says all that should be said. No prayer fully expresses our faith. No confession brings perfection. No pastoral visit brings wholeness. No program accomplishes the Church’s mission. No set of goals and objectives includes everything. That is what we are about. We plant the seeds that one day will grow. We water seeds already planted knowing they hold future promise. We lay foundations that will need further development. We provide yeast that affects far beyond our capabilities. We cannot do everything and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do something, and to do it very, very well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest. We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the Master Builder and the worker. We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs. We are prophets of a future that is not our own.” (Oscar Romero)

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a twentieth-century Jesuit philosopher, prayed, “Since once again, Lord, I have neither bread nor wine nor altar, I will raise myself beyond these symbols, up to the pure majesty of the real itself; I, your priest, will make the whole earth my altar and on it will offer you all the labors and suffering of the world.”

If you have the internet or a printed calendar, it’s pretty easy to look up the date of Easter. (Or, if you want to figure it out for yourself, Easter is the first Sunday after the coming of the first full moon after the vernal equinox.)

Discontentment is a gift to the church.

As Gandhi said, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” Our invitation is to “be the change” we want to see in the church.

We shouldn’t be too surprised that the church is a mess. After all, it’s made up of people. [...]
Augustine said, “The church is a whore, but she’s our mother.”

God has died in the flesh and hell trembles with fear. He has gone to search for our first parents, as for lost sheep. Greatly desiring to visit those who live in darkness and in the shadow of death, he has gone to free from sorrow the captives Adam and Eve, he who is both God and the son of Eve.

‘All the Way to heaven is Heaven, because He said I am the Way.’” St. Catherine of Siena:

Mary Oliver’s poem “Praying” reads: It doesn’t have to be the blue iris, it could be weeds in a vacant lot, or a few small stones; just pay attention, then patch a few words together and don’t try to make them elaborate, this isn’t a contest but the doorway into thanks, and a silence in which another voice may speak.

So much of our culture is built around moving away from people rather than closer to them. [...]
We are some of the wealthiest and loneliest societies the world has ever seen. [...]
Commitment to a people and a place is one of the countercultural values at the heart of the gospel.

Letter to Diognetus, whose author is unknown: “Christians live in their own countries, but only as guests and aliens. They take part in everything as citizens and endure everything as aliens They are as poor as beggars, and yet they make many rich. They lack everything, and yet they have everything in abundance. They are dishonored, and yet have their glory in this very dishonor…. They are abused, yet they bless…. In a word: what the soul is in the body, the Christians are in the world.”

Peacemaking doesn’t mean passivity. It is the act of interrupting injustice without mirroring injustice, the act of disarming evil without destroying the evildoer, the act of finding a third way that is neither fight nor flight but the careful, arduous pursuit of reconciliation and justice. [...] As we look at history, and even as we read the Scriptures, there seems to be evidence that violence has worked at times and failed at times, just as nonviolence has worked at times and failed at times. In the end, the question is, Which looks most like Jesus? For we are called not just to be successful but to be faithful to the way of the cross, even unto death.

liturgy protects us from simply making worship into a self-pleasing act

Confessional prayer assumes that our worship takes place in a deeply flawed community. The church has always been a worrisome and dysfunctional place. But by grace we can take small steps to restore trust.

Dom Helder Camara, a twentieth-century bishop in Brazil, said, “When I feed the poor, they call me a saint, but when I ask why the poor are hungry, they call me a Communist.”

Ask your pastor to remove the US flag from the altar, or to include the flags from the other 195 countries of the world.

Like any culture, we who follow the way of Jesus have distinct ways of eating and partying, different from the culture of consumption, homogeneity, and hedonism. Our homes, our living rooms, even our parties can become places of solace and hospitality for those with addictions and struggles. But it doesn’t happen without intentionality. Dorothy Day said, “We have to create an environment where it is easier to be good.”

Andy Raine of the Northumbria Community has written, “Do not hurry as you walk with grief; it does not help the journey. Walk slowly, pausing often: do not hurry as you walk with grief. Be not disturbed by memories that come unbidden. Swiftly forgive; and let Christ speak for you unspoken words. Unfinished conversation will be resolved in him. Be not disturbed. Be gentle with the one who walks with grief. If it is you, be gentle with yourself. Swiftly forgive; walk slowly, pausing often. Take time, be gentle as you walk with grief.”

In the church, we celebrate martyrs and saints, not warriors and conquistadors.

Catholic peace activist Jim Douglass has written, “The Cold War has been followed by its twin, the War on Terror. We are engaged in another apocalyptic struggle against an enemy seen as absolute evil.

Twentieth-century peace activist A. J. Muste often said, “There is no way to peace, peace itself being the way.”

American farmer and poet Wendell Berry has written, “Sabbath observance invites us to stop. It invites us to rest. It asks us to notice that while we rest, the world continues without our help. It invites us to delight in the world’s beauty and abundance.”

Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President (Ron Suskind)

A sympathetic if mildly damning review of the first two years of Barack Obama's government, with a really wicked title, when you think of it. Con men?

The main idea is that politics and finance in the USA have become a game of confidence. The manufacturing of confidence, or the appearance of confidence divorced from competence has come to rule the "two capitals", Washington and Wall Street.

The most interesting thing for me in reading this book was to get the background on many of the recent events in American politics and finance, reading about these things and remembering having actually seen them happen. It is a good explanation as any of why President Obama was not able to fulfill his own hopes and expectations in the first two years of his reign. We follow the President from crisis to crisis as he struggles to keep his head above water while dealing not only with almost impossible political and economic troubles, but a clutch of headstrong advisers led by Larry Summers and Rahm Emanuel, who seem themselves as master puppeteers.

The book ends in a note of hope, as Obama cleans house after the mid-term "shellacking" and seems to finally figure it out, leading to a series of modest but important victories.

“I think where the evolution has taken place,” Barack Obama said finally, looking into the middle distance, “is understanding that leadership in this office is not a matter of you being confident. Leadership in this office is a matter of helping the American people feel confident.”

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Quotes:

By being himself—an alluring and inspiring self, supremely confident yet expressing humility, speaking powerfully of grabbing history’s arc and bending it toward justice—Obama became the first black president. But more and more, walking the halls of this building, he doesn’t feel like himself—someone who could bring people together, who could map common ground and, upon it, build a future.

Confidence, in fact, was Geithner’s currency. He viewed his role, then and later, as assuring confidence in the financial markets, by any means necessary, at whatever cost.

This is how financial firms die in this era. It’s not from losses, or declining revenues. It happens when they can’t roll their debts—essentially replacing old credit cards with new ones, every day.

But gazing now at Obama, who talked warmly, sympathetically, with those facing fiscal ruin, Warren couldn’t help but wonder if the country might soon have a president who would fight, really fight, for the little guy.

It all boils down to the classic Larry Summers problem: he can frame arguments with such force and conviction that people think he knows more than he does.

“A few weeks ago, John McCain said that the economy is ‘fundamentally strong,’ and a few days later George Bush said the same thing. In fact, Senator McCain has said that we made ‘great progress economically’ over the last eight years. And here’s the thing. I think they truly believe it.” (Barack Obama)

“This I know,” Obama said. “When I raise my hand and take that oath of office, I think the world will look at us differently. And millions of kids across the country will look at themselves differently.”

As was so often the case, people saw in Obama largely what they wanted to see.

Obama, after all, had selected for his top domestic officials two men whose actions had contributed to the very financial disaster they were hired to solve.

On Wall Street, any firm with compensation barriers would just have its employees stolen by a competitor who was not similarly restricted.

As the president tried to rise to the demands of his job, the White House was increasingly being directed by a back-channel union between two forceful men: Rahm Emanuel and Larry Summers.

Rahm Emanuel waited until the president was fully out of the room and then seized the floor. “Everyone shut the fuck up. Let me be clear—taking down the banking system in a program that could cost $700 billion is a fantasy.

The administration’s domestic policy was fast becoming a debate society run by Larry Summers.

Improbable combinations, blended solutions, the integrating of opposites. This was the Obama method, in his life and in his work. But he hadn’t gotten elected simply to search for this clever version of the middle ground. He’d been elected at a time of peril to change the country’s course.

he missed some opportunities to show that America hadn’t necessarily gone from a country that makes things to one that makes things up

Confidence is the public face of competence. Separating the two—gaining the trust without earning it—is the age-old work of confidence men.

“I mean it,” Summers stressed. “We’re home alone. There’s no adult in charge. Clinton would never have made these mistakes.”

The Tea Party movement, fueled by Fox News, rose out of the heartland and spread. Talk of “death panels,” another brilliant bit of rhetorical mischief from the Republican Party, dominated the airwaves. Obama and his surrogates spent much of July trying to wash the smell of death panels off their skin like someone who’d been in a bad run-in with a skunk.

moving from partnerships to publicly traded corporations in the early 1980s—allowing partners to take their money off the table and replace it with other people’s money, thereby severing the bonds of caution and shared risk—marked the moment Wall Street started to grow into a destructive force

The Obama presidency didn’t end in the fall of 2009, but it came close.

If there was, in fact, a single operational victory in this period, it involved secrecy: the strife inside the White House was largely kept from public view. Rather than the Cheney-driven secrecy models of the Bush days—where cell phones were White House–issue and where problematic phone numbers, such as those of major newspapers, were regularly searched through shadow directories—the Obama secrecy was born of old-fashioned loyalty.

The dilemma, at that juncture, had two edges. Do anything necessary, at any cost, to win Massachusetts; and use the threat of a loss, and the loss of the filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, to get an emergency reconciliation, in a matter of days, of the two competing health care bills. The White House did neither.

By early 2010 the banks had, in fact, notched their easiest victory in years by simply lending that fresh Fed money back to the planet’s largest, safest, and still hungriest customer for debt: the U.S. government itself.

while investing in America is passé—returns are much better overseas—anticipating U.S. regulatory moves and trading accordingly is one of America’s signature growth industries

Like so many other disasters in this period, the [BP Gulf of Mexico] spill was the result of executives pushing themselves to the very edge of legal limits, and then beyond, in the name of short-term profit.

Both Presidents Roosevelt—one Republican, the other Democrat—would have said, if they could still walk upright, that government should not be a friend of business; that business can take care of itself; and that government has more important work to do, to carry forward the “greatest good for the greatest number.”

what Voigtman had just described to Gensler went far beyond the prudent hedging of downside risk. It was Goldman building customized weapons to take advantage of a unique, once-in-a-lifetime market-driven disaster that no one could have foreseen. No one except someone who had helped construct it, by providing the “liquidity” of a burgeoning menu of short-side products, to sate all the “upside” thirst in the world.

Those amendments, complex and esoteric to the passive onlooker, were all variations on the same melody: how to prevent the systemic risk of “too big to fail.”
[...]
One by one, in spite of bipartisan support, they had all failed.

GDP or unemployment rates—imperfect measurements to start with—are often quietly changed several months after their news cycle-driving “release” has already had a profound effect on politics, public statements, quickly fashioned policies, and, by association, public confidence.

If the election had proven anything, it was that American politics were still a realm of striking volatility. Obama had fallen from historic highs to crushing defeat in just two short years. But it was also a reminder that, from now on, anything could happen.

Nearly 30 percent of Medicare costs are spent on end-of-life care, a stunning figure considering that most beneficiaries arrive into Medicare at sixty-five and the average life expectancy is seventy-nine. In the last year of life, covered medical costs average nearly $30,000.

I, like many Americans, felt a surge of pride when an African American was elected president. It took some time for me to see him simply as a man, with the full complement of gifts and faults, occupying the White House.

The Water Is Wide (Pat Conroy)

One of the best books i've read this year. A powerful, honest account of trying hard to help people against impossible odds, and the growing that came with it.

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Quotes:

I was becoming convinced that the world was a colorful, variegated grab bag full of bastards.

The children were subdued, passive, and exceedingly polite. [...] It was a yes-sir, no-sir world I had entered. [...] On Mrs. Brown’s desk was an item that caught and held my eye. It was a leather strap, smooth and very thick.

Only a thoroughbred do-gooder can appreciate the feeling, the roseate, dawnlike, and nauseating glow that enveloped me on the return trip that day. I had found a place to absorb my wildest do-gooding tendency.

I know colored people better than you do. That’s because I am one myself. You have to keep your foot on them all the time. Step on them. Step on them every day and keep steppin’ on them when they gets out of line. If you have any trouble, Mama Brown will be right next door.

Sweet little Jesus, I thought, as I weaved between the desks, these kids don’t know crap.

“I slop de hog. I feed de cow. I feed two dog. I go to Savannah on the boat.”

“Have you ever heard of the United States of America?” I asked. “Oh, yeh,” Mary, one of the eighth-grade girls said. “I heared it. I heared it in I pledge a legent to the flag of United States of America.”

Among the peoples of the world I am not universally admired for the bell-like clarity of my diction. Words slide out of my mouth like fat fish.

“Saul,” I intoned, trying to sound like a miniature Yahweh.

Christ must do a lot of puking when he reflects upon the good works done in his name.

“Good Christian people” was the most cynical epithet in Zeke’s repertoire. He and Ida had been very active members of the local Baptist church until the congregation voted to close the church if a nigger ever tried to attend a service. Zeke and Ida simply never went back after that.

One attribute made this house a palace on Yamacraw. It possessed a shiny, glistening white commode, a treasure of inestimable value and an invention that overshadows the wheel as necessary for man’s comfort and convenience.

One noteworthy thing about South Carolina is the quality of school-bus drivers in the state. To qualify for a bus license one must have reached puberty and be able to recite the alphabet without stuttering.

parables of love and Jesus sung by a blue-eyed mother, a renegade Baptist, a converted Catholic, a soldier of the Lord

I could hear some white voice coming from some collective unconscious deep within me saying, “They don’t know any better. They are happy this way.” Yet all around me, in the grinning faces of my students, I could see a crime, so ugly that it could be interpreted as a condemnation of an entire society, a nation be damned, a history of wickedness—these children before me did not have a goddam chance of sharing in the incredible wealth and affluence of the country that claimed them, a country that failed them, a country that needed but did not deserve deliverance.

life was good, but it was hard; we would prepare to meet it head on, but we would enjoy the preparation

Richie Matta, whose career sparked brightly then faded like memory when he left the Delta, made his comeback and made it big with eighteen kids on Yamacraw Island.

It took me a long time but I soon became aware of an underlying, pervasive fixation for violence among the people of the island.

Of course, I understood very well why people drank on the island. It was the single form of entertainment, the social medium that bound the island together, the only sport, the only recreation, the focal point of island activity.

Yet I worried that I did things more by instinct than by logic and would be hard-pressed to explain why I let the twins mold clay when their literacy was questionable, except that they seemed to enjoy it.

And in that single moment I realized something very important. Piedmont could not scare me. Nor could Bennington. Nor could the assembled board of education in all its measly glory. For in crossing the river twice daily I had come closer to more basic things.

His power was economic and emotional, not spiritual or supernatural. Compared to the river that flowed even as we stared sullenly at each other, Piedmont was a nothing and so was I.

My friends were a strange conglomerate of long-hairs, Marines, and the attractive wives of powerful husbands.

On June 30, 1970, before mother, wife, and friends, Conrack let the bastards have it.

I do not react well to crisis. My first thought was to race over to Piedmont’s house, knock at his door, and put a fist against his jaw.

I learned that politicians are not supposed to help people. They simply listen to people, nod their heads painfully, commiserate at proper intervals, promise to do all they can, and then do nothing.

Conrack discovered that afternoon, much to his dismay, that he had a bit of demagogue in him.

In essence, I tried to teach them to embrace life openly, to reflect upon its mysteries, rejoice in its surprises, and to reject its cruelties. Like other teachers, I failed. Teaching is a record of failures. But the glory of teaching is in the attempt.

SO CONRACK, defrocked and slightly dishonored, retired to his room to write about his year on Yamacraw.

I saw the necessity of living and accepting bullcrap in my midst.

To survive in the future I would have to learn the complex art of ass-kissing, that honorable American custom that makes the world go ’round. Survival is the most important thing. As a bona fide ass-kisser, I might lose a measure of self-respect, but I could be teaching and helping kids.

I also saw that Piedmont and Bennington were not evil men. They were just predictably mediocre.

They did not feel the need for redemption, because they had already been redeemed.

Great Expectations (Charles Dickens)

I enjoyed reading this book with Laura. The reason we picked it was because it was one of the books the librarian recommends to Matilda in the Roald Dahl book. I was pleasantly surprised, especially by the excellent characters. The plot is full of twists and unpredictable. I'm glad we read it.

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Quotes:

I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be right, as I had been too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be wrong.

And it were my intentions to have had put upon his tombstone that Whatsume’er the failings on his part, Remember reader he were that good in his hart.”

And the communication I have got to make is, that he has great expectations.

The Canterbury Tales - a retelling (Peter Ackroyd, Geoffrey Chaucer))

A readable rendering of the tales in prose. My first reading of the Canterbury Tales. Good stuff!

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Quotes:

When the soft sweet showers of April reach the roots of all things, refreshing the parched earth, nourishing every sapling and every seedling, then humankind rises up in joy and expectation.

After the waste of winter it is delightful to hear birdsong once more in the streets. The trees themselves are bathed in song. It is a time of renewal, of general restoration.

On our way to Canterbury each of you will tell two stories. As every traveller knows, tales shorten journeys. Then on the way back to London, each pilgrim will tell two more. [...] The pilgrim who tells the best story, by common consent, will be awarded a free supper paid for by the rest.

‘Why do so many people complain of the actions of providence, or the decisions of God Himself, when their eventual fate is better than any they could possibly have imagined? Some men long for riches, but at the expense of their health and even of their lives. Some men desire to escape from prison, as I once did, only to be murdered in the households of their kin. In hope and ambition there lie infinite harms. We do not know the answers to our prayers.

We fare as one who wanders drunk through the streets; he knows that he has a house, somewhere, but he cannot remember the name of the street. His is a long and wayward journey. So do we fare in this fallen world. We search for felicity down every lane and alley, but often enough we take the wrong path.

‘The whole world is an inn,’ our Host said. ‘And the end of the journey is always the same.’

His wife came from a noble family, and her father was the parson of the town.

I really do not know a tale that Geoffrey Chaucer has not already told.

I hope that none of you priests and nuns will be angry with me, but I must say this. We have been given our private parts for pleasure as well as necessity. We must procreate as well as pee, within the limits set by God.

So I tell you all this. You must pay for what you want. Everything in this world is for sale. An empty hand lures no hawk.

F--- you, Friar!

That is why there are no more fairies. The friars now tread upon the elvish paths, morning and evening, saying their matins and their other holy offices; where there were once pixies there are now prayers. Of course a woman can feel much safer, knowing that there won’t be an evil spirit beneath a bush or tree. She may meet a friar, of course. But he will take only her chastity, not her soul.

There is one thing I can say for certain, sirs and dames. If two lovers want to remain in love, they had better accede to each other’s wishes. Love will not be constrained by domination.

Patience is a great virtue and, as the scholars tell us, will accomplish what the exercise of power never can achieve.

Many sermons, and devotional homilies, spring from bad intentions.

You know well enough that a woman wants six things. I am no different. She wants a husband to be healthy and wise, wealthy and generous; she wants him to be obedient to his wife, and good in bed. Just those six things. Is that too much to ask?

Forgive me, Mr Chaucer. I must speak my mind. Your story is not worth a s---. What is the point of it?

I am tired of stories about patient wives. They do not exist.

‘Well, sir,’ our Host said to the Nun’s Priest. ‘Blessed be your bum and balls!

‘One Lord. One faith. One God. One Christendom. One father who rules over heaven and earth.’

Do you see how this villain lured his prey? He granted the priest a favour the priest had not asked for. That kind of favour bodes no good.

But all precautions are useless. A good wife, innocent in thought and deed, should not be watched or doubted; if the wife is not so good, you cannot hold her down. I take it as a law that you cannot restrain a woman who wants to roam. Every writer concurs on that subject.

In the same way there is no difference between a usurping tyrant and a thief or outlaw. They are exactly the same. Alexander the Great was once told that a tyrant who burns down homes, slaughters his enemies and destroys land is acclaimed as a great general and leader; a small-time thief who does not have armies, and who can only rob a few houses without doing much damage, is damned as a rogue and criminal.

So take heed of this story and remember to think before you speak. Guard your tongue. Never tell a man that his wife has been unfaithful to him. Whether you are right or wrong, he will hate you for it.

The Last Werewolf (Glen Duncan)

A pretty nasty book with "guilty pleasure" written all over it. One can feel the catharsis the author must have had when writing this. In the end a pretty good book if you can stand the nastiness, which is, i realize, more or less the point. In a world where morality has been transcended, questions of good and evil keep popping up at inconvenient times. Can true love really exist between werewolves? And what would Buffy do?

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Quotes:

In Buffy there’d be a howlers’ singles bar or dating agency. Not in the real world.

Two nights ago I’d eaten a forty-three-year-old hedge fund specialist. I’ve been in a phase of taking the ones no one wants.

I knew—it was passed from him to me, the old dull divine truth—that no ecstatic union compares with killing the thing you love.

You don’t know what you’ve been waiting for until it arrives. We froze. She looked into my eyes. She said, “It’s you.”

I could never have not loved her without becoming someone else. But I had become someone else.

At the true end of life one doesn’t care how one’s come to death. I wasn’t Jacob, or her husband, or her killer, or a monster; I was just the thing that had unlocked the door.

In fact let me deal with this as straightforwardly as possible: Werewolves and vampires don’t get on.

Half the “reconstruction” contracts for postwar Iraq went on no-bids to vampire-owned companies (whose funding favours, dear President Obama, the Republicans will be calling in about now).

He stood in the kitchen doorway, a lean pug-faced young vampire in combat trousers and leather bike jacket with eyebrow piercings and bleached white hair cropped close to his skull, holding a bulky rifle.

You think horror enters spectacularly. It doesn’t. It just prosaically turns up.

being forced into something when all I wanted was nothing

You love life because life’s all there is, Harley had insisted. There’s no God and that’s His only Commandment.

Ellis’s money was on guilt, conscience, responsibility—mine. Grainer’s was on eye-for-an-eye vengeance—mine. New and Old Testaments respectively.

READER, I ATE HIM.

You pull your trousers on and everything seems fractionally less desperate.

Only meaning can make a difference and we all know there’s no meaning. All stories express a desire for meaning, not meaning itself. Therefore any difference knowing the story makes is a delusion.

Humanity’s getting its metamorphic kicks elsewhere these days. When you can watch the alchemy that turns morons into millionaires and gimps into global icons, where’s the thrill in men who turn into wolves?

The greatest gift of lycanthropy is knowing smoking won’t kill you.

We found ways. This is the story, the human story, the werewolf story, the life story: One finds ways.

“It got easier,” I said. “It’s easier than ever now, if you’ve got money. It’s always money.

Somewhere in the sex was the understanding that love was among other things making room for the beloved’s irrational vengeances.

Money’s not legal tender in the moral world.

Evil has to be chosen.

His consciousness was like a lethal ocean undertow. Before you knew it you were in colder water, miles from shore.

Absurdistan: A Novel (Gary Shteyngart)

Beautiful book, at turns funny and sad, reminds me of Daniel Pinkwater. This one is not for young readers, though. Can one person change the world? Will the overweight clueless antihero find happiness? Delivered with astute social comentary that skewers both sides of the iron curtain, Jews, Gentiles and Halliburton (Golly Burton). With a chilling reference to "9/11" thrown in with extreme nonchalance.

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Quotes:

This is a book about love. [...]
This is also a book about too much love. It’s a book about being had. [...]
This is a book about love. But it’s also a book about geography.

capitalist iconography (cigarette ads featuring an American football player catching a hamburger with a baseball mitt)

This is what happens when you don’t learn English, by the way. You’re always at a loss for words.

“If you want to be a Russian,” Svetlana told my friend, “you have to think of what kind of image you want to project. Everyone already thinks we’re bandits and whores. We’ve got to rebrand ourselves.”

Papa. I’m stuck in this horrible country because you killed a businessman from Oklahoma, and all I can do is remember how you once were; to commemorate the life of a near-saint, this is the burden of your only child.

I naturally settled my gaze on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, those emblematic honeycombed 110-story giants that glowed white gold in the afternoon sun. They looked to me like the promise of socialist realism fulfilled, boyhood science fiction extended into near-infinity.

See, when you’re cultured, being middle class is enough.

It was a shtetl funeral, in many ways, a kind of impromptu klezmer act minus the musical instruments.

I’ll always associate self-laundered socks with democracy and the primacy of the middle class.

Let me give you an idea of this Jerry Shteynfarb. He had been a schoolmate of mine at Accidental College, a perfectly Americanized Russian émigré (he came to the States as a seven-year-old) who managed to use his dubious Russian credentials to rise through the ranks of the Accidental creative writing department and to sleep with half the campus in the process. After graduation, he made good on his threat to write a novel, a sad little dirge about his immigrant life, which seems to me the luckiest kind of life imaginable. I think it was called The Russian Arriviste’s Hand Job or something of the sort. The Americans, naturally, lapped it up.

I was having some kind of Dostoyevsky moment. I wanted to redeem everyone in sight.

Whatever you may think of Judaism, Lyuba, in the end it’s just a codified system of anxieties. It’s a way to keep an already nervous and maligned people in check.

Words have consequences.

I tried to go to sleep, but there was nothing to dream about, except the usual Eastern European nonsense about a man sailing an inflatable Fanta bottle around the world looking for happiness.

Everything has its limits!

I turned to the window to watch our plane follow the curves of the Danube as the orderly Austrian houses with their peaked roofs and backyard swimming pools turned into the housing projects surrounding the stumpy castle of Bratislava, Slovakia, which in turn gave way to the melancholy buildup of Budapest

A passing T-62 had begun to rotate its barrel our way, like a slow child trying to make friends.

I put on a pair of gigantic square sunglasses and slipped into my roomiest vintage tracksuit, the one that prodded my stomach forward and held it prominently in place, so that altogether I resembled the infamous North Korean playboy Kim Jong Il. It was time, as Dr. Levine would say, to go for a walk.

“Think one person can change the world, Misha?” he said at last. “Yes,” I said. “I really do. Do you?”

Who would I like to be when I grew up? This was a question that haunted people of my generation well into their forties.

Like any empire in decline, ours was becoming ever more brilliant at knocking things apart, at raising palls of smoke over cratered school yards and charred market stalls.

Even among the most thoroughly secular and unaffiliated young Jews, the Holocaust enjoys great name recognition.

I thought I was Differrent and had a Special Story to tell but I guess I’m not and I dont.

The towers that had risen over the city as a watermark of Euro-American civilization were work hives and nothing more. As quickly as they had been put together, they could be taken apart.

“I know a fairy tale,” the girl said in her syrupy little girl’s voice. “It’s about a fishee that gets caught in the sea and then the fisherman plucks the fishee’s eyes out so she can’t swim back, and then he cuts her stomach open to take out the caviar—”

“I am very honored,” he said. “The Jewish people have a long and peaceful history in our land. They are our brothers, and whoever is their enemy is our enemy also. When you are in Absurdsvanï, my mother will be your mother, my wife your sister, and you will always find water in my well to drink.”

“We’re not required to love it,” Dror said of Israel. “Just to make sure it exists.”

‘Think Bosnia’ became everyone’s motto. ‘How can we make this place more like Bosnia?’ I mean, you’ve got to hand it to Halliburton. If Joseph Heller were still alive, they’d probably ask him to be on their board.”

Good morning, respected passenger! Today is Monday, September 10, 2001

You’ve done me wrong, Rouenna. It’s okay. I’ll do you wrong, too. I can’t change the world, much less myself. But I know that we are not meant to live apart.

Oh, my sweet endless Rouenna. Have faith in me. On these cruel, fragrant streets, we shall finish the difficult lives we were given.