an·​oth·​er coun·​try

excerpts from the tragic & rough-edged book that inspired reckless:

It’s not possible to forget anybody you’ve destroyed.

51

Vivaldo said, "Maybe you should stay here, Rufus, for a couple of days, until you decide what you want to do."

"I don't want to bug you, Vivaldo."

Vivaldo picked up Rufus' empty glass and paused in the archway which led into his kitchen. "You can lie here in the mornings and look at my ceiling. It's full of cracks, it makes all kinds of pictures. Maybe it'll tell you things it hasn't told me. I'll fix us another drink."

52

He remembered to what excesses, into what traps and nightmares, his loneliness had driven him; and he wondered where such a violent emptiness might drive an entire city.

60

"When you're older you'll see, I think, that we all commit our crimes. The thing is not to lie about them-to try to understand what you have done, why you have done it." She leaned closer to him, her brown eyes popping and her blonde hair, in the heat, in the gloom, forming a damp fringe about her brow. "That way, you can begin to forgive yourself. That's very important. If you don't forgive yourself you'll never be able to forgive anybody else and you'll go on committing the same crimes forever."

79

"You'll be kissing a long time, my friend, before you kiss any of this away."

114

“I tell you something else, don't none of you forget it: I know a lot of people done took their own lives and they're walking up and down the streets today and some of them is preaching the gospel and some is sitting in the seats of the mighty. Now, you remember that. If the world wasn't so full of dead folks maybe those of us that's trying to live wouldn't have to suffer so bad."

121

Strangers' faces hold no secrets because the imagination does not invest them with any. But the face of a lover is an unknown precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.

172

It was so familiar and so public that it became, at last, the most despairingly private of cities. One was continually being jostled, yet longed, at the same time, for the sense of others, for a human touch; and if one was never—it was the general complaint-left alone in New York, one had, still, to fight very hard in order not to perish of loneliness.

230

"I remember you before you went away. You were miser. able then. We all wondered— wondered—what would become of you. But you aren't miserable now."

"No," he said, and, under her scrutiny, blushed. "I'm not miserable any more. But I still don't know what's going to become of me."

"Growth," she said, "is what will become of you. It's what has become of you."

236

"What did you do in Paris all that time?"

"Oh" he smiled-"I tried to grow up."

"Couldn't you have done that here? Or didn't you want to?"

"I don't know. It was more fun in Paris."

"I'll bet." She crushed out her cigarette. "Have you grown up?"

"I don't know," he said, "any longer, if people do." She grinned. "You've got a point there, Buster."

266

On what basis where they to act? for their blind seeking was not a foundation which could be expected to bear any weight.

288

Policemen were neither friends nor enemies; they were part of the landscape, present for the purpose of upholding law and order; and if a policeman-for she had never thought of them as being very bright-seemed to forget his place, it was easy enough to make him remember it. Easy enough if one's own place was more secure than his, and if one represented, or could bring to bear, a power greater than his own. For all policemen were bright enough to know who they were working for, and they were not working, anywhere in the world, for the powerless.

290

It was a city without oases, run entirely, insofar, at least, as human perception could tell, for money; and its citizens seemed to have lost entirely any sense of their right to renew themselves. Whoever, in New York, attempted to cling to this right, lived in New York in exile-in exile from the life around him; and this, paradoxically, had the effect of placing him in perpetual danger of being forever banished from any real sense of himself.

316

Terrifying, that the loss of intimacy with one person results in the freezing over of the world, and the loss of oneself! And terrifying that the terms of love are so rigorous, its checks and liberties so tightly bound together.

363

Because we're not kids, we know what life is like, and how time just vanishes, runs away—I can't, really, like from moment to moment, day to day, month to month, make you less lonely. Or you, me. We aren't driven in the same directions and I can't help that, any more than you can." He paused, watching Eric with enormous, tormented eyes. He smiled. "It would be wonderful if it could be like that; you're very beautiful, Eric. But I don't, really, dig you the way I guess you must dig me. You know? And if we tried to arrange it, prolong it, control it, if we tried to take more than what we've-by some miracle, some miracle, I swear- stumbled on, then I'd just become a parasite and we'd both shrivel. So what can we really do for each other except—just love each other and be each other's witness? And haven't we got the right to hope-for more? So that we can really stretch into whoever we really are? Don't you think so?" And, before Eric could answer, he took a large swallow of his whiskey and said in a different tone, a lower voice,

"Because, you know, when I was in the bathroom, I was thinking that, yes, I loved being in your arms, holding you"-he flushed and looked up into Eric's face again— "why not, it’s warm, I'm sensual, I like—you—the way you love me, but"

-he looked down again-"it's not my battle, not my thing, and I know it, and I can't give up my battle. If I do, I'll die and if I die"-and now he looked up at Eric with a rue-ful, juvenile grin-"you won't love me any more. And I want you to love me all my life."

396