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The stabbing horror of life is not contained in calamities and disasters, because these things wake one up and one gets very familiar and intimate with them and finally they become tame again … no, it is more like being in a hotel room in Hoboken let us say, and just enough money in one's pocket for another meal. You are in a city that you never expect to be in again and you have only to pass the night in your hotel room, but it takes all the courage and pluck you possess to stay in that room. There must be a good reason why certain cities, certain places, inspire such loathing and dread. There must be some kind of perpetual murder going on in these places. The people are of the same race as you, they go about their business as people do anywhere, they build the same sort of house, no better, no worse, they have the same system of education, the same currency, the same newspapers – and yet they are absolutely different from the other people you know, and the whole atmosphere is different, and the rhythm is different and the tension is different. It's almost like looking at yourself in another incarnation. You know, with a most disturbing certitude, that what governs life is not money, not politics, not religion, not training, not race, not language, not customs, but something else, something you're trying to throtde all the time and which is really throttling you, because otherwise you wouldn't be terrified all of a sudden and wonder how you were going to escape. Some cities you don't even have to pass a night in – just an hour or two is enough to u
I pass on. Not the stabbing horror of disaster and calamity, I say, but the automatic throwback, the stark panorama of the soul's atavistic struggle. A bridge in North Carolina, near the Te
Every time the nigger looks at a white man he's putting a dagger through him. It's not the heat, ifs not the hook worm, it's not the bad crops that's killing the South off – it's the nigger 1 The nigger is giving off a poison, whether he means to or not. The South is coked and doped with nigger poison.