The Dying Animal by Philip Roth (2001) (read in 2021)

“[…] there was always the blouse, against her white-white skin the silk blouse of one creamy shade or another unbuttoned down to the third button.”

“[…] it’ll never be calm, it’ll never be peaceful. I was worried about her walking around in that blouse. Peel off her jacket, and there is the blouse. Peel off the blouse, and there is perfection. A young man will find her and take her away. And from me, who fired up her senses, who gave her her stature, who was the catalyst to her emancipation and prepared her for him.”

“I see him watch her crossing the broad plaza—striding the plaza—at Lincoln Center. He is out of sight, behind a pillar, eyeing her as I did on the evening I took her to her first Beethoven concert. She is in boots, high leather boots and a shapely short dress, a devastating young woman out in the open on a warm autumn night, unashamedly walking the streets of the world for all to covet and admire—and she’s smiling.”

“I played Beethoven and I masturbated. I played Mozart and I masturbated. I played Haydn, Schumann, Schubert, and masturbated with her image in mind. Because I could not forget the breasts, the ripe breasts, the nipples, and the way she could drape her breasts over my cock and fondle me like that.”

“[…] for all of the Castillos’ Cuba that Castro had ruined, for everything she feared she was about to leave—all of it was so great that in my arms, for a full five minutes, Consuela went out of her mind.”

“You should hear him about this girl. A chemist who also has a degree in art history. And plays the oboe. Wonderful, I tell him. Even in your adultery you are better than I am. He won’t even call it adultery. His adultery is different from everyone else’s. It’s too committed an arrangement to be called adultery. And commitment is what I lack. My adulteries weren’t serious enough to suit him.”

“This one cannot fuck if he doesn’t have a dominatrix over him snapping a whip. This one cannot fuck if the girl is not dressed like a chambermaid. Some can fuck only midgets, some only criminals, some only chickens. My son can fuck only a girl with the right moral credentials. Please, I tell him, it’s a perversity, no better or worse than any other. Recognize it for what it is and don’t feel so special.”

“But she was neither stupid nor a slut. Janie was someone who knew what she was doing. She stood in front of you, small as she was, with her legs slightly apart, planted, lots of freckles, blond short hair, no makeup except bright red lipstick, and her big, open confessional grin: this is what I am, this is what I do, if you don’t like it, it’s too bad.”

“The Janie Wyatts of the American sixties knew how to operate around engorged men. They were themselves engorged, so they knew how to transact business with them. The venturous male drive, the male initiative, wasn’t a lawless action requiring denunciation and adjudication but a sexual sign that one responds to or not. To control the male impulse and report it? They were not educated in that ideological system. They were far too playful to be indoctrinated with animus and resentment and grievance from above. They were educated in the instinctual system. They weren’t interested in replacing the old inhibitions and prohibitions and moral instruction with new forms of surveillance and new systems of control and a new set of orthodox beliefs.”

“[…] that someone would consent to anything without the ritual of psychological besiegement, of unremitting, monomaniacal tenacity and exhortation, well, that was unthinkable. There was no way to get a blow job, certainly, other than by dint of superhuman perseverance.”

“Coupled life and family life bring out everything that’s childish in everyone involved.”

“Sex is all the enchantment required. Do men find women so enchanting once the sex is taken out? Does anyone find anyone of any sex that enchanting unless they have sexual business with them? Who else are you that enchanted by? Nobody.”

“The first time she came to see me—and we sat side by side at my desk, as directed, with the door wide open to the public corridor, all eight of our limbs, our two contrasting torsos visible to every Big Brother of a passerby”

“I haven’t broken this rule since, back in the mid-eighties, the phone number of the sexual harassment hotline was first posted outside my office door.”

“there was always the blouse, against her white-white skin the silk blouse of one creamy shade or another unbuttoned down to the third button.”

“And that’s what I’d seen right off: the decorous, loyal private secretary, the office treasure to a man of power, the head of the bank or the law firm. She truly was of a bygone era, a throwback to a more mannerly time, and I guessed that her way of thinking about herself, like her way of comporting herself, had a lot to do with her being the daughter of wealthy Cuban émigrés, rich people who’d fled the revolution.”

“These are the veils of the dance. Don’t confuse it with seduction. This is not seduction. What you’re disguising is the thing that got you there, the pure lust. The veils veil the blind drive. Talking this talk, you have a misguided sense, as does she, that you know what you’re dealing with. But it’s not as though you’re interviewing a lawyer or hiring a doctor and that whatever’s said along the way is going to change your course of action. You know you want it and you know you’re going to do it and nothing is going to stop you. Nothing is going to be said here that’s going to change anything.”

“[…] all this is merely a detour on the way to getting where we’re going. It’s part of the enchantment, I suppose, but it’s the part that if I could have none of, I’d feel much better. Sex is all the enchantment required. Do men find women so enchanting once the sex is taken out? Does anyone find anyone of any sex that enchanting unless they have sexual business with them? Who else are you that enchanted by? Nobody.”

“This is comedy. It is the comedy of creating a connection that is not the connection—that cannot begin to compete with the connection—created unartificially by lust. This is the instant conventionalizing, the giving us something in common on the spot, the trying to transform lust into something socially appropriate. Yet it’s the radical inappropriateness that makes lust lust.”

“Because in sex there is no point of absolute stasis. There is no sexual equality and there can be no sexual equality, certainly not one where the allotments are equal, the male quotient and the female quotient in perfect balance. There’s no way to negotiate metrically this wild thing. It’s not fifty-fifty like a business transaction. It’s the chaos of eros we’re talking about, the radical destabilization that is its excitement. You’re back in the woods with sex. You’re back in the bog.”

“In Consuela’s case, because the vast difference in age gives her permission to submit, I think. My age and my status give her, rationally, the license to surrender, and surrendering in bed is a not unpleasant sensation. But simultaneously, to give yourself over intimately to a much, much older man provides this sort of younger woman with authority of a kind she cannot get in a sexual arrangement with a younger man. She gets both the pleasures of submission and the pleasures of mastery.”

“it’ll never be calm, it’ll never be peaceful. I was worried about her walking around in that blouse. Peel off her jacket, and there is the blouse. Peel off the blouse, and there is perfection. A young man will find her and take her away. And from me, who fired up her senses, who gave her her stature, who was the catalyst to her emancipation and prepared her for him.”

“It’s a representation, ordinary pornography. It’s a fallen art form. It’s not just make-believe, it’s patently insincere. You want the girl in the porno film, but you’re not jealous of whoever’s fucking her because he becomes your surrogate. Quite amazing, but that’s the power of even fallen art. He becomes a stand-in, there in your service; that removes the sting and turns it into something pleasant.”

“I see him watch her crossing the broad plaza—striding the plaza—at Lincoln Center. He is out of sight, behind a pillar, eyeing her as I did on the evening I took her to her first Beethoven concert. She is in boots, high leather boots and a shapely short dress, a devastating young woman out in the open on a warm autumn night, unashamedly walking the streets of the world for all to covet and admire—and she’s smiling.”

“It is impossible to think that not everybody is feeling this way about this girl because not everybody has an obsession about this girl. Instead, you can’t imagine her going anywhere. You can’t imagine her on the street, in a store, at a party, on the beach without that guy emerging from the shadows. The pornographic torment: watching somebody else do it who once was you.”

“As in her own family there is lots of respect for the father, everyone is well educated, everyone is easily bilingual, the right schools, the right country club, they read El Diario and the Bergen Record, they love Reagan, love Bush, hate Kennedy, rich New Jersey Cubans to the right of Louis XIV,”

“But she was neither stupid nor a slut. Janie was someone who knew what she was doing. She stood in front of you, small as she was, with her legs slightly apart, planted, lots of freckles, blond short hair, no makeup except bright red lipstick, and her big, open confessional grin: this is what I am, this is what I do, if you don’t like it, it’s too bad.”

“Twenty years earlier, in my college days, the campuses had been perfectly managed. Parietal regulations. Unquestioned supervision. The authority came from a distant Kafkaesque source—“the administration”—and the language of the administration could have come from Saint Augustine. You tried to find your wily way around all this control, but until about ’64, by and large everyone under surveillance was law-abiding, members in excellent standing of what Hawthorne called “the limit-loving class.””

“[…] the uninhibited everything that the Consuelas and the Mirandas nonchalantly take for granted derives from the audacity of the shameless, subversive Janie Wyatts and the amazing victory they achieved in the sixties through the force of atrocious behavior. The coarse dimension of American life previously captured in gangster films, that’s what Janie hauled on campus, because that’s the intensity it took to undo the upholders of the norms. That’s how you carried the quarrel to your keepers—in your ugly language rather than theirs.”

“The Janie Wyatts of the American sixties knew how to operate around engorged men. They were themselves engorged, so they knew how to transact business with them. The venturous male drive, the male initiative, wasn’t a lawless action requiring denunciation and adjudication but a sexual sign that one responds to or not. To control the male impulse and report it? They were not educated in that ideological system. They were far too playful to be indoctrinated with animus and resentment and grievance from above. They were educated in the instinctual system. They weren’t interested in replacing the old inhibitions and prohibitions and moral instruction with new forms of surveillance and new systems of control and a new set of orthodox beliefs.”

“Age-old American story: save the young from sex. Yet it’s always too late. Too late because they’ve already been born.”

“[…] the fact that I was born in this year and not in that year? People fifteen, twenty years younger than I, the privileged beneficiaries of the revolution, could afford to go through it unconsciously. There was this exuberant party, this squalid paradise of disarray, and, without thinking or having to think, they claimed it, and usually with all its trivia and trash. But I had to think. There I was, still in the prime of life and the country entering into this extraordinary time.”

“[…] that someone would consent to anything without the ritual of psychological besiegement, of unremitting, monomaniacal tenacity and exhortation, well, that was unthinkable. There was no way to get a blow job, certainly, other than by dint of superhuman perseverance.”

“Carolyn’s realism—the sense of proportion adult indignities had predictably imposed on the romantic expectations of a highly credentialed upper-middle-class girl […]”

“One’s impossible character. The stupidity of being oneself. The unavoidable comedy of being anyone at all. Each new excess weakening me further—yet what is an insatiable man to do?”

“Pro-choice I was, but that didn’t mean pro her choice for him. I urged him to remind her as often as he could that, at the age of twenty-one and just graduating from college, he didn’t want a child, couldn’t support a child, didn’t intend in any way to be responsible for a child. If, at twenty-one, she wanted the responsibility all on her own, that was a decision made by her for herself alone. I offered him money to pay for an abortion. I told him I was behind him and not to cave in. “But what if she won’t change her mind? What,” he asked me, “if she flatly refuses?” I said that if she didn’t come to her senses, she would have to live with the consequences. I reminded him that nobody could make him do what he didn’t want to do.”

“But here, free of totalitarianism, a man like you has to provide himself his own misery. You, moreover, are intelligent, articulate, good-looking, well educated—you are made to thrive in a country like this one. Here the only tyrant lying in wait will be convention, which is not to be taken lightly either.”

“You should hear him about this girl. A chemist who also has a degree in art history. And plays the oboe. Wonderful, I tell him. Even in your adultery you are better than I am. He won’t even call it adultery. His adultery is different from everyone else’s. It’s too committed an arrangement to be called adultery. And commitment is what I lack. My adulteries weren’t serious enough to suit him.”

“This one cannot fuck if he doesn’t have a dominatrix over him snapping a whip. This one cannot fuck if the girl is not dressed like a chambermaid. Some can fuck only midgets, some only criminals, some only chickens. My son can fuck only a girl with the right moral credentials. Please, I tell him, it’s a perversity, no better or worse than any other. Recognize it for what it is and don’t feel so special.”

“In my mind, I tried to excuse you, I tried to understand you. But the sixties? That explosion of childishness, that vulgar, mindless, collective regression, and that explains everything and excuses it all? Can’t you come up with any better alibi? Seducing defenseless students, pursuing one’s sexual interests at the expense of everyone else—that’s so very necessary, is it?”

“I played Beethoven and I masturbated. I played Mozart and I masturbated. I played Haydn, Schumann, Schubert, and masturbated with her image in mind. Because I could not forget the breasts, the ripe breasts, the nipples, and the way she could drape her breasts over my cock and fondle me like that.”

“What do I mean by ridiculous? What is ridiculousness? Relinquishing one’s freedom voluntarily—that is the definition of ridiculousness. If your freedom is taken from you by force, needless to say you’re not ridiculous, except to the one who has forcibly taken it. But whoever gives his freedom away, whoever is dying to give it away, enters the realm of the ridiculous”

“This need. This derangement. Will it never stop? I don’t even know after a while what I’m desperate for. Her tits? Her soul? Her youth? Her simple mind? Maybe it’s worse than that—maybe now that I’m nearing death, I also long secretly not to be free.”

“Elena’s intelligent, tremendously capable, yet for her the desire for a child is the standard unthinking. Yes, the idea activates the propagative instinct, and that’s the pathos of it, all right. But it’s still part of the standard unthinking: you go on to the next step. It’s so primitive for someone so accomplished. But this is the way she imagined adulthood long, long ago, before adulthood, before diseases of the retina became her life’s passion.”

“Coupled life and family life bring out everything that’s childish in everyone involved.”

“But what can be done about it? I’m a critic, I’m a teacher—didacticism is my destiny. Argument and counterargument is what history’s made of. One either imposes one’s ideas or one is imposed on. Like it or not, that’s the predicament. There are always opposing forces, and so, unless one is inordinately fond of subordination, one is always at war.”

“I have colleagues, sure, people I see at work and talk to in passing, but the assumptions underlying the way they live are so antithetical to mine that it’s difficult for us ever to think freely together.”

“I find that most other men I know—especially if they happen to have run into me with one of my young girls—either silently judge me or openly preach to me. I am “a limited man,” they tell me—they who are not limited. And the preachers can get mad when I don’t recognize the truth of their argument. I am “smug,” they tell me—they who are not smug.”

“Whenever George opened his eyes, they propped him up and gave him water to sip and ice to suck on. Otherwise they kept him as comfortable as they could while he slipped away at an agonizingly slow pace.”

“His mouth was aslant, hanging open, that stricken-looking mouth of the dying, but his eyes were focused and there even appeared to be something back of them, something of George that hadn’t yet given way. Like the wall left jaggedly standing after a bomb goes off.”

“Maybe that’s what everyone was celebrating—that it hadn’t come, never came, that the disaster of the end will now never arrive. All the disorder is controlled disorder punctuated with intervals to sell automobiles. TV doing what it does best: the triumph of trivialization over tragedy.”

“From Sydney to Bethlehem to Times Square, the recirculating of clichés occurs at supersonic speeds. No bombs go off, no blood is shed—the next bang you hear will be the boom of prosperity and the explosion of markets. The slightest lucidity about the misery made ordinary by our era sedated by the grandiose stimulation of the grandest illusion. Watching this hyped-up production of staged pandemonium, I have a sense of the monied world eagerly entering the prosperous dark ages. A night of human happiness to usher in barbarism.com. To welcome appropriately the shit and the kitsch of the new millennium. A night not to remember but to forget.”

“[…] for all of the Castillos’ Cuba that Castro had ruined, for everything she feared she was about to leave—all of it was so great that in my arms, for a full five minutes, Consuela went out of her mind.”