Taken from Norman Mailer's Miami and the Siege of Chicago, an account of the violent and turbulent 1968 Republican and Democratic conventions, I thought this line was great and wanted to share it.
Mailer was writing about himself in the third person (only Mailer could do that) when he wrote: "Just as he had known for one instant at the Republican Gala in Miami Beach that Nelson Rockefeller had no chance of getting the nomination, so he knew now on this cool gray Sunday afternoon in August, chill in the air like the chill of the pale and the bird of fear beginning to nest in the throat, that trouble was coming, serious trouble."
Violence followed at the Democratic convention in Chicago. The bird of fear beginning to nest in the throat. Martin Luther King had been killed the previous April. Robert Kennedy had been killed in June. On the other side of the world, in Vietnam, we were killing people who didn't look like us. In Chicago: Tear gas. Cops clubbing demonstrators and journalists. Riots in the streets. Violence in the cities. In other words: trouble, serious trouble. This book should be read in a locked room with the curtains closed, to minimize the effects of the thick fear and paranoia that drip from the page.
Get somewhere dark, warm and safe. Stay there.
Until it's over.
No comments:
Post a Comment