Written by Mel Reichler and Jim Egan
Copyright 2002
The Book of Corkscrews
“You’re thinking about writing another book,” Sister Greb remarked casually without looking up from her knitting.
Reb Dunzel continued sipping his beer from the shot glass, and tried not to give any indication that he felt his wife had read his mind. She was an ex–Nun and he was an ex–Rabbi. They had fallen in love at a peace rally and their love affair had been the scandal of two communities.
Even though they had been married for nineteen years, it never ceased to amaze him how she seemed to be able to read his thoughts. Whenever it happened, he turned away and said a little silent prayer against evil spirits even though he was a little ashamed and embarrassed at what he knew to be no more than a superstitious habit.
His wife always provided him with a reasonable explanation for her conclusions.
“You always pick a fight with the T.V. set when you are ready to start another book.”
“I’m always mad at the T.V. set,” her husband answered.
“Not enough to argue with it for an hour—and lose.” She put down her knitting. “Who were you arguing with?” she asked.
“Letterman,” he exploded, not quite over his rage. Reb Dunzel sat quietly for a moment. “I am only ‘thinking’ of writing a book,” was the most he would concede.
“Last time you were ‘only thinking’ of writing a book I didn’t see you for two months and three hundred pages,” Sister Greb complained. Two shelves of the bookcase were littered with manuscripts her husband had written. She had typed each one of them from notebooks filled with his tiny scrawl. None of them had ever been published, and Sister Greb was the only person who had read every one of them. She was his staunchest supporter and his fiercest critic. “Why don’t you try to publish one of the books you’ve written already,” she suggested, as sweetly as she could, “perhaps the last one.”
“The market is sour,” Reb Dunzel protested.
Sister Greb softened only a little. “What kind of market is there for a book about Jewish thought before the Jews. In fact, how could there be Jewish thought before the Jews?”
“How could there not be?” her husband shot back. “Do you think thought belongs to the people whose name is attached to it? Thought is named for the next to the last people who think it, not the first.”
“What is this new book about?” she asked gently, deciding to avoid opening an old wound.
“It’s a matter of taste,” said Reb Dunzel, not making it clear exactly what, was a matter of which, taste.
“Taste is one thing, diet is another,” Sister Greb said sharply.
“What is it about?” she asked again.
“Corkscrews,” her husband said.
Sister Greb waited for her husband to complete his digression, return to the matter at hand, and tell her what he had in mind for a new, unpublished masterpiece. When he did not, she gave him a sight nudge.
“So,” she said.
“So, Corkscrews.”
Sister Greb put down her knitting. “I know that even beer makes you drunk, but…”
“Corkscrews,” Reb Dunzel insisted.
“You hardly ever drink,” Sister Greb mused, not paying any attention to her husband’s attempted amplification, “only beer slowly out of a shot glass. What would you have to write about Corkscrews? You should write about labels,” she said, referring obliquely to his habit of peeling the labels off of beer bottles and rolling them into little pills as he sat thinking.
“Corkscrews,” Reb Dunzel repeated.
“A twisty little thing out of metal that you open bottles with.” His wife said what she thought he was thinking.
“A twisty little thing out of words that you open your mind with,” Reb Dunzel corrected.
It was Sister Greb’s turn to be surprised. She could read her husband like a book but sometimes he edited the volume as she was reading him. “I know what a Corkscrew is,” his wife insisted.
“I know you do, only you won’t admit it.”
“You use them to open wine bottles and we don’t have one because you only drink beer.”
“They are used to open the mind and they’re all around.”
“What are you talking about?” his wife asked querulously.
“Twisty little collections of words that have a handle you can see and which turn in ways that you can feel, and have three meanings only one of which you hear.” Reb Dunzel paused for a breath.
“And I’ll bet the second meaning shows up when you forget the first one,” his wife commented.
“Exactly,” said her husband.
“And the third one takes the second one’s place when you remember the first one again,” said Sister Greb falling in with the feeling of the logic although the words made no sense at all to her.
Reb Dunzel was glowing with genuine pride and pleasure. “You understand perfectly,” he said, delighted.
“I haven’t the least idea what you are talking about or what I am talking about,” she said peevishly. “What is a Corkscrew?”
“A Corkscrew is a sentence,” her husband replied, stopping to take a sip of beer from the shot glass. He hoped that the clarity of the statement might soften his wife’s critical stance but his wife stood her ground, letting the sentence whet the edge of her curiosity.
“It’s a sentence that bends and twists, with a handle on one end and a point on the other.”
“So much for metaphors that cast shadows instead of light,” Sister Greb muttered.
“This beer is warm,” Reb Dunzel said, “preparing to put some distance between himself and his wife and give some thought to the matter at hand. “I think I’ll get a refill.”
“It’s fine,” his wife said, sternly, “and you’ve only drunk a third, so sit and tell me what a Corkscrew is.”
“I haven’t decided to write the book,” he exclaimed, although he knew it wasn’t true. He had made up his mind to write it a minute before his wife had raised the topic and he knew his wife knew it too.
“So tell me,” Sister Greb insisted.
“A Corkscrew is like a story. For a story to work right, it’s got to have some bends and twists in the plot, a story line to hold on to, and some semblance of a point at the end. But a poem can be a Corkscrew or a song. Even just a couple of words arranged properly can be a Corkscrew.”
His wife tried to follow the idea in her mind. Reb Dunzel watched her take a wrong turn and plunge into a dark forest.
“That may be clear to you,” she said, “but…”
Reb Dunzel tried to get her to take a different path through the woods. “The beauty of a good Corkscrew is that it opens ideas up but it doesn’t pour their contents all over you. It lets you peek inside and smell what’s there; if you want to, you can try to pour out its meaning or put the cork back or just leave it uncorked.”
A little light came through the forest canopy. Sister Greb set off on a different trail and ended up poised on the edge of a gully. Her husband gestured wildly trying to point to the way out of the woods.
“A Corkscrew shows you an idea then it shows you the pattern of the idea and then it shows you the pattern itself without the idea,” he said, satisfied that he had indubitably settled the issue of what a Corkscrew was.
“Some people,” his wife said, looking at her knitting, “have the capacity to make something that is almost clear, completely opaque.” She tried to find her own way out of the forest. “Give me an example,” she demanded, “a simple, transparent example.”
He tried to delay for a minute to demonstrate he was ‘choosing’ to meet her demand. “OK,” he said, bracing himself against the chair.
“I have a perfect example right here somewhere,” Reb Dunzel announced, producing thirty or forty scraps of paper from his pockets. One of them seemed to stick to his fingers. “This one isn’t it, but it’s a good one, too.” He flattened out a crumpled sheet and read; “‘Every truth finds its way blocked by a reasonable desire.’ It’s a good one, because it says a lot but doesn’t say it in a straight–forward way. Its message wiggles and twists and it is hard to get a handle on but somehow its point still sticks you in some way.”
Sister Greb sat quietly for a few seconds testing the Corkscrew’s point. “I would have thought it would have been more practical to point out that every reasonable desire has its way blocked by an unreasonable desire. Perhaps you have another example in that refuse heap you’re building?”
Her husband reached into the pile of paper and drew out a scribbled–on matchbook cover that read, “Darkness also travels at the speed of light.”
“A scientific fact,” she replied, not giving much thought to what he said.
“What scientific fact. Light travels at the speed of light. When did you or physics ever think about darkness?”
“How about another one?” she asked, feeling she was on shaky ground with scientific facts no matter how obvious they were.
“You like to read,” Reb Dunzel said, trying to seize the initiative. “‘If you learn to read between the lines you can read anything in almost any language.’”
“I read that in yesterday’s horoscope,” Sister Greb said.
“Okay, Okay.” Reb Dunzel came back, “I’ve got a couple here in my vest pocket that you’ve never seen the likes of. How about, ‘The disaster of some people’s lives is that they fall in love with their first mistake instead of their second.’”
“That’s crazy but somehow true,” said Sister Greb, thinking of her second mistake, “But I don’t know quite what truth it is.”
“That’s exactly it,” her husband exclaimed, shuffling his feet. “That’s what Corkscrews are like. Corkscrews are always crazy but true they touch upon ideas that are strange but…”
“… when you think about them, not so strange after all.” She finished his thought for him.
Reb Dunzel looked at his wife and thought, ‘Some people always seem to know all of the details before they know what they are details of.’ He reached for his pencil to write the observation down but the pencil had disappeared. “How is it,” he said, hoping that speaking the thought out loud would fix it in his mind, “you know all the details…?”
“…before I know what they are details of,” his wife added.
“Something like that,” her husband conceded.
“It’s the way I am,” his wife announced. “Have you seen my scissors around?”
“I’m still looking for my pencil,” her husband responded. “Things that are easy to lose are hard to find,” he said, in desperation.
“It says here, on this bubble gum wrapper, that things that are easy to find are hard to lose,” his wife corrected.
“What does a bubble gum wrapper know? Besides, how is a man supposed to keep his Corkscrews straight with you rattling around looking for those scissors?”
“Look what I found in your pile of Corkscrews,” Sister Greb exclaimed.
“Is it my pencil?” her husband asked.
“No, it’s a recipe that I’ve been looking for, for weeks.”
She looked at the recipe on which her husband had written a few corkscrews. She stuck the list back in the pile of Corkscrews. “It was fattening anyway,” she said.
It was three weeks before they sat together in the living room She had gotten a report, now and then, at breakfast on the progress of the manuscript, and occasionally, in bed, a Corkscrew had appeared ambiguously under the covers in the darkness. But the project had remained shrouded in the shadow of creativity. Reb Dunzel sat with his slippers loosely balanced between his toes and the shot glass in his hand. A notebook lay on the table.
“Corkscrews?” Sister Greb asked.
“Corkscrews,” her husband said. She opened the manuscript and started to read.
Every truth finds its way blocked by a reasonable desire.
Buffalos don’t come with brakes.
We never think about stopping a large object when it is standing still.
Things that are easy to lose are hard to find.
Darkness also travels at the speed of light.
The disaster of some people’s lives is that they fall in love with their first mistake instead of their second.
Waking up is the best proof you’ve been asleep.
Death has a slogan: return the empties.
What God really wanted to forbid he made physically impossible to do.
When friends separate God puts away the locusts and chastises only with butterflies.
Safe is never virtuous.
People who demand the impossible may be satisfied with the improbable, and he who asks for what he can not have must settle for what he is not likely to get.
A sacred cow makes a bad pet.
Sex is a pleasure; good sex is pleasure; great sex is what pleasure is about.
The heart of any spoken truth is a feeling that can not be put into words.
Truth is just the best available metaphor at any given time.
If you learn to read between the lines you can read anything, in almost any language.
Reality stands behind its illusions.
There are days that never appear anywhere but on calendars and then only after the fact, and there are other days that appear and reappear on privy doors and subway posters and the backs of animals and children’s drawings and in beer advertisements on T.V., so that they feel like they have been lived in again and again like an old house that has been occupied for centuries.
Death does not keep records, at least not good records. Of course it does not have to.
Pleasure which can not be enjoyed may have to be endured.
Believing should be a matter of choice, disbelieving a matter of necessity.
Most things have a short end and an long end.
Sometimes there is no shortest distance between two points.
Events and the memory of events change at different rates. The memory of an event changes at the same rate as the consequences of an event. Events change a little more quickly than the anticipation of the consequences.
Some people need a reason before they act, others need an excuse.
A reason is an excuse before its time.
A lie is a reason that appeared only after the fact.
Shrewdness is always limited by deceit.
Happiness is boolean.
People seldom survive the bite of a butterfly. On the other hand the scars of the bite of the butterfly are beautiful.
The strength of the Japanese is not in any particular Japanese.
Everyone has a good side and a bad side. Unfortunately, some people’s good side belongs to someone else.
All of us are crazy but some of us wear our straight jackets only on formal occasions.
The unbelievable occurs regularly—but no one believes it.
Some people crave to be a good servant but can’t find a good master.
Intelligence sucks and wisdom spits out.
Sex is a palace with neither an exit nor an entrance, only a window.
Sex makes a better vice than a virtue.
Only in sex can two people be separated from one another by the thickness of their skins and yet be worlds apart.
Man becomes more like the machines he uses than the food he eats.
Sex makes love bearable.
We are indebted to unnamed sexual heroes.
Preremembered sex is often better than remembered sex.
Sex is a metaphor for all other metaphors.
Good sex is the only defense against bad sex.
There is a kind of medicine pigeons practice on fleas.
Youth is filled with deprivations and injustice and pain. What makes it youth is that it is ignorant of them.
Ignore virtue and you create a vice.
You can recognize a fool even when he’s fooling around.
Folly is intelligence with a thorn in its paw.
One does not become a fool at a ceremony. Even so, every ceremony creates its own fool.
To the color blind folly is gray. With acute sight we see that it is bright gray.
We remember only the original and the latest folly, but only the latest folly counts.
At the heart of every illusion is a misplaced conviction that reality is a good master.
If you can’t trust your own eyes whose eyes can you trust.
No wonder we have trouble saying what we mean. We must do all our talking with second hand words.
Some people have a larger vocabulary than they have words to say it in.
Contrary to common sense there are no spaces between words. Like the real numbers the spaces between real words are filled with imaginary words. The word line is dense.
Sometimes being wrong is the only available relief from being uncertain.
There is nothing so frustrating as a day that goes back on its promise.
Some people promise high quality frustration and provide low quality relief.
The logic of surrender is simple: throw up your hands. The logic of complete surrender is simpler: throw up.
Panic is crying for help with your feet.
Great novelists die in other people’s sleep.
We always know one character from a great novel personally.
What is impossible is forbidden: anything else you can get away with is permitted.
Just because it’s been said for the second time doesn’t mean you heard it the first or will hear it the third.
Experience leaves too much to the imagination to be trusted.
The virtuous whore is the invention of the virtuous pimp.
A saint is a man who is willing to share his pleasure without demanding that you share his pain—but has no pleasure to share.
Creative irrationality is art’s reason.
Normality is nothing more than the current standard and style of being irrational.
Some jobs that really need to be done aren’t for the simple reason that people make you pay to do them and then make you pay again to do them well. Other jobs that really need to be done aren’t for the simpler reason that the person who sees the need is not the person who must do the work to satisfy it.
The best conversation is about things we can’t talk about.
The best reasons make the worst excuses.
News is gossip we can all agree upon.
Some people’s lives are based on a true story but not their true story.
In the end most of us are reduced to imitating ourselves.
People we don’t know are just as perplexed as people we do.
Money is always in heat.
The only dollar bill with a pedigree is a counterfeit.
Some people’s reputation leads a richer life than they do.
In the beginning and the end, lovers win.
Each of us is furious when our ideas sound better in someone else’s sentences.
Every good idea is equally distant from a bad idea and a great idea.
Life has no end, it is limited only by our attention span.
Truths come with handles; unfortunately this means that any idiot can grab hold of them.
Just because a thing is easy to do, doesn’t mean it will be done well.
People tend not to notice easy things that are done well.
It is bizarre that people will believe anything as long as you can prove it to them.
The great law of human nature is: if you can catch, it you can eat it.
Anatomy defeats fantasy.
No ones mind is completely civilized territory.
We are often badly served by those we serve.
We speak the way computers think; linearly, directly and completely missing the point.
Given the laws of probability an impossible event is likely to occur at any moment.
She provided grief instantly, and she guaranteed it for years to come.
The impulse to do the impossible is quite weak.
Doing the impossible is easy, it is wanting to do the impossible that is impossible.
Small pains are always available as a reminder of big pains.
N.Y.C. is a great place to visit permanently but no one wants to live there.
Corkscrews are lost point down and found point up.
Reb Dunzel felt like a playwright waiting for the reviews to come out. He sat twisting in his chair waiting for his wife to put the book down. Finally he could wait no longer.
“Well?” he asked.
“I am not finished yet,” his wife answered, not looking up.
“I know, but what do you think, I mean so far, what do you think?”
His wife stopped him. “I’ll tell you what I think.”
His wife’s tone made him reconsider. “Maybe you’d better finish the book before you say anything,” he suggested.
“I can tell you what I think now,” she said, emphatically.
Reb Dunzel waited for the worst.
“I think ‘A sacred cow makes a bad pet,’ is religious.”
Her husband screwed up his face.
“And I like ‘Reality stands behind its illusions,’ but…” The ‘but’ was like a sword lifted over his head. “But what do they mean? I don’t understand a lot of them.”
“I only copied them down,” Reb Dunzel said, holding onto the excuse lightly in case he would have to abandon it at a moment’s notice.
His wife was not so easily put off. “Copied them down. From where?”
“From my head,” he said, deciding the excuse might serve longer as a shield if he embellished and burnished it a bit. “It’s hard to describe. Sometimes, out of the corner of my eye, I would notice the shadow of the words of one of these Corkscrews wriggling on the wall, but when I turned my head a little bit more and looked directly at it, it would fade into the wallpaper and I would have to copy it, like a child tracing a picture, from the stain it left on my memory. With others it was still different. I would be thinking about nothing at all, and out of the silence of my mind a Corkscrew would leap, like a fish breaking the surface of a still pond. It would hook itself on a period that it had tried to devour, as if it were a genuine sentence, and it would thrash and fight as if it hated to be caught. While it dangled, there I would sketch it. It always managed to squirm off of the period and dive into my mind again and disappear.” Reb Dunzel luxuriated in the richness of the descriptions of how the Corkscrews had appeared to him.
“Very creative,” Sister Greb said, “what did you use as bait?” Reb Dunzel could not tell if she meant the remark sarcastically. “It’s nice to know how you caught them but what I really want to know is what they mean. Some of them are clear enough she said. But take ‘Truth is just the best available metaphor at any given time.’ What does that mean?”
“Couldn’t say exactly,” Reb Dunzel answered placidly, feeling that after having so imaginatively described the mysterious manner in which the Corkscrews appeared to him, he could relax and coast a little. “I only write them down, I don’t unbend them.” His wife’s face conveyed the message she was not at all happy with his answer, and just as he concluded that abruptly dismissing the problem of what the Corkscrews meant was the wrong way of answering her question, she called him to account.
“Besides, what is and what isn’t a Corkscrew isn’t really clear in my mind. Can you tell me or not?” It was the kind of ultimatum that meant trouble.
Reb Dunzel looked up and saw the sword over his head jiggle and he beat a tactical lateral retreat. “Maybe the Man With The Ladder could tell you what a Corkscrew is and explain them better than I can. Most of them are very much like things I heard him say.”
Sister Greb, who recognized a lateral, tactical retreat when she saw one, got annoyed at her husband’s insistence that he was only a scribe. She had met the person her husband called the Man with the Ladder twice, and both times, after a perfunctory hello, he and her husband whipped up a fog of words and immediately dove into it like outnumbered fighter pilots. Occasionally, they would stick their heads out to test the air and ask how she was doing, then they would plunge back into their fog of words again. As far as she was concerned they had a conspiracy going and, although she was not quite clear what they were conspiring about, she was determined that they were not going to conspire again, at least in front of her. She doubted that the Man with the Ladder could explain anything, not even why he wandered around with a ladder so much of the time that the habit had become his name. But the day was sunny and meeting the Man with the Ladder was a good excuse for going to the park where Reb Dunzel insisted they would find his friend.
“I talk to him first,” Sister Greb demanded, as she and her husband headed out the door “that is, if we meet him. How can you be so sure he’s going to be at the park,” she asked half curious, half dubious.
“Where else should he be?” her husband asked, as if there were no more natural place for a person to spend most of his time.
“At home making supper, at the super market shopping…”
“He likes parks,” Reb Dunzel interrupted, “is that a crime?”
“…working, praying, in bed,” Sister Greb continued, indicating she could go on with the list for a long time. “Only pigeons spend so much time in the park,” she said.
Reb Dunzel was really not quite sure why his friend spent so much time in the park but he was sure they would find him there. And he was right. The Man with the Ladder was perched on his ladder among the pigeons, close to the bench that he and his friend used for their conversations.
“Here,” Sister Greb said, holding the manuscript out in front of her and thrusting it into the Man with the Ladder’s hands. Her face was filled with pride. “It’s my husband’s latest book. He said you would be able to tell me what a Corkscrew was and explain some of them.”
The Man with the Ladder took the book and balanced it on his toes. “It’s good to see you, Sister Greb,” he said, nodding warmly to Reb Dunzel.
“So what is a Corkscrew ?” she prodded.
The Man with the Ladder opened the book. “You don’t mean the things you open wine bottles with do you. Of course not,” he said, answering his own question. “A Corkscrew is a sentence that’s pointed on one end and has a handle on the other.”
Sister Greb turned up her eyes. “That much I know already. I want to know other things, like what they really are, and whether they are true.”
“I don’t think this will satisfy you but I think a Corkscrew is the common ground between any truth and its contradiction.”
Sister Greb looked at the pigeons. “Maybe the pigeons can cause such a confusion of words. I mean maybe there’s something about loose feathers and droppings.” She said it out loud, although she did not mean to.
“I was thinking the same thing,” said the Man with the ladder. “It does seem to fertilize the air.” He spoke to Reb Dunzel but looked at Sister Greb.
“Would you believe,” he said, poking his head into his jacket,”that a Corkscrew is a one person dialogue or a two person monologue.’ I’m not quite sure which. No, I didn’t think you would,” he continued, not waiting for a reply. “Well,” he said, his head darting inside his jacket again, wriggling there as if he were a bird preening himself, “the problem is that the meaning of a Corkscrew is always another Corkscrew.” He withdrew his head slowly and looked at Sister Greb to see if his words had their desired effect.
Sister Greb remained implacable and unblinking.
The Man with the Ladder wound up, preparing to stick his head into his jacket again. Sister Greb could not restrain herself. “Why do you keep sticking your head inside your jacket?”
“Well, after your husband told me he was going to collect Corkscrews and make a book of them I started saving them for him. I always lose pieces of paper so I wrote them here.” He threw open his jacket to show Sister Greb how he had enormously complicated the simple pattern of the lining with an inked needlepoint of Corkscrews. “Anyway, here’s a good example that might make it clear what a Corkscrew is.” He tried to twist his body so he would not be so conspicuous reading from somewhere around his vest pocket. “In a pinch you can use a hammer as a screwdriver, but only once per screw.”
Reb Dunzel slapped his pockets, frantically trying to locate the pencil and piece of paper he always intended to carry. He was afraid that a deluge of Corkscrews was about to cascade off his memory and spill into the children playground to collect in puddles in the sand box, and drain like water on the beach. The idea drove him to distraction.
Sister Greb’s sharp glance caused her husband to carry on the search surreptitiously, so that he looked like a soldier at attention, searching secretly for fleas.
“Armies never surrender at night,” the Man with the Ladder said, from somewhere inside his jacket.
Watching the Corkscrew stream off of his parched attention and dribble into the children’s playground drove Reb Dunzel to desperation. “I need a pencil,” he wailed.
“Don’t bother,” The Man with the Ladder said, finally realizing his friends predicament. “Don’t bother writing them down. Take it.” He wriggled out of the jacket. “You can give it back later. Only, I have a few others.”
Sister Greb realized that the pattern on his shirt consisted of wavy lines of tiny scrawl.
“And there are a few here.” He removed his tie. “Of course,” he said, turning his pants pockets inside out,”some of the best ones are here.”
“Not to worry,” he said, and slipped out of most of the rest of his clothing, pointing out to Reb Dunzel where, on each piece of clothing, the Corkscrews were written. “I have a change at home.” Finally, he sat clad only in a pair of Bermuda shorts that functioned as underwear on which at least two Corkscrews were written.
Sister Greb saw Reb Dunzel eyeing the sentences written on the shorts. “Those you can copy,” she said, materializing a pencil out of her handbag.
“You can’t just sit out here like that,” Reb Dunzel protested, his hands piled with his friends clothing. “It’s not that warm.” He put the clothing down and slipped out of his jacket. “You take my clothes,” he said, looking at his wife. “After I’m done copying them, we’ll change back.” The Man With the Ladder began to protest just as his teeth began to shiver.
“OK,” he said, “maybe the coat.”
“Not only the coat,” said, Reb Dunzel hurrying a complete exchange of clothing as if he feared a spring frostbite.
“Do you understand now?” Reb Dunzel asked his wife as they took leave of the Man with the Ladder, who perched awkwardly on his ladder in clothing that made him seem a too rapidly growing child.
“I understand that any explanation of what a Corkscrew is not going to come from that man,” Sister Greb stated categorically. “And I understand that it’s going to take me a month to type these up,” she said.
The Man with the Ladder’s Corkscrews.
The bailiff knows Murphy’s law better than the judge.
In a pinch you can use a hammer as a screwdriver but only once per screw.
Those who want to, shouldn’t. Those who will, can’t. Those who should, may not. Those who can, won’t. We are always having to choose between getting things done not quite well enough and getting them done at all.
There are places steeped in so deep and profound an anarchy that even Murphy’s law does not hold.
Armies never surrender at night.
The best things in life may be free but the store is always out of them and they spoil when you take them out of the box, and you can’t claim them as dependents on your income tax returns, whereas the worst things in life cost ferociously but are deductible, and available on easy credit, and are childlike and cling and never grow up.
Graffiti is three dimensional wisdom on a two dimensional wall.
It may be true that, in the long run, a group can survive by doing the wrong thing for the right reason as well as it can survive by doing the right thing for the wrong reason. It is questionable whether the long run includes tomorrow.
In
Even truth can leave you unprepared for reality and feeling that you’ve been deceived.
It is important to distinguish what you need from what you want. It is even more important to distinguish what you want from what you want to want. But what is most important of all, is to distinguish what you want badly from what you want badly, but not badly enough.
Big things change because people are too smart for their own good. Little things change because they are not smart enough.
If you can’t come to terms with reality you have the wrong terms.
Life, like death is sleight of hand, only a little faster.
Competition is always imperfect where it counts the most.
Pleasure as well as pain, leaves scars.
Commuting is not traveling anywhere. Neither is shuffling.
Saying something, saying something in so many words, and saying something in any words at all, are quite different things.
Blessed are those who can say what they mean because not being able to say what you had in mind is a fact of mind.
Every stick has a short end and a long end. The short end of the stick is always available.
Bad spelling and tragedy don’t mix.
A style of life is a poor metaphor for a way of being.
A perfect bullet can not be shot from anything less than the perfect gun. Inventing the perfect bullet is easy. Inventing the perfect gun, impossible.
For some people it is a pleasure to be caught between a rock and a hard place.
Simplicity in sex is profound.
The prick has no memory. On the other hand, the cunt never forgets.
Any doctor who refuses to believe in divine intervention and miracles foregoes 2/3rds of the tools of his trade.
The father remembers all his son’s follies: The son remembers all his father’s follies but one.
We remember how our foolishness feels and how other people’s foolishness looks.
Foolishness is never terminal.
Sensibility seldom lies outright—but it hardly ever tells the truth either.
No given collection of words can support their own weight.
Given any collection of words, a good writer can always take one out and a bad writer put one in.
One may refuse to be frustrated only up to a point.
No event, however painful, lasts forever. It is no consolation however: the memory of pain lasts a little longer than forever.
It is possible to father a hero when what you think you are doing is having a little fun.
The mechanism we have for resisting temptation is oiled with the temptations we have given in to.
We can resist temptation only by convincing ourselves that we will miss the very last train home. We give into temptation when we remember that we have legs and can walk.
Sometimes quitting when you’re ahead is the only way of losing badly.
Great novels have at least three endings only one of which appears in the novel.
In a great novel we are likely to show up as a peripheral character.
Stealing the egg does not get you the goose.
Writers have as much control over words as stock brokers do stocks.
You can not master great literature. You can always ask it politely however.
Maturity falls on some people like a stone. Other people trip on it on the way to the bathroom.
Ask and you shall be given, don’t ask and you’ll get it anyway. Run away and you will trip on it, stand still and it will fall on you. The inevitable happens whether you like it or not and usually when you’re looking the other way.
A sentence may be incoherent yet perfectly intelligible. On the other hand, it may be clear as a bell and incomprehensible.
Modern electronic technology has made commonplace possible what only freak, tragic, accidents of nature accomplished before: it has made it possible to march to a different drummer,– in a different ear, in stereo, at the same time.
There is a fundamental asymmetry about the world. The only reason we do not see it is because the shift from one imbalance to another occurs to quickly to be seen.
Writing down something foolish doesn’t make you foolish any more than writing down something intelligent makes you intelligent, although why this is so no one knows.
The greedy get the most of the worst of the best of any possible world or the most of the best of the worst of any possible world and they enjoy it least—because they are greedy.
When the cost of a steak is more than the price of the cow we are in trouble.
A nation has absolutely collapsed when it has to import its common diseases the way it imports its television sets—and from the same place.
A country’s rationality does not depend on any particular person being rational at any given time, nor does it require that everyone be rational all the time, only that some people be rational some of the time. Even with this it is remarkable how few countries are rational.
Complete indifference is as close to Godliness as one is likely to come in one’s life.
Most of the news that’s fit to print is not fit to read.
There are games you can’t win but can’t lose either. These are the games without rules that are the most difficult to play.
Money is the dark phase of love. It is capable of tender mercies.
Change is collective pretend.
If you are not part of the problem you can’t be part of the solution. Of course, if you are not part of the problem you probably have no interest in the solution, by which fact you become part of the problem. This is why the 70’s were rapidly followed by the 90’s.
A woodpecker won’t peck until it smells the bark of the tree.
Reality makes things true but advertising makes them real.
No object that has been lost twice is worth looking for a third time.
Doubt lives in the shadow that every truth casts.
Life is a jig saw puzzle in which some pieces fit with every other piece and some pieces don’t fit with any other piece.
Flattery is beneath contempt, usually with her legs spread and breathing hard.
It now takes all of western technology to teach a watch to tick.
At least one piece of the puzzle is always missing.
Human inefficiency on a grand scale is what makes a nation great and a people small.
A Corkscrew is the common ground between any truth and its contradiction.
Even the simplest of relationships are hopelessly complex.
If you can’t be young be enthusiastic.
The Druids are here.
Genius is enthusiasm for the incomprehensible.
Love is the incomprehensibly beautiful with teeth.
Great art is always the negation of a great void.
Sister Greb finished her typing with a flourish. “Done,” she announced. She lifted the pile of clothing in front of her off of a stack of papers, pulled the sheet from the printer and put it on top. Her eyes hurt as much as her fingers.
“I wouldn’t have believed a shirt, a pair of pants and a jacket could have held so many words. The man should have been a engraver. How did he write in pencil on wool?” she asked Reb Dunzel.
Her husband snatched up the manuscript. “You didn’t miss any,” he asked anxiously.
“No,” Sister Greb assured him. “Not a seam, not a crease, not a pocket. Not even a pleat. He wrote everywhere.” Sister Greb could see that her husband was torn between the desire to get his own clothing back and the urge to keep the original manuscript. He had used the occasion to buy a new outfit but somehow he couldn’t get himself to wear it, and while Sister Greb was not transcribing the Man with the Ladder’s Corkscrews, he tramped around the house in the Man with the Ladder’s clothing which were much too big for him. “I’ll be glad to get my old vest back,” Reb Dunzel said, but Sister Greb detected a note of sadness in his voice.
“Let’s celebrate,” her husband said. “Let’s go out to eat.”
“I think that’s a great idea.” Sister Greb consulted her stomach. “I think,” she said, “I could eat Viennese; schnitzel would be nice.”
“A tiny flake of meat between two pages of grit is not food.” Her husband tossed away schnitzel. It was his turn. Reb Dunzel consulted his stomach. “Today, I think goulash.”
“Goulashly things makes me burp,” Sister Greb
said, dismissing
“Maybe you’re right,” Reb Dunzel assented. “Maybe,” he said, hopefully, “shish–kebab.” Recently, through a window, he had watched a belly dancer in a Turkish restaurant where shish–kebabs were roasting on an open grill.
“I was thinking more of French,” Sister Greb said.
“French,” Reb Dunzel sneered. “From people who cook snails and frog’s legs, food is possible?”
“OK,” said, Sister Greb, “so maybe African.”
Reb Dunzel hesitated. African food sounded interesting. “Well, African would be OK, maybe tomorrow. For a celebration, no.”
“Well,” his wife said, knowing they would eat where they always ate when they ate out, “I’m hungry.”
It was always the same. They would begin with a whirlwind tour of the
cuisine of the world, but no matter where they set sail from, and no matter
what ports they contemplated dropping anchor in, the voyage ended in
“Once,” she complained, “once I would like to eat Spanish or Russian,” resigning herself to Chinese food. “Chinese,” she assented, “but a different restaurant, for the variety.”
“Whatever you want, you can pick,” her husband said. “You always get your way,” he added, thinking he could make the situation.
“I always get what,” Sister Greb exploded at her husband, “I would eat Greek or Roumanian, or Arabic. I would even eat at MacDonalds or Burger King or Roy Rogers, I would eat GLATT kosher or ribs,” she insisted, “anything but Chinese again.”
“Well, not always all your way,” her husband acknowledged. “So you can pick the restaurant.” The door bell rang.
“Oh, by the way,” her husband said, cursing the way things had, when they weren’t going well, of piling up like drifting snow. “The Man with the Ladder maybe might come by to pick up his clothes. He may know a restaurant. But you can still pick,” he added hastily.
Sister Greb glared at him. “What exactly are ‘we’ celebrating?” The “we” was fuller this time.
“Well since they are his Corkscrews and I’m getting my vest back, I thought…”
Sister Greb actually welcomed the company. She had developed a fondness for the Man with the Ladder. Handling his clothes for a week, she felt she understood him a little better. The stains on his tie were different from the stains on her husband’s tie, and the handwriting had twists that made her think differently about the words they made up. “A romantic evening it’s not going to be,” she grumbled, thinking about eating in a fog of words.
The Man with the Ladder came in dressed in Reb Dunzel’s clothes which were much to small for him. “I tried to move slowly,” he said apologetically, pointing to a torn seam in the jacket. He leaned his ladder against the door of the closet.
“You didn’t write on the insides?” Sister Greb asked in a quiet panic.
“No, no, only on paper. Only one or two. I was written out.”
Reb Dunzel handed him the typed manuscript. “Your Corkscrews,” he said.
“Your Corkscrews,” the Man with the Ladder responded. “I only put down things I remember you saying.”
Sister Greb smiled an innocent smile at her husband. “Friends are like a mirror with no silver on the back and no glass in front,” she said. They laughed. “And Corkscrews are a contagious disease,” she added.
“Where should we eat?” the Man with the Ladder asked. “If you’ve decided, any place is good with me. “But,” he added quickly,”there is a Chinese place I know. It’s small and sometimes the food is good and sometimes the food is bad, but the fortune cookies are always wonderful.”
“No, no,” said, Reb Dunzel, “we haven’t decided, any place is good enough.”
Sister Greb sighed and put on her coat. “Is your ladder dieting,” she asked in a good humored way.
The Man with the ladder shrugged. “I thought I would leave it, let it rest, if it’s OK.”
Sister Greb relaxed as they walked. Her mind was filled with Corkscrews but the possibility of eating without the usual, fruitless half hour of trying to decide which restaurant they would eat at before they ate where they always ate, increased her appetite.
“Here’s the place,” the Man with the Ladder announced after they had made their way through crooked streets that were unfamiliar to Sister Greb and Reb Dunzel.
“I thought we knew
The place was loud and noisy. People were sitting on long benches and the waiters squeezed between the rows of tables to put tubs of soup ambiguously between patrons who jostled one another. It was just the kind of place Reb Dunzel avoided.
“It feels like holidays at the Grape Street Schul,” he thought to himself, although when he really looked at it, it did not look like the Grape Street Schul at all.
“Well?” the Man with the Ladder asked.
Reb Dunzel smiled. “If you’ve eaten here it’s fine.” He glanced at his wife expecting to be reminded of his complaints. She put on her angelic look.
“We reserve some of our habits for some people, different habits for others,” was all she said.
Reb Dunzel pointed to three empty places in the middle of a bench.
“I’d suggest we wait,” the Man With the Ladder responded laconically. Seeing his friend was puzzled he offered what Reb Dunzel thought was a very ambiguous explanation. “Sometimes, since you’re eating so close, it pays to pay more attention to your eating companions and less to the immediate demands of your appetite,” he said, as he continued to scan the eaters. After a minute he nudged Sister Greb, pointing with his chin to a group of people who had just wiped up the last of the Gong Bao Ji Ding.
Sister Greb led them towards the table where they positioned themselves discretely behind the eaters who, after a minute, rose shakily and made for the door. “Now this is more like a spot to eat,” said, the Man with the Ladder with more enthusiasm than Reb Dunzel thought was called for.
“I’ll tell you a story,” said the Man with the Ladder, “after we order.”
Suddenly a passing waiter stuck his face over the heads of the people sitting opposite them. “No more fat man,” the waiter said. It made no sense to Reb Dunzel. “Who was he talking to?” he asked.
The Man with the Ladder blushed. “Me, I think, you see…”
“Ah, back again,” another waiter said,”no trouble this time, huh.”
The Man with the Ladder started to say something but hesitated and the waiter disappeared into the kitchen. Sister Greb got the distinct impression that the Man with the Ladder was a celebrity in this establishment. A waiter came by empty handed and insisted on hugging him. “Good see you,” he said, effusively, “really good seeing you. Worried.”
“Last time I ate here…” the Man with the Ladder started to say, by way of explanation.
“…there was a commotion.” said a passing waiter, finishing the sentence.
“It was crowded and I was hungry and I just sat down at the first available seat and ordered dinner,” the Man with the Ladder continued. “I happened to sit opposite a fat man who was the tail end of one of the most boisterous groups I’ve ever encountered in a Chinese restaurant.”
“May be it was just too much sesame noodles or
The manager came by personally carrying three cups of tea and a menu entirely in Chinese and set them down in front of Sister Greb.
“My Chinese is rusty,” Sister Greb said politely to the manager but he scurried off.
The Man with the Ladder interrupted his story to open the menu. “Do you read Chinese?” Reb Dunzel asked.
“No,” said the Man with the Ladder, “but sometimes you can pick from the feel of the characters. In this place though, it doesn’t make any difference.”
The chef stuck his head out of the kitchen and waved his cleaver at them up and down in an half menacing, half welcoming way. “I rather fancy seeing you again,” he said, in a thick English accent.
Reb Dunzel pointed to a dish printed in purple. “What do you think this is?” he asked, as they huddled over the menu. Another waiter pushed through behind them sticking a finger into the huddle. “Order this,” he said, authoritatively and moved on.
“What is it?” Sister Greb asked no one in particular.
“AB A LON E,” sang still a different waiter who set his tray down at the head of the table and pushed the dishes along the table until they reached the right customers.
“It doesn’t matter to me,” said Reb Dunzel who usually agonized over even the choice of the appetizer. Sister Greb nodded.
Just them the manager appeared again and set down three bowls of something that looked like a porridge but smelled like a soup, and a plate of roasted meat. “The chef said…,” and he repeated something in Chinese and disappeared.
“I wouldn’t recommend the…” the waiter who had sung out ‘Ab a lon e’ said, stopping when he saw what the Manager had put in front of them. “Well, never mind.”
“… but he was the worst of the lot,’ the Man with the Ladder said abruptly, picking up his story and expecting Reb Dunzel and Sister Greb to paste it to the place he had left off. “I ate under siege that evening. The man sitting opposite me harassed me with suggestions, advice and caustic comments. It was horrible. When I was almost finished with my meal, the waiter solemnly brought me two fortune cookies. I treat fortune cookies very seriously, at least here,” the Man with the Ladder said. “I sat for a long time trying to decide which I would pick in what order and just as I had decided, the fat man reached over and scooped them off of the plate.”
“Well, if you don’t want them,” he said, before I could say anything, “I’ll just help myself.”
“It was just too much and I started to complain just as he cracked open the first cookie, extracted the fortune and stuffed the cookie in his mouth at the same time. I watched as his eyes bulged and his fingers closed around the remaining fortune cookie and the piece of paper he had just read. Then he just fell over into his Moo Shu Pork.”
“Dead?” asked Reb Dunzel.
“Dead.”
“Dead,” all the waiters repeated in unison, although Reb Dunzel could not figure out how they could have followed the story over the noise.
Sister Greb put down her chop sticks and crossed herself.
“He fell over, and as a final act of rudeness, his hand, still clutching the fortune poked into the last of my sweet and sour pork. I could just make the fortune out.”
“What did it say?” asked Reb Dunzel, munching on a piece of roast something.
“It said, as far as I could make out, ‘Your time has come.’ The other fortune cookie rolled out of his hand and I picked it up. I still have it.” He reached into his jacket pocket and took out a fortune cookie.
Now Reb Dunzel who had worn the jacket all week did not remember a fortune cookie in the pocket at all.
“I’ve never opened it, but now I feel safe.” He cracked the fortune cooked open and hesitated. “Well, to tell the truth,” he said, “I’m a little anxious.”
“Getting your fortune is what makes a difference, not reading it,” Reb Dunzel pontificated.
The Man with the Ladder read the fortune slowly. It said, “Often your fortune looks better on someone else.”
Reb Dunzel noticed that the restaurant had become quiet as the Manager brought them their check, three oranges and three fortune cookies. The waiters stopped serving and made a little, ragged half circle around them.
“This is silly,” Sister Greb said, as she reached over and picked up a cookie. “I…,” she dropped her hand as she heard Reb Dunzel and the waiters suck in their breaths as if they were a single person.
“Well,” said, the Man with the Ladder, “I’ll go first.”
He cracked open his cookie. “‘When the light comes on, it’s wonderful.’ That’s true but I don’t see the point,” he complained. He noticed there was something scribbled on the back in pencil, and turned it over. “‘But sometimes you yearn for the darkness again.’” One of the waiters applauded.
Sister Greb opened hers. “‘Sometimes you want to surrender but can’t find a general to surrender to.’ Hm,” she said, “I’m not sure that’s a proper fortune cookie at all.”
Everyone looked at Reb Dunzel who was pleased with his neighbors fortunes but hesitated before his own. He took the plunge teeth first. “It says,” he announced with a flourish, ‘It is easier to know when to stop then…’” There was a blank then a period. “I’ve never seen a do—it—yourself fortune before,” Reb Dunzel commented.
“I would say ‘why,’” Sister Greb said authoritatively, as if the issue was not in doubt.
“And I would say ‘how,’” said the Man with the Ladder. Reb Dunzel stuck the cookie in his mouth and started to chew. “I think “ He stopped talking and chewing and reached as discretely as he could into his mouth to extract another piece of paper. It said, “It’s easier to know when to stop than why, and easier to know why than how.”
“I think,” Reb Dunzel said, without thinking of the implications of what he was about to say,“that we should collect fortune cookie Corkscrews.”
“I love Chinese food,” the Man with the Ladder said, “but I’m not sure I could stand the strain. It would take a lifetime of Moo Shu Pork and Sesame Noodles.”
The Man with the Ladder insisted on paying the bill. “Now, no more fat man. Come often,” the manager said, adding “may good fortune cookies follow every meal of your life,” as he handed back the change.
As they turned from the restaurant and headed home, a small Chinese man lurking in the shadows accosted them.
“Hey, foreign people, want to buy used fortunes from cookies? I have a pile. Genuine thing, the real maccaw. One hundred smackeroos. Real cheap. Save yourself the price of a hundred meals and a hundred indigestions.” He showed them a take out carton stuffed with fortunes. “The real thing. Hot, real cheap. Not anyone’s old sweepings. Hardly used.”
The Man with the Ladder thought he recognized the man who swept up the restaurant but the man in the shadows also resembled the chef and the manager too.
“Five dollars,” the Man with the Ladder said.
“Worth more than fiver,” the man in the shadows repeated. “Eighty–six dollars,” the seller re–offered.
“Five dollars and twenty–five cents,” the Man with the Ladder came back.
“Twenty–seven dollars and forty–two cents,” replied the man with the takeout box of fortunes.
“Six dollars and thirty two cents,” the Man with the Ladder said. It was the change from the meal.
“You drive a hard bargain,” the seller complained. “Done.” The money and the takeout carton changed hands.
Sister Greb sighed as they headed back. “Two more weeks at the computer,” but the faces of all three of them glowed.
Pleasures from which there is no respite are worse than pains from which one can flee.
Wisdom, for the ant, is not walking on sidewalks even if the cracks are filled with candy and cake.
The improbable is merely the impossible with a license.
Wisdom is just intelligence waiting for a person to happen to.
Sometimes the end of your rope is only an inch off the ground.
To recover from an incurable illness tempts fate unnecessarily.
Every truth breaks a chain.
Every truth worth knowing can be said in no more than fifteen words. And any truth that can be said in no more than fifteen words can be said in six or less. Of course, any truth that can be said in six words or less is so obvious that it doesn’t need to be spoken of at all. (It is also clear that truths that are so obvious they don’t need to be spoken of, require no fewer than three volumes to write down.)
No truth is ever spoken clearly. But then no truth is ever said twice without extensive corrections.
Some people look their age only once in their life.
Sex speaks with forked tongue, don’t you wish.
What creativity lacks in imagination it makes up.
It is too much to require of intelligence that it be beautiful.
When someone’s cup runneth over, someone else gets wet.
Pretentiousness is its own reward.
Men with obscure virtues are seldom as well known as those with obscure vices.
Expertise never comes in a small size.
It is reasonable to ask whether the trains will ever run on time. It is unreasonable to expect an answer.
Comfort is always bitter and small.
Being prepared for any emergency means keeping a good disguise handy.
Evil is dark and shadowy in one dimension but life is dark and shadowy in three.
Imagination is not a dependable mode of transportation.
Undertakers believe in the angel of death.
Almost anything will stand on its own for a little while.
There is nothing like a little terror to make reality more real.
To grow old without growing wise is a bad thing. Worse is to grow wise without growing old. The absolute worst thing that can happen though, is not to grow old at all.
Someone else’s memories make the best gossip.
Nothing in excess is excessive.
The warning shot warns the shooter.
Reality can always become too real to be borne.
In sex as in life, there are no divisions worth a damn.
Some diseases know us better than we know ourselves.
There are some diseases even leeches can cure.
Some doctors cure bit by bit; others in one fell swoop.
The germ wishes it could cure a only it doesn’t know how.
You can always enjoy youth, only not your own.
A person may be foolish only because he had lost, another only because he has won, and a third only because he has refused to play the game.
A man’s reputation may hinge not on how he avoids, but how he recovers from, foolishness.
Death is nothing but terminal foolishness.
Some men are public fools, other practice their foolishness in private.
Every written book is a victory of sensibility over sense.
Every sentence is a jig saw puzzle with most of the pieces missing.
Not every word we read has been written.
The future always delivers less than it promises but more than we can handle.
Common sense is not a guide to great literature.
Things are forbidden only as a warning.
It is not good advice to forgive too much or forbid too little. In fact, it is not advice at all.
To the starving man there is only one kind of food.
A name is a habit existence develops but does not require.
Some people are paid by the minute for the hour, other are paid by the hour for the minute.
Some people work hardest when they are having fun.
Advertisements make promises that products can’t keep.
We do not learn something when we discover it is true and forget it when it becomes false.
We may use any occasion to celebrate the death of a tyrant.
By definition, saints and kings are born on holy days.
It is unreasonable to be rational reaching for the moon.
Irrationality is best served raw not cooked.
It is unreasonable to insist on rationality where guessing will do.
Rationality is the guardian of illusion and stepfather of superstition.
Sometimes people want something just a instant after they need it, and they need something just a fraction of a second after they had it and let it go.
The best joke in the world is in the process of being told.
In the just society, permitting people to live out erroneous beliefs will be a criminal act.
Politics gives compromise a bad name.
Politics starts out as a necessity and ends up as a vice.
Like all perversions, politics makes pleasurable what most people find distasteful.
Rationality gets you in trouble; irrationality gets you in trouble; You are in trouble.
Life is a Punch and Judy show and you’re the Judy.
Some people believe growing up is merely growing old with a vengeance.
The human mind is the slide rule of tomorrow.
Kites designed to fly the highest don’t require wind at all.
The one firm rule of creation is: solutions are created first. Problems are created only if the solutions do not work.
Only a master craftsman can use a hammer of clay.
Religion is a set of beliefs for those embarrassed by being human.
When Reb Dunzel came home, Sister Greb and her friend Coya were so caught up in their conversation that neither of them noticed him come in. He tried hard not to make any noise while moving toward the living room where they talked. There was something about an intimate conversation between two women that always fascinated him. They were huddled together touching and laughing softly.
They were old friends, but Reb knew that with women that didn’t matter much. He had seen women huddle that way when they were perfect strangers. He didn’t want to intrude, knowing it always broke the spell of their attention to each other. He just wanted to get close enough to hear the kind of things women talked about when they were alone, not the shopping, dress talk they always subjected him to when he was present.
“It sort of feels like having sex with your clothes on,” Sister Greb was saying.
“Or an orgasm without the sex,” Coya suggested.
“Or the feeling of an orgasm without the orgasm.”
The two of them suddenly lapsed into silence as if they were mulling over what had just been said. “Now we’re getting some where,” Sister Greb observed brightly.
Reb Dunzel scratched his head. The conversation completely mystified him. What was worse, he was sure he had heard something similar before, but he couldn’t remember where or when.
Despite his caution, his wife spotted him.
“Oh, hello, Rebbe, I didn’t hear you come in. Sit down. Coya and I just came back from shopping. I really should have bought the blue blouse don’t you think, Coya?”
“But the beige looked so good on you,’ Coya came back. “What do you think, Rebbe?”
The spell was broken. Reb Dunzel headed for the refrigerator with his shotglass, mumbling, “definitely like an orgasm without the sex.”
“What did you say?” Sister Greb asked, trying not to sound too interested.
“Or sex without the sex,” he continued.
“So you were listening to us talk,” Coya observed with a sly smile. “I bet you didn’t understand a single word you heard.”
“Sex is not an English word?” Reb Dunzel mumbled back.
Coya explained what she had in mind. “The words perhaps, but not what they meant.”
“Of course I did,” Reb Dunzel responded. “You were talking about sex, and orgasms, and misplaced orgasms, and, and…. What were you talking about?”
“Shopping,” Sister Greb replied, nonchalantly turning to adjust the table cloth.
“Shopping for clothes?” Reb Dunzel asked incredulously.
“No, shopping for feelings,” Coya replied.
Reb Dunzel poured himself another shot of beer hastily.”What do you mean by that?”
“Well, feelings are sort of like Corkscrews,” Sister Greb explained, “they don’t just walk up to you and tell you what they mean, they sort of brush by you, and unless you stop and try them on for size and see how they feel, you’re never sure if they fit right.”
We were just now discussing the feel of your Corkscrews,” Coya added.
“Oh really?” Reb Dunzel tried to fill an already full shot glass and spilled some beer on himself.
“I think you’ve come up with something very special with these Corkscrews,” his wife said, getting up to look for some paper towels.
“Or stumbled upon something,” Coya muttered.
Sister Greb picked up the argument. “I think the reason you have so much trouble trying to explain what they are and what they mean is that the Corkscrews themselves are so unlike you. They express your ideas but without your logic, they make you laugh the way a grain of sand makes an oyster produce a pearl.”
“Well, a Corkscrew is the common ground between a truth and its contradiction.” Reb Dunzel pointed out.
“You mean,” Coya corrected, “a Corkscrew is the common ground between the feeling that gave birth to it and the feeling it gives birth to.”
“That’s not the same thing,” said Reb Dunzel.
“Oh sure it is,” said Coya, “It’s like sex. Sex is groping with your feet for something that you can’t grasp with your hands.”
Sex was one of Reb Dunzel’s favorite topics but he found it hard to think straight about it. The comparison of sex to groping with one’s feet struck him as intuitively exact, but he was reluctant to concede the proverbial inch let alone the foot or feet. His wife spoke up before he could think of something to say.
“I think what Coya is trying to say is that like sex, Corkscrews are best felt not understood.”
“Felt?” Reb looked up from his shot glass.
“Yes,” said Coya, “like what the meaning of a Corkscrew tastes like.”
Reb Dunzel nearly choked on his beer. “Tastes like?”
“It’s hard to describe,” Sister Greb admitted.
“Men must have invented words,” Coya explained,”they’re never there when you need them, they’d just as soon lie as tell the truth, and when it comes to feelings and emotions they’re useless.”
Sister Greb picked up the point. “I felt something was missing when I was typing your Corkscrews but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Corkscrews disregard ordinary logic and rationality to produce an effect, but they have a logic all their own that you haven’t touched upon. It’s the feel of a Corkscrew that hits you first when you read them not the literal meaning because the logic of Corkscrews is feeling.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Reb Dunzel argued, not quite sure what he would say.
“You already have,” Sister Greb pointed out. “Didn’t you write, ‘The heart of any spoken truth is a feeling that can not be put into words.’”
“I resent being argued against with my own words,” her husband said peevishly. “Logic is logic.” He had studied a little logic in school and this was what he remembered.
“No,” Coya said simply,”logic is logic is logic. That’s the women’s version.”
“I can’t see the difference,” Reb Dunzel replied.
“Of course you can’t. No one can see the difference, but anyone can feel it, even you. There’s a logic of feeling as well as a logic of words.”
“There’s only one logic,” Reb Dunzel insisted trying to work himself into an argumentative mood, but wondering at the same time how he got himself into this box. “Logic …” he started to say.
Coya cut him off. “Logic is one path through the wilderness of thinking, that’s what logic is. Intuition is just another name for a different path that men didn’t take, a logic of feeling.”
Reb Dunzel struggled for words. “How can there be a logic of feeling?” he heard himself ask.
“How can there not be?” his wife replied. “ Most men think that women can’t think, at least they can’t think well because they don’t think like men. That’s like saying people can’t fly because they can’t fly like birds.”
“Why talk about flying? Better talk about learning to walk. All the Corkscrews that have been written so far have been written by men.”
“Ah, the words belong to you,” said Coya, “but when they’re put in a Corkscrew they act strangely, because the Corkscrew itself is ours.”
Reb Dunzel thought of the funny way the corkscrews had of eluding his grasp as soon as he encountered one, but he was not quite prepared to admit the truth of what Sister Greb and Coya were saying.”You’ll have an easier time convincing me when you start writing some of your own,” he countered. Just then he noticed a manuscript on the coffee table. “You mean…”
Sister Greb nodded. Arguments forgotten, Reb Dunzel sat down in front of the manuscript trying to contain his excitement. “Can I read them?” he asked cautiously.
Sister Greb gave him a smile and he threw caution to the wind and started to read.
Babies are nature’s way of explaining sex in exactly the same way in which fat is nature’s way of explaining food.
Needing and wanting turn out to be the same thing about as often as the person you fall in love with turns out to be the person who falls in love with you.
Only human inefficiency makes human efficiency bearable.
Sex is like groping with your feet for something that you can not grasp with your hands.
We mourn in our victory the death of possibility.
It is nowhere written that you have to be happy with what pleases you most.
Some people require more to satisfy them than to make them happy.
Truth makes little effort to appear true. Lies try harder, they must be convincing.
The best part of us always dies in some childhood tragedy while the worst part of us grows up with two sets of parents.
Most people have two childhoods, one too early, one too late.
The trouble with men is that they think that the same thing that caused a thing to happen explains it. The trouble with women is that they know that this is not so—and they know why.
There are three sides to any truth, one side to obvious to be noticed, another to subtle to be overlooked and a third to clear to be understood.
Arguing that machines can’t think because they can’t think like men is the same as arguing men can’t fly because they can’t fly like birds.
Clever is what adults are when they think like children.
Sophisticated means to be able to do something before you know the name for what you are doing and why you’re doing it.
In matters of love, rub a thorn, remember the knife.
An aroused and agitated creativity is one of God’s fiercer creatures.
Failure misuses us, victory uses us up.
There is something about beauty that is repugnant to effort. At the same time, there is something about effort that makes it repugnant to beauty.
Beauty is always bait for one trap or another.
Looking back requires that one stop and turn around.
It is almost impossible to locate the exact point at which the comic becomes tragic but it is the same point at which adolescence turns into middle age.
He was so loved that when he died no one would come forth to identify the body.
Many people think of surrendering but never find a general worth surrendering to.
A lost love is a lost life.
Any good idea is as translatable into theoretical physics as it is into a sonnet.
Only words travel by word of mouth: It takes art to move ideas.
There are certain hard cold facts, believing in which is equivalent to believing in the tooth fairy.
Pain is something for which everyone makes time.
The devil works harder than God to achieve the same end. That’s his punishment.
Virtue is always unreasonable, vice never.
Unnatural virtue breeds contempt.
Scars breed: for instance a painter’s scars breed art.
The capacity to sin is a potentially underdeveloped resource.
The real story of creation never appeared in the Bible for the simple reason that it is still going on.
Even rats and mice gossip.
Even God needs someone to keep score.
Most of us outgrow childhood: only the truly lucky ones outgrow adulthood.
Sex has many competitors as a vice, few as a virtue.
Sex is footnote to love.
Intuition lies frequently enough to be mistrusted.
Sex is man’s only defense against ungodly desire.
Some people are saints only because they give their foolishness away with all of their other possessions.
Folly is one of those rare prizes that some people struggle to gain, others are given, and still others win in the lottery.
Folly’s discipline is as exacting as wisdom’s.
The worst fool flatters foolishness.
Foolishness has no ancestors only descendants.
It is possible to write sentences that hum with words that bark. This is what makes writing an art.
To a modern musician silence is not an inferior sound.
There are silences so profound even the deaf hear them.
Putting one foot in front of the other is not dancing, at least not dancing well.
In great writing there is always a struggle between words and sense that sense wins, almost, but only in the end.
Some people remind you of a sentence you have written, then forgotten, and then forgotten you have written, then forgotten you have forgotten.
A great novel is merely the concentration of the diffuse light that illuminates a thousand living rooms.
In a creative society the guardian of reason is the least rational being available.
Never measure the value of a question by the value of its answer.
Evolving is not traveling anywhere.
Men have one childhood, women two.
Imitating yourself does not produce good sex.
It is easier to live with the life you choose then the thousands of lives you choose not to live.
The only difference worth noticing between two saints is they way they dress.
Great writers write in order to find out what they have to say; less great writers because they want to hear themselves say it.
Art is what remains when all of the recognizable pieces of anything are taken away.
There’s a custom tailored logic for every madman.
Enthusiasm is a medium of exchange.
Never outrun the carrot: it is always easier to outrun the carrot than the stick.
What we choose to forget is more important than what we care to remember.
Creativity is the willingness to plagiarize God.
No one goes to the trouble of destroying that which has no value.
Priest tells us what we should not want, parents what we shouldn’t do, spouse tells us what we don’t need, government what we can’t have: No wonder we can’t hear the voice inside that tells us what would make us happy.