Miss Lonelyhearts / The Day of the Locust

He smoked a cigarette, standing in the dark and listening to her undress. She made sea sounds; something flapped like a sail; there was the creak of ropes; then he heard the wave-against-a-wharf smack of rubber on flesh. Her call for him to hurry was a sea-moan, and when he lay beside her, she heaved, tidal, moon-driven.

He felt as though his heart were a bomb, a complicated bomb that would result in a simple explosion, wrecking the world without rocking it.

But whether he was happy or not was hard to say. Probably he was neither, just as a plant is neither.

He Sat in the window thinking. Man has a tropism for order. Keys in one pocket, change in the other. Mandolins are tuned G D A E. The physical world has a tropism for disorder, entropy. Man against Nature...the battle of the centuries. Keys yearn to mix with change. Mandolins strive to get out of tune. Every order has within it the germ of destruction. All order is doomed, yet the battle is worth wile.

He thought of how calm he was. His calm was so perfect that he could not destroy it even by being conscious of it.

Like a dead man, only friction could make him warm or violence make him mobile.

Crowds of people moved through the streets with a dream-like violence.

The way to be gay is to make other people gay," Miss Lonelyhearts said. "Sleep with me and I'll be one gay dog.

He felt like a bottle that is being slowly filled with warm, dirty warter.

But the romantic atmosphere only heightened his feeling of icy fatness.

It was on this trip that Faye acquired a new suitor by the name of Homer Simpson.

Perhaps I can make you understand. Let’s start from the beginning. A man is hired to give advice to the readers of a newspaper. The job is a circulation stunt and the whole staff considers it a joke. He welcomes the job, for it might lead to a gossip column, and anyway he’s tired of being a leg man. He too considers the job a joke, but after several months at it, the joke begins to escape him. He sees that the majority of the letters are profoundly humble pleas for moral and spiritual advice, that they are inarticulate expressions of genuine suffering. He also discovers that his correspondents take him seriously. For the first time in his life, he is forced to examine the values by which he lives. This examination shows him that he is the victim of the joke and not its perpetrator.