The Damnation Game

It was as though in these last minutes together--when they had so much to say--they could say nothing of the least significance, for fear it open the floodgates.

Hell is reimagined by each generation. Its terrain is surveyed for absurdities and remade in a fresher mold; its terrors are scrutinized and, if necessary, reinvented to suit the current climate of atrocity; its architecture is redesigned to appall the eye of the modern damned.

The Devil is by no means the worst that there is; I would rather have dealings with him than with many a human being. He honours his agreements much more promptly than many a swindler on Earth. To be true, when payment is due he comes on the dot; just as twelve strikes, fetches his soul and goes off home to Hell like a good Devil. He’s just a businessman as is right and proper. —-J.N. NESTROY, Hollenangst

I'm not afraid," he said. "What's the use of fear? You can't buy it or sell it, you can't make love to it. You can't even wear it if they strip off your shirt and you're cold.

Indifference was the best remedy. Once you conceded defeat, life was a feather bed.

You cut up a thing that’s alive and beautiful to find out how it’s alive and why it’s beautiful and before you know it, it’s neither of those things, and you’re standing there with blood on your face and tears in your sight and only the terrible ache of guilt to show for it.

Winning is beauty. It is like life itself.

Every man is his own Mephistopheles, don’t you think?

Every man is his own Mephistopheles, don’t you think? If I hadn’t come along you’d have made a bargain with some other power. And you would have had your fortune, and your women, and your strawberries. All those torments I’ve made you suffer.

I feel things other people don’t. I don’t think it’s particularly clever of me, or anything like that. I just do it.

You know, as a child I thought somebody came and took the world away in the night and then came back and unrolled it all again the following morning.

though she hurried him on, he dawdled, his head back, squinting at the stars. There were no revelations to be had there. Just pinpricks of light in a plain heaven. But he saw for the first time how fine that was. That in a world too full of loss and rage they be remote: the minimum of glory. As she led him across the lightless ground, time and again he could not prevent his gaze from straying skyward.

The Deluge wasn’t a wave, was it? It was blind men with axes; it was the great on their knees begging not to die at the hands of idiots; it was the itch of the irrational grown to an epidemic.

There was a primitive power in naming someone. It gave you a handle on a person.

...Ili je pakao možda jedna soba, jedan krevet i večno uzbuđenje i želja, i ja sam bio u njemu, video sam njegovu lepotu, i ako stvari krenu najgorim tokom izdržaću.

This was the nadir, surely. They had no further to fall.

It was enough to know they had no Devil on their backs. Just old humanity, cheated of love, and ready to pull down the world on its head.

For a time he had tried to forget her; it was more convenient that way. Now he clung to thoughts of that face, bereft. He wondered if he would see her again.

You hear stories all the time, about how some lucky man escaped death because he sneezed, or died for the same reason. Tales of benign providence, or fatal bad fortune. And after a while you begin to look at the world a little differently: you begin to see chance at work everywhere. You become alive to its mysteries. And of course to its flip side; to determinism. Because take it from me there are men who make their own luck. Men who can mold chance like putty. You talked yourself of feeling a tingle in your hands. As though today, whatever you did, you couldn't lose.

They were one indivisible thought, imagining each other.

In this maelstrom his feelings for her had the purity of mathematics. Its equations—complex, but elegant in their proofs—offered a nicety that was like truth. He had to hold on to this recognition. If he once relinquished it he was lost.

It wasn’t love she felt for him. That was too big a burden of feeling to carry. It was at best infatuation, mingled with that sense of impending loss she always tasted when close to somebody, as though every moment in his presence she was internally mourning the time when he would no longer be there.

She got up and crossed to the window. Like father like daughter, he thought: window freaks, both of them.

Not a whisper of flatulence would dare this man’s bowels.

Besides, he guessed she wouldn’t have thanked him for delaying his purchase. She needed dope more than she needed him.

Was that what made him a European? To want to have his story told once more, passed down the line to another eager listener who would, in his time, disregard its lesson and repeat his own suffering? Ah, how he loved tradition.

Experience was made up of endless ambiguities—of motive, of feeling, of cause and effect—and if he was to win under such circumstances, he had to understand how those ambiguities worked.

Once you conceded defeat, life was a feather bed. In