I found ways to protect myself from this liminal threat (the threat of being sucked into outer space).

In the New World, his immigrant melting-pot generation of malnourished teeny-weenies produced six-foot sons and large luxuriant daughters.

An Actor Prepares by Constantin Stanislavsky

(Hamlet)

Anything but dormant, however. She had a crackling mind.

Her bird legs, aslant, were laid together or set aside until they should be called upon to move.

These were all commonplace persons. I would never have let them think so, but it's time to admit that I looked down on them. They were lacking in higher motives. They were run-of-the-mill products of our mass democracy, with no distinctive contribution to make to the history of the species, satisfied to pile up money or seduce women, to copulate, thrive in the sack as the degenerate children of Eros, male but not manly, and living, the men and women alike, on threadbare ideas, without beauty, without virtue, without the slightest independence of spirit—privileged in the way of money and goods, the beneficiaries of man's conquest of nature as the Enlightenment foresaw it and of the high-tech achievements that have transformed the material world. Individually and personally, we are unequal to the scope of these collective achievements.

…It's a pastime with them to bargain with Bodo Heisinger, to chaffer and haggle.

"There is no leisure for anybody," I said. "Retirement is an illusion. Not a reward but a mantrap. The bankrupt underside of success. A shortcut to death. Golf courses are too much like cemeteries. Adletsky would never stoop to golf. He was right to wheel and deal as he had done from the age of two till ninety-two."

Another characteristic in common: my mother kept her own counsel. It gave me an incomprehensible satisfaction to deny almost everyone access to my thoughts and opinions. People always were willing to confide in me, though I didn't ever encourage confidences.

With Oriental patience, I held still while he loaded me like a beast of burden with his anecdotes.

Like the old gag… Q: "What's the difference between ignorance and indifference?" A: "I don't know, and I don't care."

"You little gonif," my impatient mother used to call me.

"Paris is just New York in French."

I had never made a trip myself in this ocean-liner limo.

Composure is one of my special gifts. Not to look too impressed. An impervious pre-Columbian look.

I think very fast, then I edit the thoughts just as quickly. But it's hard for speech to keep up. It the thick lips that make articulation difficult.

In my low but coherent voice (a lifelong training in articulate but deferential speech: I myself would be reluctant to trust a man who spoke as I did), I explained what Sigmund Adletsky had arranged.

Two dilatory people who had loved each other for forty years, discussing ottomans and wing chairs.

I held my breath for a few pulses, then, like the practiced liar that I am, I denied it again. But sometimes the truth will hitch a short ride with your finest lies. I saw that she didn't believe me,...

I wished that somehow my composure were as good as the shock absorbers and the computerized engine.