I remember going to the British Museum

I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a touch – hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases, generally. I forget which was the first distemper I plunged into – some fearful, devastating scourge, I know – and, before I had glanced half down the list of “premonitory symptoms,” it was borne in upon me that I had fairly got it.

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Love in the Time of Cholera I

“I adore you because you made me a whore.”

Said in another way, she was right. Florentino Ariza had stripped her of the virginity of a conventional marriage, more pernicious than congenital virginty or the abstinence of widowhood. He had taught her that nothing one does in bed is immoral if it helps to perpetuate love.

-Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)

Watermelon

Chapter 1: Watermelon

Sickening sweet taste of my childhood, bottled up, in peaches, white grape, and vanilla. Smooth but sour. Childhood, my land of enchantment, life, my ever lasting childhood. To write is to step onto a magic carpet and fly off into endless trips of nostalgia. Despair tastes sweet, like peaches, and white grapes, and the smell of vanilla. Personalities contained in bottles of scent, fragrances defying analysis. I am passionate about the sense of smell, taste, touch. Vision—the looking at the surface, it eludes me, it leaves me utterly befooled. Nothing is to be trusted except the most banal sentimentalism. I form my conclusions only through pure, heart wrenching emotion. And that’s where it all begins.
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Major Major Major Major

Major Major Major Major had had a difficult time from the start.

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Bonny Baby Competition

Last week the Sentinel Bonny Baby Competition was held at Prince’s Building. And late last night the body of a dead male baby was found, neatly wrapped in a brown paper parcel, on the rubbish dump at Cocorite.
I have seen the baby and I am in a position to say that it did not win a prize in our Bonny Baby Competition.
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Sunday there was rain

Sunday there was rain, leaving me with memories. Rain seems to make them swell like bothersome flowers whose perfume is bittersweet. A night I remember: we were children, embracing in a garden above the Harbour. The rustling of azaleas, smell of oranges, a black frock she wore that absorbed all the stars and moon; reflecting nothing back. As she had taken from me, all my light. She has the carob-softness of my heart.

-Thomas Pynchon -V.

This will not be a funny book

This will not be a funny book. I cannot tell jokes because I do not understand them. Here is a joke, as an example. It is one of Father’s.

His face was drawn but the curtains were real.

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Amazing scenes

Amazing scenes were witnessed in St. Vincent Street yesterday when Biswas, 31, unemployed, of no fixed address, assaulted a receptionist at the offices of the TRINIDAD SENTINEL. More

A boy with a golden screw

Somehow it was all tied up with a story he’d heard once, about a boy born with a golden screw where his navel should have been. For twenty years he consults doctors and specialists all over the world, trying to get rid of this screw, and having no success. More

When People Tell You What To Do

I decided that I was going to find out who killed Wellington even though Father had told me to stay out of other people’s business.

This is because I do not always do what I am told.

And this is because when people tell you what to do it is usually confusing and does not make sense.

For example, people often say “Be quiet,” but they don’t tell you how long to be quiet for. Or you see a sign which says KEEP OFF THE GRASS but it should say KEEP OFF THE GRASS AROUND THIS SIGN or KEEP OFF ALL THE GRASS IN THIS PARK because there is lots of grass you are allowed to walk on.

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An Interview On TV

Interviewer: You lived life with a big ‘L’.
Mervin: And sometimes I suffered pain with a big ‘P’. Like when I met this terrible agent. This lady producer, she said, “I’m having this surprise party.” I got the surprise when I got there, I can tell you. Carrying on like that. It was disgraceful, like that film about Gomorro and that other place, you know. A tower of babell there, it was full of beatniks with long sideboards full of drink. No, I mean the side… they had sideboards, it was full of drink. Some of the men was just as bad. I tell you, there, I tell you there was witches there, they were practicing witchcraft. Not just lady witches but men witches, they had men witches there.
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Watt

As for his feet, sometimes he wore on each a sock, or on the one a sock and on the other a stocking, or a boot, or a shoe, or a slipper, or a sock and a boot, or a sock and a shoe, or a sock and a slipper, or a stocking and boot, or a stocking and shoe, or a stocking and slipper, or nothing at all. More

Flatland

I call our world Flatland, not because we call it so, but to make its nature clearer to you, my happy readers,who are privileged to live in Space.

Imagine a vast sheet of paper on which straight Lines, Triangles, Squares, Pentagons, Hexagons, and other figures, instead of remaining fixed in their places, move freely about, on or in the surface, but without the power of rising above or sinking below it, very much like shadows–only hard with luminous edges–and you will then have a More

A Time for Everything

Ecclesiastes 3

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:

a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
a time to kill, and a time to heal;
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A Table

A table means does it not my dear it means a whole steadiness. Is it
likely that a change.

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