Hope: a tragedy

As primeiras duas páginas do livro:

"It's funny: it isn't the fire that kills you, it's the smoke.

There you are, pounding on the windows, climbing higher and higher through your burning home, trying to get away to get out, hoping that if you can just avoid the flames, perhaps you'll survive the fire, but all the time you're suffocating slowly, your lungs filling with smoke. There you are, waiting for the horrors to come from some there, from some other, from without, all the while you're dying, bit by airless bit, from within.

You buy a handgun - for protection, you say - and drop dead that night from a heart attack.

You put locks on your doors. You put bars on your windows. You put gates around your house The doctor phones: It's cancer, he says.

Swimming frantically up to the surface to escape from a menacing shark you get the bends and drown. 

You resolve, one sunny New Year's Day, to get back into shape. This is the year, you insist. A new beginning. A new start. A stronger you, a tougher you. At the health club the following morning, just as you're beginning your third set of bench presses, your muscles cramp and the barbell collapses onto your neck, crushing your windpipe. You can't cry out. Your face turns blue. Your arms go limp. There, on a poster on the wall beside you, are the last words you see before your eyes close and darkness envelopes you for eternity:

Feel the Burn.

It's funny."

Um pouquinho de diversão

"It is Monday morning, six weeks after my wife and I learned that she is pregnant with our first child, and I am stopped at a traffic light. The kid doesn't have a chance. It's a trick. I know this God; I know how He works. The baby will me miscarried, or die during childbirth, or my wife will die during childbirth, or they'll both die during childbirth, or neither of them will die and I'll think I'm in the clear, and then on the drive home from the hospital, we'll collide head-on with a drunk driver and they'll both die later, my wife and child, in the emergency room just down the hall from the room where only minutes ago we stood so happy and alive and full of promise.

That would be so God.

The teachers from my youth are gone, the parents old and mostly estranged. The man they told me about, though - he's still around. I can't shake him. I read Spinoza, I read Nietzche. I read National Lampoon. Nothing helps. I live with Him every day, and behold, He is still angry still vengeful still - eternally - pissed off.

- Man plans, my parents said, - and God laughs.

- When you least expect it, my teachers warned, - expect it."