Tag Archives: RKS literature

RKS Literature: The Temporary Joy of a Successful Operation (Yury Felsen)

“I was recuperating after a successful operation. The joy, such that convalescents experience was long gone and had given way to neurotic boredom of interminable waiting. Those who are often ill know this impatient reckoning of days and hours, the alarm if the time of discharge is again discharged, the irritability brought on by theContinue reading “RKS Literature: The Temporary Joy of a Successful Operation (Yury Felsen)”

RKS Literature: Post Morphine Blues (Yury Felsen)

“I would awake towards morning (already prepared for the requital) with the anguish of an unhabituated drunkard emerging from inebriation, but tenfold and irremediable. A fierce cold penetrated my body, no matter how warmly I enswathed myself. The pain would return, fortified by bitter comparison-just moments ago I had dropped off so serenely. The dayContinue reading “RKS Literature: Post Morphine Blues (Yury Felsen)”

RKS Literature: The Initial Bliss and Joy of Morphine (Yury Felsen)

“After my own operation I had experienced unremitting, unbearable pain, and over the course of ten days, every evening before sleep, that same Margarita would inject me with morphine. I cannot recall another so blissful and happy state that could compare with what you begin to feel several minutes after the injection. Somewhere inside thereContinue reading “RKS Literature: The Initial Bliss and Joy of Morphine (Yury Felsen)”

RKS Literature: After a Southern Lynching How Does Mike the Mob Participant Feel? Part 2 (John Steinbeck)

“He walked around the side of his house and went in the back door. His thin petulant wife was sitting by the open gas oven warming herself. She turned complaining eyes on Mike where he stood in the doorway. Then her eyes widened and hung on his face. ‘You been with a woman,’ she saidContinue reading “RKS Literature: After a Southern Lynching How Does Mike the Mob Participant Feel? Part 2 (John Steinbeck)”

RKS Literature: After a Southern Lynching How Does Mike the Mob Participant Feel? Part 1 (John Steinbeck)

“Mike shied away from the contact. ‘It don’t make you feel nothing.’ He put down his head and increased his pace The little bartender had nearly to trot to keep up. The street lights were fewer. It was darker and safer. Mike burst out, “Makes you feel kind of cut off and tired, but kindContinue reading “RKS Literature: After a Southern Lynching How Does Mike the Mob Participant Feel? Part 1 (John Steinbeck)”

RKS Literature: That Oft Used Parental Expression “When I’m Dead….” (Georges Simenon)

“This was the first time since I’d been with you in the room where you were slowly dying that you spoke, even indirectly, of death. When I was a child and then a young man, you often spoke of it, I’d almost say with satisfaction. ‘ When I’m dead children…..’ Or: ‘You’ll understand when I’mContinue reading “RKS Literature: That Oft Used Parental Expression “When I’m Dead….” (Georges Simenon)”

RKS Literature: What Else Could it be But Hatred? (Georges Simenon)

“When I speak of hatred, I’m not exaggerating. True, I wasn’t there. But when a husband and wife living under the same roof get to the point where each does his own cooking, each keeping his provisions in his own locked food cupboard, and one waits for the other to vacate the kitchen before gettingContinue reading “RKS Literature: What Else Could it be But Hatred? (Georges Simenon)”

RKS Literature: Merciless Judging of Parents by Their Children (Georges Simenon)

“Today I realize that a couple with children is not just a couple. And sometimes they forget it. Near them in the house, almost always present, there are children who watch them and, in the measure of their own intelligence, judge them. The parents think of themselves as simply a father and a mother. ButContinue reading “RKS Literature: Merciless Judging of Parents by Their Children (Georges Simenon)”

RKS Literature: Harlem’s Sense of Community Before Its Collapse (James Baldwin)

“When I say I was luckier than the children are today I am deliberately making a very dangerous statement, a statement that I am willing, even anxious, to be called on. A black boy born in New York’s Harlem in 1924 was born of southerners who had but lately been driven from the land andContinue reading “RKS Literature: Harlem’s Sense of Community Before Its Collapse (James Baldwin)”

RKS Literature: Can a White Person Ever Know What a Black Person is Talking About? (James Baldwin)

“I hit the streets when I was seven. It was in the middle of the Depression and I learned how to sing out of hard experience. To be black was to confront, and be forced to alter, a condition forged in history. To be white was to be forced to digest a delusion called whiteContinue reading “RKS Literature: Can a White Person Ever Know What a Black Person is Talking About? (James Baldwin)”