Grendel
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Important Quotations Explained
1. I
understood that the world was nothing: a mechanical chaos of casual,
brute enmity on which we stupidly impose our hopes and fears. I
understood that, finally and absolutely, I alone exist. All the
rest, I saw, is merely what pushes me, or what I push against, blindly—as
blindly as all that is not myself pushes back.
2. Thus
I fled, ridiculous hairy creature torn apart by poetry—crawling,
whimpering, streaming tears, across the world like a two-headed
beast, like mixed-up lamb and kid at the tail of a baffled, indifferent
ewe—and I gnashed my teeth and clutched the sides of my head as
if to heal the split, but I couldn’t.
3. “Nevertheless,
something will come of all this,” I said.
“Nothing,”
he said. “A brief pulsation in the black hole of eternity. My advice
to you—”
“Wait and see,” I said.
He
shook his head. “My advice to you, my violent friend, is to seek
out gold and sit on it.”
4. I
had become something, as if born again. I had hung between possibilities
before, between the cold truths I knew and the heart-sucking conjuring
tricks of the Shaper; now that was passed: I was Grendel, Ruiner
of Meadhalls, Wrecker of Kings!
But also,
as never before, I was alone.
5. As
you see it it is, while the seeing lasts, dark nightmare-history,
time-as-coffin; but where the water was rigid there will be fish,
and men will survive on their flesh till spring. It’s coming, my
brother. . . . Though you murder the world, transmogrify life into
I and it, strong searching roots will crack your cave and rain will
cleanse it: The world will burn green, sperm build again.
