Pulphead

John Jeremiah Sullivan

"Statistically speaking, my bout with Evangelicalism was probably unremarkable. For white Americans with my socioeconomic background (middle to upper-middle class), it's an experience commonly linked to the teens and moved beyond once one reaches twenty. These kids around me at Creation--a lot of them were like that. How many even knew who Darwin was? They'd learn. At least once a year since college, I'll be getting to know someone, and it comes out that we have in common a high school "Jesus phase." That's always an excellent laugh. Except a phase is supposed to end--or at least give way to other phases--not simply expand into a long preoccupation...My problem is not that I dream I'm in hell..It isn't like I feel psychologically harmed. It isn't even that I feel like a sucker for having bought it all. It's that I love Jesus Christ.

Why should He vex a person? Why is His ghost not friendlier? Why can't I just be a good child of the Enlightenment and see in His life a sustaining example of what we can be, as a species?

Once you've known Him as a God, it's hard to find comfort in the man. The sheer sensation of life that comes with a total, all pervading notion of being--the pulse of consequence one projects onto even the humblest of things--the pull of that won't slacken.

And one has doubts about one's doubts."



From another essay

"He appeared to me only once afterward, and that was two and a half years later, in Paris. It's not as if Paris is a city I know, or have even visited more than a couple of times. He knew it well. I was coming up the stairs from the metro in the sunshine with the girl, whom I later married, on my left arm, when my senses became intensely alert to his presence about a foot and half to my right. I couldn't look directly at him: I had to let him hang back in my peripheral vision, else he'd slip away. It was a bargain we made in silence. I could see enough to tell he wasn't young but was maybe twenty years younger than when I'd known him, wearing black framed engineer's glasses he'd worn at just that time in his life, looking up and very serious, climbing the steps to the light, where I lost him."

From an essay on Michael Jackson

"His physical body is arguably, even inarguably, the greatest piece of postmodern American sculpture."

He writes about the first moment when he moonwalks. It happens at 3:36.






From an essay about animals attacking humans

"But I'm not sure we'll ever say the world is ours again, not sure we'll every really feel at home here again. That may be for the best. Being brave, after all, means saying in every situation, "I'll comport myself as I think honorable, no matter the risk and no matter what the voice of frowning power have to say about it. That's the kind of thinking that'll get you raped by a rhino."

Jamaican dance hall music recommended by Sullivan after visiting with Bunny Wailer of Bob Marley fame.



From Tessa Hadley's London Train
She wouldn't say anything, unless Robert asked. She would watch and see what he wanted. The night ahead was a brimming dish she had to carry without spilling it.