Normally, there is your life, and you turn on the television and there is news, and no matter how grave it is, or how deep in the toilet the world has fallen, or how relevant the information might be to your own existence, your life remains a separate entity from the news. You still have to wash your underpants during a war, don’t you? And don’t you still have to fight with your loved ones and then apologize when you don’t mean it even when there’s a hole in the sky burning everything to a crisp? Of course you do. As a rule, there’s no hole big enough to interrupt this interminable business of living, but there are exceptions, grim instances in the lives of a few select unlucky bastards when the news in the papers and the news in their bedrooms intersect. I tell you, it’s a daunting and appalling moment when you have to read the newspapers to find out about your own struggle.

A Fraction of the Whole ~ Steve Toltz

Darkness is boring and surprisingly brown.

A Fraction of the Whole ~ Steve Toltz

I learned that detaching is easy. Retreat? Easy. Hiding? Dissolving? Extraction? Simple. When you withdraw from the world, the world withdraws to, in equal measure. It’s a two-step, you and the world. I didn’t look for trouble, and it wore me down that none found me. Doing nothing is as tumultuous for me as working on the floor on the New York Stock Exchange on the morning of a market crash. It’s how I’m made. Nothing happened to me in three years and it was very, very stressful.

A Fraction of the Whole ~ Steve Toltz

Betrayal wears a lot of different hats. You don’t have to make a show of it like Brutus did, you don’t have to leave anything viable jutting from the base of your best friend’s spine, and afterward you can stand there straining your ears for hours, but you won’t hear a cock crow either. No, the most insidious betrayals are done merely by leaving the life jacket hanging yin your closet while you lie to yourself that it’s probably not the drowning man’s size. That’s how we slide, and while we slide we blame the world’s problems on colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, corporatism, stupid white men and America, but there is no need to make a brand name of blame. Individual self-interest: that’s the source of our descent, and it doesn’t start in the boardrooms or the war rooms either. It starts in the home.

A Fraction of the Whole ~ Steve Toltz

In short, I’m a sweetheart, but I’m cold about it.

A Fraction of the Whole ~ Steve Toltz

All I could do was uselessly shake a clenched fist and think how people are so eager to become slaves it’s unbelievable. Christ. Sometimes they throw off their freedom so quickly, you’d think it was burning them.

A Fraction of the Whole ~ Steve Toltz

I looked over the terrifying drop and the my stomach lurched and all my joints locked and I had the following horrible thought: You experience life alone, you can be as intimate with another as much as you like, but there has to be always a part of you and your existence that is incommunicable; you die alone, that experience is yours alone, you might have a dozen spectators who love you, but your isolation, from birth to death, is never fully penetrated. What if death is the same aloneness, though, for eternity? An incommunicable, cruel and infinite loneliness. We don’t know what death is. Maybe it’s that.

A Fraction of the Whole ~ Steve Toltz

Then I started thinking about tears. What was evolution up to when it rendered the human body incapable of concealing sadness? is it somehow crucial to the survival of the species that we can’t hide our melancholy? Why? What’s the evolutionary benefit of crying? To elicit sympathy? Does evolution have a Machiavellian streak? After a big cry, you always feel drained and exhaust and sometimes embarrassed, especially if the tears come after watching television commercial for tea bags. Is it evolution’s design to humble us? To humiliate us?

Fuck.

A Fraction of the Whole ~ Steve Toltz

Not much gets past you, I’ll bet. No, I won’t use that hackneyed phrase that you remind me of myself when I was a boy, because, frankly, you don’t. You remind me of myself now, as a man, in jail, and it’s pretty frightening for me to be able to make that comparison, Martin, don’t you think? Considering, well, you’re just a kid.

A Fraction of the Whole ~ Steve Toltz

Just because I’m here for life doesn’t mean I won’t be out one day. Life doesn’t really mean life. It’s just a figure of speech. It means an eternity which is shorter than life, if you know what I mean.

A Fraction of the Whole ~ Steve Toltz

You don’t want to be regular Joe. You just have to look out a window and see. I’ll tell you what’s out there: a bunch of slaves in love with the freedom they think they have. But they’ve chained themselves to some job or another, or to a squad of rug rats. They’re prisoners too, only they don’t know it.

A Fraction of the Whole

That’s the way of life for us boys. It would shake the foundations of common folk, but we have to be tough and prepared to live against the wall with our eyes blazing and our fingers twitching. After a while it becomes an unconscious act, you know. You develop a sixth sense. It’s true. Paranoia makes a man evolve. Bet they don’t teach you that in the classroom! Precognition, ESP, telepathy – we criminals have prophetic souls. We know what’s coming even before it happens. You have to. It’s survival mechanism. Knives, bullets, fists, they come out of the woodwork. Everyone wants your name on a headstone, so on your toes, boys! It’s a cunt of a life! But there are rewards.

A Fraction of the Whole ~ Steve Toltz

Some people are body-and-soul repulsed at being a figure of pity. Others, such as me, can soak it up greedily, mostly because having pitied themselves for so long, it seems right that everyone else is finally getting on the bandwagon.

A Fraction of the Whole ~ Steve Toltz

So use your imagination, Jasper, when I tell you one gazillionth of what I saw:

I saw all the dawns come up too early and all the middays reminding you you’d better get a hurry on and all the dusks whisper “I don’t think you’re going to make it” and all the shrugging midnights say “Better luck tomorrow.” I saw all the hands that ever waved to a stranger thinking it was a friend. I saw all the eyes that ever winked to let someone know their insult was only a joke. I saw all the men wipe down toilet seats before urinating but never after. I saw all the lonely men stare at department store mannequins and think “I’m attracted to a mannequin. This is getting sad.” I saw all the love triangles and a few love rectangles and one crazy love hexagon in the back room of a sweaty Parisian café. I saw all the condoms put on the wrong way. I saw all the ambulance drivers on their off hours caught in traffic wishing there was a dying man in the backseat. I saw all the charity-givers wink at heaven. I saw all the Buddhists bitten by spiders they wouldn’t kill. I saw all the flies bang uselessly into the screen doors and all the fleas laughing as they rode in on pets. I saw all the broken dishes in all the Greek restaurants and all the Greeks thinking “Culture’s one thing, but this is getting expensive.” I saw all the lonely people scared by their own cats. I saw all the prams, and anyone who says all babies are cute didn’t see the babies I saw. I saw all the funerals and all the acquaintances of the dead enjoying their afternoon off work. I saw all the astrology columns predicting that one twelfth of the population of earth will be visited by a relative who wants to borrow money. I saw all the forgeries of great paintings but no forgeries of great books. I saw all the signs forbidding entrance and exit but none forbidding arson or murder. I saw all the carpets with cigarette burns and all the kneecaps with carpet burns. I saw all the worms dissected by curious children and eminent scientists. I saw all the polar bears and the grizzly bears and the koala bears used to describe fat people you just want to cuddle. I saw all the ugly men hitting on all the happy women who made the mistake of smiling at them. I saw inside all the mouths and it’s really disgusting in there. I saw all the bird’s-eye views of all the birds who think humanity looks pretty active for a bunch of toilet heads...

A Fraction of the Whole ~ Steve Toltz

At eleven, she had that thing that was eventually perfected on the Parisian catwalks – a pout. I didn’t know it then, but pouts operate like this: they suggest a temporary dissatisfaction that entices you to satisfy it. You think: If only I could satisfy that pout, I would be happy. It’s only a recent blip in evolution, the pout. Paleolithic man never heard of it.

A Fraction of the Whole ~ Steve Toltz

She wasn’t just at death’s door, she was pounding on it! Oh no! A catastrophe! It was going to be a race to the finish line! Who would be first? The old biddy was nearly eighty, so she’d been practicing dying for a lot longer than me. She had nature on her side. I had nothing but luck to hold out for. I was too young to die of old age but too old for infant mortality. I was stuck in the middle, that terrible stretch of time where people can’t help but breathe.

A Fraction of the Whole ~ Steve Toltz

I have nothing against children. I just wouldn’t trust one not to giggle if I accidently stepped on a land mine.

A Fraction of the Whole ~ Steve Toltz

I concluded that my father had tried to erase any image of his brother so he might forget him. The futility of the attempt was obvious; when you put in that much effort to forget someone, the effort itself becomes a memory. Then you have to forget the forgetting, and that too is memorable.

A Fraction of the Whole ~ Steve Toltz

Most of my life I never worked out whether to pity, ignore, adore, judge or murder my father.

A Fraction of the Whole ~ Steve Toltz

You never hear about a sportsman losing his sense of smell in a tragic accident, and for good reason; in order for the universe to teach excruciating lessons that we are unable to apply in later life, the sportsman must lose his legs, the philosopher his mind, the painter his eyes, the musician his years, the chef his tongue. My lesson? I have lost my freedom, and found myself in this strange prison, where the trickiest adjustment, other than getting used to not having anything in my pockets and being treated like a dog that pissed in a sacred temple, is the boredom.

A Fraction of the Whole ~ Steve Toltz