The Moral Order in Popular Writing

You and I are what they used to call witnesses, vouching with our lives for something we never saw. - Peter S. Beagle, The Folk of the Air

[The manumitted slave] Thorby . . . answered, “If you are Captain Fjalar Krausa, I have a message for you, noble sir.” . . .
“To Captain Fjalar Krausa, master of Starship Sisu from Baslim the Cripple. Greetings, old friend! Greetings to your family, clan, and sib, and my humblest respects to your revered mother. I am speaking to you through the mouth of my adopted son. He does not understand Suomic; I address you privately. When you receive this message, I am already dead. My son is the only thing of value of which I die possessed; I entrust him to your care. I ask that you succor and admonish him as if you were I. When opportunity presents, I ask that you deliver him to the commander of any vessel of the Hegemonic Guard, saying that he is a distressed citizen of the Hegemony and entitled as such to their help in locating his family. If they will bestir themselves, they can establish his identity and restore him to his people. All the rest I leave to your good judgment. I have enjoined him to obey you and I believe that he will; he is a good lad, within the limits of his age and experience, and I entrust him to you with a serene heart. My life has been long and rich; I am content. Farewell.” - Citizen of the Galaxy, Simon and Schuster trade paperback edition, pp 63 ff [by the early Robert A. Heinlein]

Later, in the same work, crew-members of a ship of the Hegemony:

"Not me," Stancke said firmly.
"You. When you're a C.O. and comes time to do something unpleasant, there you'll be, trying to get your tummy in and your chest out, with your chubby little face set in hero lines." p. 181

And:

Colonel Baslim ... one of the toughest, sanest, most humane men ever to wear our uniform. p. 189
Did [Thorby] really have blood relatives somewhere?
"I suppose so," he answered slowly. "I don't know."
"Mmm . . ." Brisby wondered what it was like to have no frame to your picture. pp. 190-1

This spot-on send-up of academic jargon that "darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge":

[Thorby's grandfather, a professor:]
"I heard you use that term 'sold' once before. You must realize that it is not correct. After all, the serfdom practiced in the Sargony is not chattel slavery. It derives from the ancient Hindu gild [sic] or 'caste' system--a stabilized social order with mutual obligations up and down. You must not call it 'slavery.'" p. 236
"I don't know any other word to translate the Sargonese term."
"I could think of several, though I don't know Sargonese . . . it's not a useful term in scholarship. But, my dear Thor, you aren't a student of human histories and culture. Grant me a little authority in my own field." p. 236

my first affair with that older woman
she was ten years older
and mortally hurt by the past
and the present;
she treated me badly ...
 
yet we had our moments; and
our little soap opera ended
with her in a coma
in the hospital,
and I sat at her bed
for hours
talking to her,
and then she opened her eyes
and saw me:
"I knew it would be you,"

she said. - Charles Bukowski, You Get So Alone At Times That It Just Makes Sense

From Robert B. Parker's Spenser series of detective novels:

  [Spenser:] "Have Hawk for Thanksgiving dinner?"

  [Susan:] "Certainly . . ."
  "Suze," I said. "You just don't have Hawk for Thanksgiving dinner . . . You know how in medieval landscape painting the artists would often include an allegorical representation of death to remind us that it's always present and imminent?"
  She nodded.
  "That's like inviting Hawk to Thanksgiving dinner. He'd be the figure in the landscape, and that would compromise him. Hawk would not want you to invite him."
  "That doesn't make any sense," Susan said.
  "It would to Hawk." p. 126
  I said, "He and I are part of the same cold place." p. 127
  "One of the rules," she said. . . .
  "Doesn't matter," I said. "It's a way to live. Anything else is confusion." p. 134 [Robert B. Parker, Ceremony]

For my ivy league friends
you should have seen them back then: raggedy-ass, wild-eyed, raving
against the order
now
they have been ingested, digested, rested
they write reviews for the journals
they write well-worked, quiet, inoffensive poesy
they edit so many of the magazines that I have no idea where I should send this
poem
since they attack my work with alarming regularity
and
I can't read theirs

 - Bukowski, You Get So Alone At Times That It Just Makes Sense

Peter S. Beagle - The Folk of the Air:

  [John Erne, the combat master:] "I never met a real musician who wasn't a miser with himself. They'll never come all the way with you anywhere." p. 150 
  Farrell: "You're like me." ...
  "Am I? I don't have room for more than the one seriousness, if that's what you mean. ... People invite me to their history classes, and I give demonstrations and talk about extinct attitudes. I talk about chivalry, honor, prouesse, and playing by the rules, and I watch their skins crawl." ...
  "This is Avicenna, they just like theoretical violence, rebels in Paraguay blowing up bad folks they don't know. They like the Middle Ages the same way, with the uncool stuff left out. But you scare them, you're like a pterodactyl flapping around the classroom, screaming and shitting. Too real." p. 151
  Erne: "A dead art form," he said, "like lute music. As unnatural to the animal as opera or ballet, and yet nobody who puts on even cardboard armor can quite escape it--any more than you can escape the fact that your music believes in God and hell and the King. You and I are what they used to call witnesses, vouching with our lives for something we never saw. The bitch of it is, all we ever wanted to be was experts." p. 152
  Ben [alter ego is Egil Eyvindsson]: "[This university tolerates] Blacks and Chicanos out of fear--and expect[s] to be praised for it." p. 161
  Ben/Egil: "Things taste so different there, Joe; the light's all different, the constellations, the facial expressions ..."
  The cape dogs danced hotly against the bars, whining with grim urgency. They smelled to Farrell of blood and horse dung and chocolate, and he wondered whether they could sense Egil, if only as a wrongness, a constant disquieting shiver in their wild logic. p. 195
  The gyrfalcon kept her eyes closed for a moment, then opened them so explosively that Farrell stepped back from the dark, living emptiness of her gaze.
  Frederik said, "Look at her. she balances between habit and what we'd call madness, and for her there's no such thing as the future. I don't think there's really any present, either--there's just the endless past going around and around her, over and through her. When I hold her on the glove--"He indicated the leather jesses that leashed the falcon's ankles, "--she's more or less tied to my present, but the moment I let her go, she circles up into her real time. Her real time, where I never existed and where nothing's extinct." p. 204

you get so alone at times that it just makes sense
when I was a starving writer I used to read the major writers in the
major magazines (in the library, of course) and it made me feel very bad because--being a student of the word and the way, I realized
that they were faking it: I could sense each false emotion, each utter pretense. - Bukowski

The Folk of the Air: The goddess Sia: "I like it here," she said softly. "Of all worlds, this one was made for me, with its silliness and its cruelty, and its fine trees." ...
"And still you desire one another ... I know gods who have come into existence only because two of you wanted there to be a reason for what they were about to do that afternoon. Listen, I tell you that on the stars they can smell your desire--there are ears of a shape you have no word for listening to your dreams and lies, tears and gruntings. There is nothing like you anywhere among all the stones in the sky, do you realize that?" p. 272
Ben: "Egil was my sanity. The real crazies go to meetings, teach what they love to people who don't love anything, and stand around at receptions for years with other crazy people who never do give a shit about them. And they don't know what anything is, just what everybody thinks it's like. [...] Egil knew what poetry is, and what God is, and what death is. [...] I'll never have a good time like that again. Just tenure." p. 283
"Um. Egil didn't think much of our civilization, the little he saw of it. He thought it was probably all right, for people who really didn't care a lot about anything."

help wanted
I was a crazed young man and then found this book written
        by a
crazed older man and I felt better because he was
able to write it down. - Bukowski