Jerzy Pilch - The Mighty Angel

What kind of soul does a man have when he knows he has drunk away all the washing machines in the world? My answer is this: He has a winged soul, and his mind spins like the rotating drum in the final stages of the spin cycle. When you sense upon your heart the burden of a thousand drunk-away washing machines, it is unbearable. But when you lift your tormented gaze and see flocks of white-winged washing machines soaring across the watery heavens like squadrons of papal helicopters, you understand that you have been given more than others. You have been given an uncommon gift, and if you manage to survive, if you do not perish beforehand, you can begin a voyage in search of all the lost washing machines, and even — yes indeed — in search of all lost objects in general.

The gates of worldliness may open wide before you, yet if they do you must pay special attention, you must concentrate hard, because the gates of worldliness may open for good. They will not slam shut behind you, but if you are weak, if your step is unsteady and if sleep is upon you, you will be neither willing nor able to return. Often, after the hundredth drunk-away washing machine, or in the case of frailer individuals even the tenth, one loses for good one’s interest and pleasure in worldly matters. And things of the mind that have been completely freed from the bonds of worldliness are nothing but pure graphomania. Drinking away all the washing machines in the world leads inexorably to a complete neglect of worldliness; in writing, a complete neglect of worldliness leads to graphomania, and so anyone who writes and drinks is in a tough situation. I drank and I did not neglect writing, and now, with a drunkard’s tear in my eye, I am writing about a washing machine that has been neglected through drink. Oh, if I had found within myself not so much a curiosity about the worldly fault in its workings, but if I had simply found a free moment, a moment of free will, then naturally I would have had the appropriate person repair the washing machine. But I found within myself neither the one thing nor the other. Neither our, nor daily, nor bread, nor amen. My first wife eventually got used to the permanently unrepaired washing machine and stopped nagging me, and she left me without nagging. My second wife left before she had gotten used to it and before she started to nag.

They drank on Thursday too. And how! And now he was shouting day and night, and he had gone hoarse; now he was dying.

— Yuri Tynyanov

After first fortifying myself amply, very amply, I started to assemble all my belongings on the roof of the shack, where I could reach them: first my briefcase, then one bottle after another: a Saxon rye, then four unopened Black Forest slivovitzes and one opened one, all carefully placed in a row at the edge of the roof.

— Hans Fallada

The man is killing time — there’s nothing else.

No help now from the fifth of Bourbon

chucked helter-skelter into the river.

— Robert Lowell

“Brandy?” Danny cried. “Thou hast brandy? Perhaps it is for some sick old mother,” he said naïvely. “Perhaps thou keepest it for Our Lord Jesus when He comes again. Who am I, thy friend, to judge the destination of this brandy?”

— John Steinbeck

Do you know, do you know, my good sir, that I even drank away her stockings?

— Fyodor Dostoevsky

Do I not have feelings? Of course I do. The more I drink, the more I feel. That’s exactly why I drink — in drink I’m seeking compassion and sympathy. I’m not looking for joy, only for pain. . I drink because I want to suffer more intensely!

— Fyodor Dostoevsky

God neither wants nor does not want the sins that actually happen; He merely permits them.

— Gottfried Wilhem Leibnitz

And that was how I spent the whole night, drinking and vomiting in turn.

— Hans Fallada

He enters the church; his lips move in something resembling a prayer. Inside it’s cool; on the walls are pictures of the stations of the cross. No one seems to be looking. He especially likes to drink in churches.

— Malcolm Lowry

But there were also topers who, sensing an excess of drink within themselves, and unwilling to give up when the merriment continued after dinner, would go behind the house, deliberately make themselves vomit, then return to the company and start drinking all over again.

— Jędrzej Kitowicz

Don’t you find it a little tiresome living with a drunk? You haven’t seen the worst yet. I knock everything over. I puke the whole time. It’s a miracle I’ve felt so good these last few days. You’re like an antidote that’s mixed with the alcohol to maintain my equilibrium; but it won’t last forever.

— John O’Brien

And He will pass sentence on everyone justly, and He will forgive the good and the evil, the arrogant and the humble. . And when He is done with everyone, then He will say unto us too: “You too come hither,” he will say. “Come, all you thoroughly drunk ones! Come, you weak, weak ones! Come, you disgraced ones!” And we will all come without shame and stand before Him. And He will say: “You are swine! In the image and likeness of beasts! But come to me, you too!”

— Fyodor Dostoevsky

Only a second-rate mind is unable to choose between literature and a true night of the soul.

— E. M. Cioran

Yet I cannot comprehend how someone was able to extend the pleasure of drinking beyond his thirst, and create in his imagination as it were an artificial and unnatural appetite.

— Michel de Montaigne

Lord, grant all us drunkards such a gentle and beautiful death.

— Joseph Roth

“I think I feel like a drink.”

“Almost everyone feels like a drink, it’s just they don’t know it.”

— Charles Bukowski

I was terrified and drank more than ever. I was attempting my first novel. I drank a pint of whiskey and two six packs of beer each night while writing. I smoked cheap cigars and typed and drank and listened to classical music on the radio until dawn. I set a goal of ten pages a night but I never knew until the next day how many pages I had written. I’d get up in the morning, vomit, then walk to the front room and look on the couch to see how many pages there were. I always exceeded my ten.

— Charles Bukowski

And I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, Write. .

— Revelation

This shaking keeps me steady.

— Theodore Roethke

And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud. .

— Revelation

Hard drink is the gateway to all immorality:

To quarrels and insults, to stealing, vulgarity,

And other things too; for the drunken man’s sin

Is the devil within.

— Song Against Drunkenness

(from Heczka’s hymnal, no. 443)

Why don’t you sing us that little drunken aria?

— (from Samuel B. Linde’s dictionary)

As a biologist, as a social thinker concerned with power and world projects, the molding of a universal order, as a furnisher of interpretation and opinion to the educated masses — as all of these he appeared to need a great amount of copulation.

— Saul Bellow

Vodka’s a strange thing. It’s a fiendishly sharp drink, a mysterious concoction of herbs, which has some peculiar relation to the stars.

— Herman Broch

We walked side by side down the Boulevard Saint-Germain, and in front of the window of the anti-alcohol league, which as usual contained a display of desiccated brains, I said:

“At this point, of course, it’s best to cross to the other side.”

— Philippe Soupault

A real man is one who desires repetition.

— Søren Kierkegaard

At sixteen, while still at school, I began to visit more regularly than before a pleasantly informal bawdy house; after sampling all seven girls, I concentrated my attention on roly-poly Polymnia, with whom I used to drink lots of foamy beer at a wet table in an orchard — I simply adore orchards.