City of God by E.L. Doctorow Read Free Book Online

geopolitical adventures of the cold war toward ordinary people, who get their news from the newspaper.
    He is as middle-class as she is, born in upstate New York, perhaps, though it is wrong to place him precisely in that his whole life has been a training away from the specific identity attaching to a region or a family. More precisely, his nihilist moral endowment, or perhaps only the necessity of bringing the movie in under two hours, has erased any secondary compensation of character that is conferred by a religious or ethnic qualification.
    By now he has wired his mistress so that he can hear the husband’s private conversations with her, learn the weaknesses, the inflections of voice that betray fear or guilt, lust or love. The husband has a softness about the underchin, a mama thing in his most private moments, a desire for his wife’s praise and admiration. Living with him she has felt imprisoned. The drama of his business life is like a bludgeon. She understands that his prideful attention to her in public is a kind of self-congratulation, in the same way that he will not go anywhere or accept any invitation that does not by its auspices bring honor or status to himself.
    Why she has responded to the dark-hearted lover is not clearly thought out by her but is in fact what she responded to when her executive husband courted her, with the sense in both instances of rising on a tide that would lift her with immense power beyond any possibilities of freedom she could have realized for herself. But she has become as indentured to her lover and to his ways as she had been to her husband according to his, and freedom for her is realized as subjection, as an idea attainable only in its wreckage.
    And so we have in these three roles three lives more or less unattached to reality, and vivified by that fact. The lover, for his part, envisions a grand finale to his enterprise that is so dangerous, so extreme, that he decides his life, heretofore adrift in boredom and alienation and the absence of serious conviction, may now be redemptively recon-ceived as an artform.

    â€”This is my laboratory, here, in my skull. I can assure you that it is barely furnished. In fact, in a matter of speaking, my work has been to empty my laboratory of the furniture there, the beakers, measuring scales, cabinets, old books. While I have succeeded to some extent, there are still some things here that I can’t seem to part with: the idea that the universe is designed, that there are a few simple rules, or laws, physical laws, from which all the manifold processes of life and nonlife can be derived. So you see I am hardly the undermining subversive revolutionary the Nazis of Hitler made me out to be.
    Of course, the universe we have all known and seen since our childhoods is only apparently explained by the great, esteemed Sir Isaac Newton. That universe, with all the stars in the heavens and the planets turning in their orbits and night following day, and actions having reactions and objects in their gravity falling—all of it seems quite sound except to a mind like mine, nor is it the only one. Because my revered Sir Isaac’s mechanical model of the universe makes one or two assumptions that cannot be proven. The idea of absolute motion and absolute rest, for example, the idea that something can move in an absolute sense without reference to anything else. This is clearly impossible, a concept that cannot be proven empirically, by reference to experience. The ship that moves on the sea does so with reference to the land. Or if you prefer with reference to another ship, moving at a greater speed or a slower speed. Or by reference to a dirigible overhead. Or to a whale beneath the sea. Or to the currents of the sea itself. Always to something. And this is true of a planet as well. There is nothing in the universe that can be proven to move absolutely without reference to something else in the universe, or for that matter without