Word: brokenness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1990
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...cell with three other Kuwaitis. Two of the three were tortured while Basa was forced to watch. "They wanted names, resistance leaders, people they could go after," he says. "One fellow had his genitals prodded with an electric rod. After that he was made to sit on a broken Pepsi bottle. Then, working very slowly, they ripped the fingernails off his right hand. He broke, of course. Who wouldn't? He gave them some names. And then they killed him. A single shot between the eyes...
Ernest, I came to understand, was a sort of brilliant grown-up orphan: he had an air that was both distinguished and tattered. Something in his mind had broken years before. He survived on technique. Ernest taught me how to forage for an all-American diet: wait politely behind a fast-food place at closing time and accept the unsold hamburgers and fries. A third problem, keeping clean, was difficult but manageable: a cold-water spigot in the morning...
...layering outward from the child's self. If he gets lost in the galaxy, he can find the way back, can fly through the concentric circles to his own house -- from outermost remoteness to innermost home. Nostalgia means the nostos algos, the agony to return home. What got broken long ago in Ernest was his charts and instruments for the journey...
...rings. The person called never spoke first. To take our telephones into more soundproof rooms, we extended phone lines with lamp wire. At safer hours we slipped up and down corridors to meet together in different apartments. On the hall floor outside my apartment, I positioned a piece of broken mirror against the wall so that the entire length of the corridor was visible from my partly open door. It was a group rule that everyone checked the mirror before stepping into the hall. When we made visits, knocks on the door required still another code...
...modern computers, and it had built the nation's telephone system, which is essentially one vast computer network. Industry analysts predicted that AT&T one day would even challenge IBM for market supremacy. The government, which had barred Ma Bell from the business until the phone monopoly was broken in 1984, fretted that it might be opening the way for the giant (1989 revenues: $36.11 billion) to dominate the computer industry. But instead of conquering the market, AT&T has suffered one humiliating defeat after another, racking up huge losses in the process...