Drinks Before Dinner Read Online Free

of saying things, this is the society in which these things are supposed to be said. The very fact of our saying these things is part of what these things are. So what you see when you walk the streets are people rushing along like this with radios to their ears. They are listening to the radios as they walk. They watch television when they get home and turn on the record players while the television sets are going; they are trying to keep up. They are reading papers as they walk along listening to radios. They are stopping in front of appliance stores to watch the banks of TV sets while they listen to their radios with their newspapers tucked under their arms. They don’t know how to keep up. They are reading reviews of movies based on plays taken from novels. They are going to school to study the novels upon which films they have seen are based. They remember the films about the lives of the authors of the novels they study upon which the lectures are based. They are trying to keep up.
JOEL    Well, if I understand Edgar correctly, he’s saying our culture consumes us. But didn’t people say that too in the eighteenth century when novels began to be published? He also says that passion does not last, but I am not sure it should. Can you imagine the effect of a constant lifelong passion on one’s prostate? He says our relationships are easily duplicated. But that’s what it means to have been evicted from Eden. So where’s the news in any of this? It has undoubtedly been true before our time that it appeared to somebody or other that nothing seemed to be worth doing. So it is tiresome to wring one’s hands over this. Perhaps something crucial has happened and we are becoming depleted persons in some way. But I look around and see so much unregenerate ego in human beings that I would welcome a loss of person for all of us, across the board. In fact, it ishugely funny to me that Edgar, with his formidable ego and a mind given over to its own inimitable hysteria, should worry over his loss of character. It is enormously funny. A doctor learns early in his career, that most illnesses are imaginary. It is a form of narcissism, of course. People love themselves more in the fear of death.
ANDREA    But he is talking of how we are compromised, and I understand that. I really understand that. The way we all duplicate each other. I really do understand that and feel that when I walk in the street and see other girls not only wearing my clothes but walking my walk. Oh, how I understand that. Life is becoming unclear. The lines are disappearing. I see women who are men and men who are women. I suppose I should say my idea of life is no longer clear. I see in old movies dead people who are still alive. They live in states of high drama. They have more life than I have.
CLAUDETTE    Good, Andrea dear. Let it be that way. Drama is to be avoided. I want to live my life as undramatically as possible. I want to live quietly and watch my children grow and keep my family fed and clean and enjoy beautiful things, and not be hurt by anyone. Besides which, whatever we know about our lives, we go on living them. Isn’t that right? Even you, Andrea. Even Edgar. No matter what we say of it, life requires us to go on living it. It is the custom of life to go on with itself no matter what we say or what we feel. It has that aspect of requiring us to go on with it. Life is so totally careless of what we feel or what we know, or think we feel or think we know, that all our emotions and thoughts are continuously superseded by other emotions and other thoughts because life pushes on and forces us to continue living it. So that even if we are blissfully happy, it pushes on until we are not; even if we are in love, it pushes on until we are not; and even if we discover something marvelous or do something thatmakes us famous, it pushes on. It just goes through a whole lifetime of our feelings, careless of all of them, not giving a damn for any