First Lines...

Just one of my little experiments...

See if you can guess what I did:

I.

All of this more or less happened, Lolita, light of my life. It is a truth universally acknowledged that, it was the best of times; it was the worst of times, and many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buenidia was to remember that distant afternoon when Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party and Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.

“What’s it going to be, then, eh, lads?”

“Eh bien, mon prince,” said the vampire who died today, or yesterday, if you really want to hear about it. “Call me Ishmael.”

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold, late in the day, early in the century. It was a dark and stormy night and the sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel. And it was a pleasure to burn; it was love at first sight. For a long time, I went to bed early, and someone must have slandered Josef K. as stately Gregor Samsa awoke one morning to find that a screaming comes across the sky, once upon a time…and a very good time it was…

II.

You are about to begin reading the saddest story I have ever heard. I begin with writing the first sentence - in the beginning, once upon a time - a story has no beginning or end. Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, I have never begun a novel with more misgiving.

I am a sick man; I am an invisible man. I was born twice (you don’t know about me). Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital. If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me. You better not never tell nobody but God that all happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way (they’re out there).

I am an American. In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly-fishing. In my younger and more vulnerable years, no one would have believed a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men. In the town, there were two mutes. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. And all children, except one, grow up.

He was born with a gift of laughter and when he was nearly thirteen, he got his arm badly broken at the elbow. I had the story, bit by bit, from various people. The stranger came early in February. The cold passed reluctantly from the earth. The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. In the late summer of that year, we lived in a house in a village: Towers of Zenith. It was a queer, sultry summer, and they say when trouble comes, close ranks.

Ours is essentially a tragic age – true! – nervous – very, very nervous. Behind every man now alive stands thirty ghosts, and to be born…one has to die. He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream far out in the uncharted backwaters of somewhere in La Mancha (ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board). A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head.

Justice? You get justice in the next world; in this world you have the law in a hole in the ground. Of all the things that drive men to the riverrun sea, the most common disaster, I’ve come to learn, is women. There was no possibility of taking a walk that day when I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house. It was a wrong number that started it (124 was spiteful). My suffering was sad and gloomy. Under certain circumstance there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as the human race, to which so many of my readers belong.