 | 78,000 in one minute (whisper of a scream)
78,000 human beings
we'll destroy ourselves?
*
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''Aah, Mrs. Miserable," he said, as if she could hear, "all your life working, and now in bed you lie, servants to tend, you do not even need to call to be tended, and still you work. Such hard work it is to die? Such hard work?"
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The body threshed, her hand clung in his. A melody, ghost-thin, hovered on her lips, and like a guilty ghost, the vision of her bent in listening to it, silencing the record instantly he was near. Now, heedless of his presence, she floated the melody on and on.
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"Hid it from me," he complained, "how many times you listened to remember it so?" And tried to think when she had first played it, or first begun to silence her few records when he came nearbut could reconstruct nothing. There was only this room with its tall hooked pillar and its swarm of sounds.
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| No man one
except through others
Strong
with the not yet
in the now
Dogma dead
war dead
one country
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"It helps, Mrs. Philosopher, words from books? It helps?" And it seemed to him that for seventy years she had hidden a tape recorder, infinitely microscopic, within her, that it had coiled infinite mile on mile, trapping every song, every melody, every word read, heard,
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| | *The italicized passage contains references to the ships that transported slaves from Africa to America, to the trains that took millions of Jews and other Nazi victims to the concentration camps, and to the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
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