Bar Quotes - page 25
One is reminded of the actor, playing the role of a villain in a traveling theatrical troupe, who, at a particularly tense moment in the play, was shot by an excited cowpuncher in the audience. But this kind of confusion does not seem to be confined to unsophisticated theatergoers. [...] Paul Muni, after playing the part of Clarence Darrow in Inherit the Wind, was invited to address the American Bar Association; Ralph Bellamy, after playing the role of Frankin D. Roosevelt in Sunrise at Campobello, was invited by several colleges to speak on Roosevelt. Also, there are those astonishing patriots who rushed to the recruiting offices to help defend the nation when, on October 30, 1938, the United States was "invaded" by an "army from Mars" in a radio dramatization.
S. I. Hayakawa
But to Stern at that moment it wasn't a hand grenade at all but a no longer distant cloud high above the Temple of the Moon, a driftin memory in the desert of dim pillars and fountains and waterways, mysterious places where myrrh grew, the ruins of his youth.
Blinding light then in the mirror behind the bar, sudden death merging the stars and windstorms of his life with darkness in the failure of his seeking, bright blinding light in the night sky at last and Stern's once vast vision of a homeland for all the peoples of his heritage gone as if he had never lived, shattered as if he had never suffered, his futile devotion ended on a clear Cairo night during the uncertain campaigns of 1942 when the eternal disguise he wore to his last clandestine meeting, his face, was ripped way and thrown against a mirror in the half-light of an Arab bar, there to stare at a now immobile landscape fixed to witness his death forever.
Edward Whittemore