BOOK MEME: I think I’ve done this before? But I was tagged, so here goes:
1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people. [I’m skipping this part. Y’all consider yourselves tagged, or not, as you prefer….]

Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World:

That the war deaths occurred on behalf of a terrain in which pianos could be played and bicycles could be pedalled, where schools would each day be entered by restrained and extravagantly gesturing children alike, must be indicated by appending the direction of motive, “for my country,” since the deaths themselves are the unmaking of the embodied terrain of pianos and bicycles, classmates, comrades, and schools.

For My Country. Thus “to kill and to die”–or in the idiom that embraces both simultaneously, “to hurt” (to hurt within one’s own body; to hurt an opponent’s body) or “to alter body tissue”–are alike in having no interior referent and, if they are to have one, requiring a separate specification. But precisely because there is nothing “interior” that itself stipulates and in doing so limits its referent, the act of “dying” or “killing” can be lifted away and coupled with a different referent.

Cheery! Aren’t you glad you asked??