“I commute all sentences.”
—from Don Delillo’s The Names (p.32)
This is lifted from a paragraph where a father, after a year of hospitals and tests, speaks his finalish words and says “I commute all sentences. Pass the word. The criminals are forgiven,” which is almost a throwaway bit where a character is talking about her father’s death but always struck me (for a patriarch in a post-Abrahamic worldview, i.e., Delillo’s) as perfect last words and of which the daughter comments, “Deadpan. Absolutely deadpan to the end.”
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