Glengarry Glen Ross:

Act 1, Scene 3 Page 48

Roma: . . . what of these happen . . . ? None of ‘em. We worry anyway. What does this mean?
I’m not secure. How can I be secure? (Pause.) Through amassing wealth beyond all measures?
No. And what’s beyond all measures? That’s a sickness. That’s a trap. There is no measure. Only
greed. How can we act? The right way, we should say, to deal with this: “There is a
one-in-a-million chance that so and so will happen . . . Fuck it, it won’t happen to me . . . “ No.
We know that’s not the right way I think. (Pause.) We say the correct way to deal with this is
“There is a one-in-so chance this will happen . . . God protect me. I am powerless, let it not
happen to me . . . “ But no to that. I say. There’s something else. What is it? “If it happens, AS IT
MAY for that is not within our powers, I will deal with it, just as I do today with what draws my
concern today.” I say this is how we must act. I do those things which seem correct for me today.
I trust myself. And if security concerns me, I do that which today I think will make me secure.
And every day I do that, when that day arrives that I need a reserve, (a) odds are that I have it,
and (b) the true reserve that I have is the strength that I have of acting each day without fear.
(Pause.) According to the dictates of my mind. (Pause.) Stocks, bonds, objects of art, real estate.
Now: what are they? (Pause.) An opportunity. To what? To make money? Perhaps to lose
money? Perhaps. To “indulge” and to “learn” about ourselves? Perhaps. So fucking what? What
isn’t? They’re an opportunity. That’s all. They’re an event. A guy comes up to you, you make a
call, you send in a brochure, it doesn’t matter, “They’re these properties I’d like for you to see.”
What does it mean? What you want it to mean. (Pause.) Money? (Pause.) If that’s what it
signifies to you. Security? (Pause.) Comfort? (Pause.) All it is is THINGS THAT HAPPEN TO
YOU. (Pause.) That’s all it is. How are they different? (Pause.) Some poor newly married guy
gets

The Lying Life of Adults

Page 17

the space where my father's relatives lived was undefined, nameless. I knew only one thing for
certain: to visit them you had to go down, and down, keep going down, into the depths of the
depths of Naples, and the journey was so long it seemed to me that we and my father's relatives
lived in two different cities. And for a long time that appeared to be true. We lived in the highest
part of Naples, and to go anywhere we had inevitably to descend. My father and mother went
willingly only as far as the Vomero, or, with some annoyance, to my grandparents' house in
Museo. And their friends were mainly in Via Suarez, Piazza degli Artisti, Via Luca Giordano,
Via Scarlatti, Via Cimarosa, streets that were well known to me because many of my
schoolmates lived there as well. Not to mention that they all led to Villa Floridiana, a park I
loved, where my mother had brought me for fresh air and sunshine when I was an infant, and
where I had spent pleasant hours with my friends of early childhood, Angela and Ida. Only after
those place names, all happily colored by plants, fragments of the sea, gardens, flowers, games,
and good manners, did the real descent begin, the one my parents considered irritating. For work,
for shopping, for the need that my father, in particular, had for study, encounter, and debate, they
descended daily, usually on the funiculars, to Chiaia, to Toledo, and from there went on to Piazza
Plebiscito, the Biblioteca Nazionale, to Port'Alba and Via Ventaglieri and Via Foria, and, at most,
Piazza Carlo III, where my mother's school was. I knew those names well, too— my parents
mentioned them frequently but didn't often take me there, and maybe that's why the names didn't
give me the same happiness. Outside of the Vomero, the city scarcely belonged to me, in fact the
farther it spread on that lower ground, the more unknown it seemed. So it was natural that the
areas where my father's relatives lived had, in my eyes, the features of worlds still wild and
unexplored. For me not only were they nameless but,from the way my parents referred to them, I
felt they must be difficult to get to. The times we had to go there, my mother and father, who
usually were energetic and willing, seemed especially weary, especially anxious. I was young,
but their tension, their exchanges-always the same stayed with me.
"Andrea," my mother would say in a tired voice, "get dressed, we have to go."