“It crept into you like mist under an ill-fitting door, until words you didn’t know you knew had taken up residence–words like love, heartbreak, forever. People her age spent years having poetry hammered into them at school, and emerged without a couplet intact. But each and every one knew what followed “I’ll never dance with another.”
— The Last Voice You Hear (Mick Herron)
“He wondered now how many people there were […] living their back-up plan; who were office drones or office cleaners, teachers, plumbers, shop assistants, IT mavens, priests and accountants only because rock and roll, football, movies and authordom hadn’t panned out. And decided that the answer was everyone. Everyone wanted a life less ordinary. And only a tiny minority ever got it, and even they probably didn’t appreciate it much.”
— Slow Horses (Mick Herron)
“Pike was good at waiting, which was why he excelled in the Marines and other things. He could wait for days without moving and without being bored because he did not believe in time. Time was what filled your moments, so if your moments were empty, time had no meaning. Emptiness did not flow or pass; it simply was. Letting himself be empty was like
putting himself in neutral: Pike was.”
— The Last Detective (Robert Crais)
“It had never occurred to the lords of the consumer society that consumerism as a political philosophy might one day manifest the grave systemic instabilities that Communism had. But as those instabilities multiplied, the country had cracked. Civil society shriveled in the pitiless reign of cash. As the last public spaces were privatized, it became harder and harder for American culture to breathe. Not only were people broke, but they were taunted to madness by commercials, and pitilessly surveilled by privacy-invading hucksters. An ever more aggressive consumer-outreach apparatus caused large numbers of people to simply abandon their official identities. It was no longer any fun to be an American citizen. Bankruptcies multiplied beyond all reason, becoming a kind of commercial apostasy. Tax dodging became a spectator sport. The American people simply ceased to behave.”
— Distraction by Bruce Sterling (1998)
(Wikipedia) “The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is a website and YouTube channel, created by John Koenig, that coins and defines neologisms for emotions that do not have a descriptive term. The dictionary includes verbal entries on the website with paragraph-length descriptions and videos on YouTube for individual entries. The neologisms, while completely created by Koenig, are based on his research on etymologies and meanings of used prefixes, suffixes, and word roots.”
I shared a few of these five years ago and must have gotten them from the website. Don’t think I knew about the YouTube channel. I purchased the book recently and find myself highlighting about every third entry. Have to give that up.
“It’s strange how little of the world you actually get to see. No matter where on Earth you happen to be standing, the horizon you see in the distance is only ever about three miles away from you, a bit less than five kilometers. Which means that at any given time, you’re barely more than an hour’s walk from a completely different world.”
“ But if someone were to ask you on your deathbed what it was like to live here on Earth, perhaps the only honest answer would be: “I don’t know. I passed through it once, but I’ve never really been there.”
“In philosophy, monism is the belief that a wide variety of things can be explained in terms of a single reality, substance, or source. Onism is a kind of monism—your life is indeed limited to a single reality by virtue of being restricted to a single body—but something is clearly missing.”
“sonder: the realization that each random passerby is the main character of their own story, in which you are just an extra in the background.”
“I have had such a sickening of men in masses, and of causes, that I would not cross this room to reform parliament or prevent the union or to bring about the millennium. […] And I have nothing to do with nations, or nationalism. The only feelings I have – for what they are – are for men as individuals; my loyalties, such as they may be, are to private persons alone.”
— Master and Commander (Patrick O’Brian)
“Knowledge is inherently precious even if you can’t sell it,” Greta said. “Even if you can’t use it. Knowledge is an absolute good. The search for truth is vital. It’s central to civilization. You need knowledge even when your economy and government are absolutely shot to hell.”
— Bruce Sterling’s Distraction (1998)
“Sometimes, it was hard just to stop focusing on the simple reality that other human beings can kill you — and often, it seemed, that they can kill you without much compunction or consequence. They can kill you by refusing to pull their mask over their nostrils, by bureaucratically denying you adequate health care, by allowing you to live on the street, by keeping you at work while a tornado closes in, by shooting you with their guns just because they felt scared.”
— New York Times
“He, like everyone else, […] is exactly where, exactly what, exactly when he is meant to be. It is the Tao.”
I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve read William Gibson’s All Tomorrow’s Parties but that line didn’t hit me until I came across it today. Timing, right? American democracy on the ropes. Millions dead/dying from a global pandemic. The planet gasping for breath. And here I am, exactly where/what/when I was meant to be. Seriously, this is the most peaceful I’ve felt in months.
Set in the near-ish future, Neal Stephenson’s latest novel (Termination Shock) charts a world gone haywire with the aftereffects of human-driven climate calamity. Like the last couple of novels I’ve read, it incorporated COVID into the storyline as well as the January 6th insurrection.
“…before you knew it there was a white guy in red-white-and blue war paint sacking the U.S. Capitol in what the media described as some kind of Viking getup but Rufus knew perfectly well was a Plains Indian-style bison headdress. And just like Comanches with their raids, those people didn’t stick around and try to plant their yellow rattlesnake flags on the Capitol dome. They just wandered off, having counted coup on democracy and taken a few cop scalps, and melted back into their nomadic trailer park encampments.
This excerpt reminded me of some of his descriptions in Snow Crash.