More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Everything about our exile had been steady-state, calm and self-renewing, but now Aenea had reminded me that everything and everyone ends.
It has been my experience that immediately after certain traumatic separations—leaving one’s family to go to war, for instance, or upon the death of a family member, or after parting from one’s beloved with no assurances of reunion—there is a strange calmness, almost a sense of relief, as if the worst has happened and nothing else need be dreaded.
Pain is an interesting and off-putting thing. Few if any things in life concentrate our attention so completely and terribly, and few things are more boring to listen to or read about.
To see and feel one’s beloved naked for the first time is one of life’s pure, irreducible epiphanies. If there is a true religion in the universe, it must include that truth of contact or be forever hollow.
Only humankind struggles and fails in becoming what it is. The reasons are many and complex, but all stem from the fact that we have evolved as one of the self-seeing organs of the evolving universe. Can the eye see itself?”
“Almost everything interesting in the human experience is the result of an individual experiencing, experimenting, explaining, and sharing,” said my young friend. “A hive mind would be the ancient television broadcasts, or life at the height of the datasphere … consensual idiocy.” “Okay,” I said, still confused. “What direction does evolution take?” “Toward more life,” said Aenea. “Life likes life. It’s pretty much that simple. But more amazingly, nonlife likes life as well … and wants to get into it.”
‘Atoms, once drawn into the torrent of living matter, do not readily leave it.’ ”
“M. Endymion,” he said softly, “if love is the human emotion to which you refer, I feel that I have watched humankind long enough during my existence to know that love is never a stupid emotion. I feel that M. Aenea is correct when she teaches that it may well be the mainspring energy of the universe.”
I could not do this, I realized, if I were immortal. This degree of love of life and of one another is granted, I saw for once and for ever, not to immortals, but to those who live briefly and always under the shadow of death and loss.
“No lifetime is long enough for those who wish to create, Raul. Or for those who simply wish to understand themselves and their lives. It is, perhaps, the curse of being human, but also a blessing.”
