Angelmaker

by Nick Harkaway

There’s a curious courage to them both: they believe in a political reality which is utterly terrifying, and they’re fighting it. Joe is never sure whether they’re mad or just alarmingly and uncompromisingly incapable of self-delusion.

I know no Joe. The phenomenon known as Joe is an illusion created by my conscious mind to account for the discrepancy between the number of scones I buy and the number I eventually consume. His putative reality has been demonstrated false by empirical testing.

Seek the stricture. Find the lesson, the purpose, the essence. The rest is window dressing, and will give itself to you entirely, if you first understand the thing and the nature of the thing.

you won’t find many funerals begin with “he was a total pain in the neck and only half as clever as he thought, so let’s put him in the ground and have a pint, and good riddance.”

Her certainty is fading as she says it out loud. What made sense in the twentieth century sounds odd in the twenty-first. Blockish, even, and naive.