More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The end of the world looks exactly the way you remember. Don’t try to picture the apocalypse. Everything is the same.
But he knows it is there and so is the time before everything changed. He says this is how our names work.
ever remember your name, how will I know it was really your name?
Then I pretended my breath was smoke. Now I pretend my breath is breath.
We dream without sleeping. We refuse to return to the earth. Hunger is relentless.
That we have annihilated the ideas of both heaven and hell, which, he says, is the most striking and beneficial advance in human evolution to date. He says we are the apotheosis of humankind. He
He keeps repeating this, “Nothing is real. Nothing is real,” until I hear it differently. Nothing is real. Is he saying the opposite of what Marguerite says or are they saying the same thing?
We are unbound. We are hungry because we are endless. We are endless because it’s too late. It’s all over. It’s all gone.”
This is the east. Higher, flatter ground that once was prairie, then farmland, then was cut and zoned and paved, and for a long time had been headed toward this future. Maybe the future of this future looks more like the past. Maybe the prairie will return.
They say a total solar eclipse will alter you forever. That when day turns to night, even if you know why, it feels like the end of the world. That really it is the end of the world for about three minutes.
lasts forever then it is over. And I am running.
was the end. But we did not know it then. You do not know the end has happened until later. Or you do not admit it. Looking back, you can see it. And you realize that all the time after that was just an effort to keep going as if it weren’t already over.
An apple and a plum. They reach to each other, are collapsing slowly into one another’s arms. Branches as thick as trunks themselves. The plum is a mess of tender red-leaved watersprouts shooting up from old and new breaks.
It is the day we almost don’t notice thousands of birds migrating south, their endless, fearless flight, the perilous dotted line they thread down
into the troughs and along the breaking crests.
It comes in waves. I think there can’t be more and there is. It seems like one continuous thing, an endless liquid body coming out of my body. I
Their voices, low and tense, blend into a drone that reminds me of the chattering teeth of the hotel guests assembled on the roof for Marguerite’s immolation.
wish I could tell her to say I sent her. To send my regards. It is the first time I’ve missed my name.