Creation Lake

by Rachel Kushner

The pinball machine seemed to me some stationary and atavistic workhorse wagon, the old work reformulated as play.

Bruno said that he practiced sleep as a discipline. He had trained himself to sleep upwards of twelve hours a night. Sleep is time travel, he said. Sleep is revolutionary. And most importantly, he said, sleep feels good.

Yes

imagination and sleep and dreaming were the interwoven tresses of a single glossy braid, and this thick braid was a sign of health in a grand sense, of the heaven right here on earth, a garden of delights you should not wait for, pray for, but live in, occupy, and enjoy.

Ecclesiastes declares that life has no meaning, that evil will be rewarded, and goodness punished. He says that even the most honorable man can be left in town to die in the street, while the greediest fool gets a eulogy and a proper burial. But either people skip that part of the Old Testament, or they never read the Bible at all, and instead they follow their instinct to mythify a sequence of random events and the stream of strangers they encounter in life:

The dumb luck of good looks is akin to the fact that it may very well rain on the sea in times of drought, and will not rain where it is needed, on a farmer’s crops: grace is random, dumb and random and even a bit violent, in giving to the one who already has rather a lot, and taking from the one who has been denied, who doesn’t have a pot to piss in.

In a bunker, you cannot hear the human community in the earth, the deep cistern of voices, the lake of our creation.

Cave frequencies, he said, are not three to thirty megahertz. Cave bandwidth crosses moments, eras, epochs, eons. You have to learn to get inside the monophony, to tease it apart.

I have to be honest, at this point in the book, I'm really wondering where this is all going. Had I not read her two prior novels, I would probably have put this aside by now.

as if the poor white overseer all at once discarded his racial superiority, recognizing it as a dirty prize and little more, for his own servitude.

It turned out that this UK undercover agent who had tipped off the FBI about the meeting was himself the bomber of the army recruitment center, and that he had acted alone. That agent’s name was Marc Cutler, though he had been using the name Marc White while undercover. Marc Cutler, aka Marc White, was apparently in love with Pascal Balmy’s girlfriend (I mean Pascal’s girlfriend at the time, the one in the Fair Isle hat; in the file there are short biographies of thirteen women with whom Balmy has been romantically associated in the last few years). Cutler sued the UK Metropolitan Police for failing to protect him from ultraleft indoctrination, and failing to protect him from falling in love.

Is THAT where this is going??

“Democracy is for predators.” “To live is to live through something to the end.” “Those who understand extinction is coming can transform the future.” “A saved humanity will be a mystical humanity.”

He had a big round belly, the kind that looks hard rather than soft, which the French call a bidon.

was so precious it served as money. It is the source of the word “salary.”

Referring to "salt"

Life goes on a while. Then it ends. There is no fairness. Bad people are honored, and good ones are punished. The reverse is also true. Good people are honored, and bad people are punished, and some will call this grace, or the hand of God, instead of luck. But deep down, even if they lack the courage to admit it, inside each person, they know that the world is lawless and chaotic and random.

I’d burned the inside of my leg on a motorcycle exhaust pipe, a burn that left a large brown bubble, which turned into a scar I still have.

Just remembered that I did that too in the mid-80s in Greece; had completely forgotten ( no scar).

Know your worth. Know your salt. Know their salt.

It’s not logical, exactly, it’s emotional. We all like to find a person to hate, and for me that person is Nancy.

“Men are all the same,” she says. “They try to get what they want. And after they get it, they change. They’re completely different.”

the old division of labor between men and women reasserts itself when people attempt to live on a commune.

Or a household

That the labor of thinking, reading, and writing fell to men was not discussed in the library.

but they were white people with the burnish of good language, who knew not to be coarse and racist.)

Like that New York real estate buffoon and his Miss Universe pageant,

Trump

No culture can be understood, nor should be defined, by what doesn’t wash away.

The durable traces, the rock or rebar, are real, but they are time-disfigured nubs, as strange and unrecognizable to the people who left them behind as they seem to us.

never mind that he had the sexual energy of a grandmother with bone density issues.

The man turned and put his hand on her arm, an ancient gesture employed in every epoch of history by gullible men attempting to calm strident women beset by reasonable doubts.