Playground

by Richard Powers

The world with all its bright and surprising contents was created out of boredom and emptiness. Everything started by holding still and waiting. The perfect story to tell such a dark and anxious child.

The soft parts had dissolved into a golden outline against the gray sand.

The beauty of finding a chinook carcass

our pieces climbing heavenward or falling back down toward hell at random.

The course of civilization is carved in ocean currents. Where sea layers mix, where rains travel or wastelands spread, where great upwellings bring deep, cold, nutrient-rich waters to the energy-bathed surface and fish go mad with fecundity, where soils turn fertile or anemic, where temperatures turn habitable or harsh, where trade routes flourish or fail: all this the global ocean engine determines. The fate of continents is written in water.

Too many members for a mathematically literate person to bother asking, Why me, Lord?

There was so much to life, too much, more than Beaulieu could do justice to, more than any living thing could guess at or merit. She loved it all, even humans, for without the miracle of human consciousness, love for such a world would be just one more of a billion unnamed impulses.

I could die now. I have seen the relentless engine, the inscrutable master plan of Life, and it will never end.

the feeling that the globe was still mostly unknown, mostly unknowable. That she was in the middle of life, while still being nowhere at all.

Skinny, naïve, and betrothed to everything in the ocean.

But no one ever survived into old age who couldn’t open that vise and let much of their hard-gripped facts go free.

The rules were simple, as if they’d existed long before humans stumbled onto them.

when she herself went out—this year or next or the year after, at the latest—when the time came for her to stop walking up the rise and sail back out on the tide, a lot of those songs would never again be sung by anyone.

That was what was wrong with the French invaders in the first place. They had no home.

everything that people found of interest interested her.

tapping her papery hand to the music and smiling like the world was already finished.

‘The road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom.’ William Blake.”

The bottle had dropped by godly accident into the pool, and life, which never stopped toying with possible next moves, had exploited the miraculous hiding place dozens of times.

The reverse of this story - nature "colonizing" a bottle - an artificial island

and all the other neural parasites that now make it impossible for me to remember what thinking and feeling and being were really like, back then? Not even close.

I think I mourn never having lived without this

“Is a thing still garbage, once life starts using it?”

When humankind was gone, the spin-offs of their creativity would provide a resource management game for the rest of creation for eons to come.

I think the central question of this book is about how nature and technology use eachother, and how humans try to conduct themselves at the edge of both of those categories. To which is each person loyal?

She stopped to stir a stick in an open can of blue housepaint sitting on the stool behind her. It was like the can was alive, a pet of hers, and she suddenly remembered that it needed feeding.

I think I would have given my life for her, had she asked. And she would have made the sacrifice into an adventure.

His own voice turned earnest, trying to interpret and to forestall, which I suppose comes to the same thing.

In their recirculating pain, he and Evelyne were united again. Even saying goodbye to her, again and again, was thick with meaning.

The wreckage of war had seeded the greatest nursery she’d ever seen.

Theme

Full fathom five thy father lies; Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes; Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange.

I'd like to read a tempest adaptation

I was just so grateful to be present in the first days of this new kind of life.

Appreciation of the manufactured life taking over the natural - his regret/misstep

“A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.”

I want all my career choices to be infinite games. Flathead was an infinite game. Idaho is infinite.

The more everybody gave away, the more we all had.

He is blurring the lines of giving

“At the root of this sacred rite we recognize unmistakably the imperishable need of man to live in beauty.

The breakthrough was simple, and it could have been implemented ten years earlier on any of the primitive online communities that existed before the web: scarcity.

This platform would be overrun by neonazis

As in the best dreams of my childhood, I could breathe underwater.

What does Todd wanting to breathe underwater mean in the metaphor of the book? He wants to be of nature but he isn't or won't?

California.

Todd wants to do it on Tahiti because its where Ina is from

She had never known another human being who more badly needed the world to be perfect and who felt its shortfall more bitterly.

My favorite quote in the book. I might aspire to this. "My private Idaho"

“If two choices are impossible to choose between, it means they have equal merit. Either choice can have your belief. It doesn’t matter which you choose. You shed one chooser and grow into another.”

But what caught in his windpipe was not the tune alone, but the idea that a woman in her nineties thought it might not be too late to try to learn how to play it.

The need to solve an intricate puzzle and the need to quiet your brain are twin sons of different mothers.

But down where the light was powerless, even the world’s largest eyes could not make out the stunning, jagged mountain ranges, vast waterfalls with a thousand times the flow of Niagara, trenches and crenellations and pits and crevasses like nothing known on land, panoramas never to be seen by any living thing.

I was a ten-year-old oceanographer who had taken a wrong turn. And in that instant, I remembered the life I was supposed to have led.

Todd was supposed to apreciate the ocean/nature and now he is trying to shape it - his life's mistake. But the seasteading is not/cannot be all bad. It could be beneficial for Makataeans and they get to decide. What does their decision mean in the metaphor of the book? How can it mean anything without undercutting the islanders' self-determinance?

Every canoe may be an island, but the whole island world is itself a canoe.