Absolution (Southern Reach #4)

by Jeff VanderMeer

Could you lose your mind to an unanswerable question, or just your soul?

What was a person, sometimes, but a wandering fire. But put the flames out, and what was left?

Could a thing debunked by science still impact a person—if they believed it and had believed it for a long time? Did a fact, not, in fact, matter if in a sense matter had a different authority depending on one’s perception of the truth?

A terrible genius to the idea that people could wish themselves into poverty, injury, death, psychic damage. That, in fact, given the freedom … that’s what they would tend to do.

He slept the quiet sleep of the certain, and Old Jim almost envied him.

The darkness of the night beyond his desk beguiled him now at times, the way it could feel like the prow of a boat and the mutters of the open waters beyond almost like words rising from the depths.

The world was filled with forgotten places that had been something else once, had contained something else once, renamed by whatever you did there now.

The sensation of lingering on words was peculiar now. He did not like to do it, to scrutinize, preferred to glance, to skim and move on, as if in the cursory slant of his regard he might be spared the power of whatever stared back at him from the letters.

Winters liked this rhyming too, considered himself a fucking poet who had perhaps joined the wrong calling. Well, he might’ve joined the wrong calling but if poetry was it instead, he had no fucking calling at fucking all.

But he held his tongue. His tongue might need the silence to be credible if some other more imperative blurt overcame him.

“And, again, I must raise the issue of the fucking boat. Isn’t the fucking boat convenient? Is this not the most convenient fucking boat in the fucking history of boats. Surely you will not trust this stupid fucking boat. Made of stardust and the applesauce apparently pouring out of your skulls where your brains used to be.”