Acceptance (Southern Reach, #3)

by Jeff VanderMeer

You feel numb and you feel broken, but there’s a strange relief mixed in with the regret: to come such a long way, to come to a halt here, without knowing how it will turn out, and yet … to rest. To come to rest. Finally.

“What does the border look like?” A child’s question. A question whose answer means nothing. There is nothing but border. There is no border.

“You want a lived-in life because you don’t have one,” Control had said to her, but that was a crude way to put it.

Perhaps a copy could also be superior to the original, create a new reality by avoiding old mistakes.

“I’m not an answer,” she said. “I’m a question.”

Bodies could be beacons, too, Saul knew. A lighthouse was a fixed beacon for a fixed purpose; a person was a moving one. But people still emanated light in their way, still shone across the miles as a warning, an invitation, or even just a static signal. People opened up so they became a brightness, or they went dark. They turned their light inward sometimes, so you couldn’t see it, because they had no other choice.

Sometimes their life between the sheets seemed mysterious, to have no relationship to life out in the world.

Sometimes, too, other people gave you their light, and could seem to flicker, to be hardly visible at all, if no one took care of them. Because they’d given you too much and had nothing left for themselves.

Freedom could take you farther from what you sought, not closer.

There’s a regret in you, a kind of daymark you’ve let become obscured.

How much of a childhood can be destroyed or twisted before the overlay replaces the memories?

Acts of loving-kindness. The uselessness of guilt.

Everything had shifted when he’d moved. There were ways in which he felt so different in the south than in the north, ways in which he was different because he was happier, and he didn’t want to acknowledge sickness or anything that might hint at a change in what had been so ideal.

Was this paranoia or some nagging doubt, some part of his brain trying to ruin everything, wanting him to be unhappy—to force him to deny himself the life he’d made here?

Your heart is beating out some secret code you can’t decrypt.

A thing you don’t want to consider for too long, that you put out of your mind because isn’t that the way of things? To ignore the unreal so it doesn’t become more real.

“There’s nothing to this world,” he said, “but what our senses tell us about it, and all I can do is the best I can based on that information.”

Writing, for me, is like trying to restart an engine that has rested for years, silent and rusting, in an empty lot—choked with water and dirt, infiltrated by ants and spiders and cockroaches. Vines and weeds shoved into it and sprouting out of it. A kind of coughing splutter, an eruption of leaves and dust, a voice that sounds a little like mine but is not the same as it was before; I use my actual voice rarely enough.

Someday the fish and the falcon, the fox and the owl, will tell tales, in their way, of this disembodied globe of light and what it contained, all the poison and all the grief that leaked out of it. If human language meant anything, I might even recount it to the waves or to the sky, but what’s the point?

Some things you can be so close to that you never grasp their true nature.

I never had a country, never had the choice; I was born into one. But over time, this island has become my country, and I need no other.

Beyond these observations, I have a single question: What is the nature of my delusion? Am I hallucinating when I see the night sky that I know? Or when I see the one that is strange? Which stars should I trust and navigate by?

As a result, pain does not much bother me anymore; it gives me evidence of my ongoing existence, has saved me from those times when, otherwise, I might have stared so long at wind and rain and sea as to become nothing, to just disappear.

There were questions she did not want to ask, because if she did they would take on detail and weight and substance, flesh and skin reclothing the arch of ribs.

She knew where it would all lead, what it always led to in human beings—a decision about what to do. What are we going to do? Where do we go from here? How do we move forward? What is our mission now? As if purpose could solve everything, could take the outlines of what was missing and by sheer will invoke it, make it appear, bring it back to life.

You could know the what of something forever and never discover the why.

Unable to tell him the truth: that he still didn’t feel right, not a sickness in the normal way, not what the doctor had diagnosed, but something hiding inside, waiting for its moment.

My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness.

He was back in control, but control was meaningless.

We must begin to examine all of those things that we think of as irrational simply because we do not understand them. In other words, we must distrust the rational, the logical, the sane, in an attempt to reach for something higher, for something more worthy.

“Don’t forget about me,” he’d said, so long ago, and you won’t ever forget him, but you might have to leave him behind.

You put yourself here, set this trap for yourself, so if you feel trapped by it now, it’s your own fault.

It would have been better if she could have thought of each person in the equation as just one thing, but none of them were that simple.

“Explain,” you say, putting just enough pressure on the word to hold it there like an egg about to crack.

The second song played out more like a traditional folk song, slow and deep, carrying along the baggage of a century or two of prior interpretations.

That she has a kind of self-possession that comes not just from knowing who she is but from knowing that, if it comes down to it, she needs no one.

There was a choice in not making a choice.

How long could a person hold to a pattern, a process, despite being fundamentally damaged?

Near the top, the wind whistled down briskly and he welcomed the chill, the way it told him a world existed outside of his mind, helped him deny these symptoms that had now crept back in.

The answer doesn’t lie in your backyard because no one is going to come and save you even if you beg them to. Especially if you beg them to. You’re on your own, like you’ve always been on your own. You have to keep going forward, until you can’t go forward anymore. You have to hang on. You’re almost there. You can make it to the end.

The world went on, even as it fell apart, changed irrevocably, became something strange and different.

The words aren’t important but what’s channeled through them is. Maybe the important thing is getting it out on the page so it can be there in your mind.