Acceptance (Southern Reach, #3)

by Jeff VanderMeer

Control said nothing, had said nothing for quite some time, as if he didn’t trust words anymore. Or had begun to cherish the answers silence gave him.

“Evil advances with good. But these terms have no meaning in Area X. Or to Area X. So why should they always apply to us in pursuit of an enemy to whom they go unrecognized?

For, having found so many ways to put it off, I believe that my transformation will be more radical than it might have been, that I might indeed become something like the moaning creature. Will I see the real stars then?

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.

It had all been moving so slow, like a journey that meant something, and now so fast. Too fast. Like breath that had become light, gone from mist to a ray, slashing out toward the horizon but not taking him with it.

Morale at the Southern Reach becomes worse after the last eleventh returns and then, so quickly, passes on to the next place, wherever that might be. Numbness? A sense of having gone through so many crises that emotion must be hoarded, that it might not run out.

A little embarrassed, he said, “That fish down there sure is frightened of you.” “Huh? It just doesn’t know me. If it knew me, that fish would shake my hand.” “I don’t think there’s anything you could say to convince it of that. And there are all kinds of ways you could hurt it without meaning to.”

His father could have been less honest, because honesty was often just a way of being cruel.

“The only solution to the environment is neglect, which requires our collapse.”

Perhaps so many journals had piled up in the lighthouse because on some level most came, in time, to recognize the futility of language. Not just in Area X but against the rightness of the lived-in moment, the instant of touch, of connection, for which words were such a sorrowful disappointment, so inadequate an expression of both the finite and the infinite.

Behind them, on the horizon, the lighthouse could be seen, might always be seen, even through the fog that came with the dawn, here noncommittal and diffuse, there thick, rising like a natural defense where needed, a test and blessing against that landscape.

“I think this is an asylum. But so is the rest of the world.”

I am come to send fire on the earth; and what will I, if it be already kindled?

Anger tries to thrash its way free of you, manifests as a suspicion you’ve had for a while.

He did not want to leave the world, and yet he knew now that he was leaving it, or that it was leaving him.

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