Acceptance (Southern Reach, #3)

by Jeff VanderMeer

The gleaming silver egg you imagine when you think of Central—those seamless, high-level thoughts so imperfectly expressed through your superiors there—hums and purrs and pulses out approval over all of you … even if it also emanates the sense that the Southern Reach is some kind of meat-brain corruption of a beautiful elegant algorithm Central has hidden deep inside itself.

The sound of the midnight waves at high tide, how from the window of your room in your mother’s bungalow back then you could see the surf under the moonlight as a series of metallic-blue lines, dark water squeezed between them. Sometimes those lines had been broken by her figure as she walked the beach late at night, kept awake by thoughts she never shared, her face turned away from you. As if searching even then for the answer you seek now.

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.