Twist

by Colum McCann

Meanwhile, let us abolish the ticking of time’s clock with one blow. Come closer. Virginia Woolf, The Waves

Those of us who reject divinity, who understand that there is no order, there is no arc, that we are night travelers on a great tundra, that stars can’t guide us, will understand that the only work that will matter, will be the work done by us. Ta-Nehisi Coates

At a certain stage our aloneness loses its allure.

It still astounded me that nearly all our information travels through tiny tubes at the bottom of the ocean. Billions of pulses of light carrying words and images and voices and texts and diagrams and formulas, all shooting along the ocean floor, a flow of pulsating light. In tubes made from glass. In glass made from sand. In sand that has sifted through time.

“The disease of our days is that we spend so much time on the surface.”

Who can say where anything truly begins? The cloud, the raindrop, the original speck of dust around which water collects? We can only ever locate the middle when we get to the end. And then, at the absolute end, what’s the point in finding the middle, or even the beginning?

So much of who we are is who we cannot be. We flatter ourselves when we think we can become something entirely new.

The bottle does a good job of drinking the mind.

The best way to experience home is to lose it for a while. Then, when it is gone, you can know what it is. You can yearn to return to it. It is a form of wounding. You welcome the scar so it will remind you of where you once were.

I tend to smile when wounded: it is a bizarre tic, admittedly, one of my more awkward responses.

We are all, indeed—you, me, us—shards in the smash-up.

Young, I had wanted to be old, and old now, young.

“And we’re just putting the ends together so people can ruin one another. What we wrought…” He recapped the pen with a snap. “Everything gets fixed,” he said, “and we all stay broken.”

What was it Pascal had written? All of our problems stem from our inability to sit quietly in a room alone.