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“Forgive me, I only wanted t’say that the purity of science often hurts many people, just like pure natural phenomena do. Volcanic eruptions bury whole towns, floods wash bridges away, earthquakes knock buildings flat—” “Grandfather!”
and I do have something of an allergy t’servin’ under others. But even so,
“Well, there’s your cognitive system for y’. You just can’t say all at once. Accordin’ t’what you’re up against, almost instantaneously, you elect some point between the extremes. That’s the precision programming you’ve got built in. You yourself don’t know a thing about the inner shenanigans of that program. ’Tisn’t any need for you t’know. Even without you knowin’, you function as yourself. That’s your black box. In other words, we all carry around this great unexplored ‘elephant graveyard’ inside us. Outer space aside, this is truly humanity’s last terra incognita. “No, an ‘elephant
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“Me, I’m of a more practical bent,” continued the Professor. “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and leave the rest alone. Metaphysics is never more than semantic pleasantries anyway.
encephalodigital
“Well, a scientist isn’t one for controlling his curiosity. Of course, I deplore how those scientists cooperated with the Nazis conductin’ vivisection in the concentration camps. That was wrong. At the same time, I find myself thinkin’, if you’re goin’ t’do live experiments, you might as well do something a little spiffier and more productive.
“Interesting distinction,” I grumbled. “Listen. I may not be much, but I’m all I’ve got. Maybe you need a magnifying glass to find my face in my high school graduation photo. Maybe I haven’t got any family or friends. Yes, yes, I know all that. But, strange as it might seem, I’m not entirely dissatisfied with this life. It could be because this split personality of mine has made a stand-up comedy routine of it all. I wouldn’t know, would I? But whatever the reason, I feel pretty much at home with what I am. I don’t want to go anywhere. I don’t want any unicorns behind fences.” “Not fences,”
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valise
Thereon, the south face of the rock descends in a gentle grassy incline, and beyond that is the dark oceanic expanse of the Woods.
clerestory
He is young, his years numbering perhaps fewer than my own. His appearance and manner are antithetical to the Gatekeeper in every way.
“The Town is lighted by wind,” he says. “There is a powerful cry in the earth here. We harness it to turn the works.”
“It wails up once every three days. There are great underground deposits of emptiness here. On days with no wind, I tighten the bolts on the fan, grease the shaft, see that the valves and switches do not freeze. And I send the power generated here to Town, again by underground.”
“Have you ever seen a woman around here?” she asks. “An older woman, perhaps, who looks like me?”
“The encyclopedia wand’s a theoretical puzzle, like Zeno’s paradox. The idea is t’engrave the entire encyclopedia onto a single toothpick. Know how you do it?” “You tell me.” “You take your information, your encyclopedia text, and you transpose it into numerics. You assign everything a two-digit number, periods and commas included. 00 is a blank, A is 01, B is 02, and so on. Then after you’ve lined them all up, you put a decimal point before the whole lot. So now you’ve got a very long sub-decimal fraction. 0.173000631 … Next, you engrave a mark at exactly that point along the toothpick. If
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Think about the koan: An arrow is stopped in flight. Well, the death of the body is the flight of the arrow. It’s makin’ a straight line for the brain. No dodgin’ it, not for anyone. People have t’die, the body has t’fall. Time is hurlin’ that arrow forward. And yet, like I was sayin’, thought goes on subdividin’ that time for ever and ever. The paradox becomes real. The arrow never hits.”
“You can die right now,” said the Professor, very business-like. “Before Junction A links up, just check out. That leaves nothing.” A profound silence fell over us. The Professor coughed, the chubby girl sighed, I took a slug of whiskey. No one said a word.
I was swimming. Orpheus ferried across the Styx to the Land of the Dead. All the varieties of religious experience in the world, yet when it comes to death, it all boils down to the same thing.
filligreed decoration,
arabesques
“They dig holes from time to time,” the Colonel explains. “It is probably for them what chess is for me. It has no special meaning, does not transport them anywhere. All of us dig at our own pure holes. We have nothing to achieve by our activities, nowhere to get to.
kayokyoku.
“I wouldn’t know,” I said, I really wouldn’t. “ ‘I wouldn’t know’ seems to be a pet expression with you,” she observed.
“In L’Etranger, the protagonist had a habit of saying ‘It’s not my fault.’ Or so I seem to recall. Umm—what was his name now?” “Meursault,” I said.
anachronist.”
Several of the appetizers arrived, and for the next few minutes we ate in silence. The flavors were light, delicate, subtle. The shrimp were consummately fresh, the oysters kissed by the sea.
“Good butter sauce is an art,” I said. “It takes time. You stir finely minced shallots into melted butter, then heat it over a very low flame. No shortcuts.”
Everything, everything, seemed once-upon-a-time. The clothes on the floor, the music, the conversation. Round and round it goes, and where it stops everyone knows. Like a dead heat on the merry-go-round. No one pulls ahead, no one gets left behind. You always get to the same spot.
Quietude itself.
My search has been a long one. It has taken me to every corner of this walled Town, but at last I have found the mind we have lost.
I located a Schick razor and a can of Gillette Lemon-Lime Foamy with a dry sputter of white around the nozzle. Death leaves cans of shaving cream half-used.
indelibly
umbrage.
tacit
conveyance
“Ever read The Brothers Karamazov?” I asked.
“Listen,” she spoke. “Even if we lose you forever, I’ll always remember you, until the day I die. You won’t be lost from my mind. Don’t forget that.”
