Before the Fall

by Noah Hawley

The question is, are these qualities she was born with, or qualities seeded inside her by what happened?

But that was before the events of July 2008, before her daughter’s kidnapping and the agonizing three days it took to get her back.

It seems impossible, but life goes on.

To an engineer, only the ingenuity of pragmatic solutions is poetic. Function over form. It’s not a question of optimism or pessimism, a glass half full or half empty. To an engineer, the glass is simply too big.

Someone had told her once that mothers existed to blunt the existential loneliness of being a person. If that was true then her biggest maternal responsibility was simply companionship. You bring a child into this fractious, chaotic world out of the heat of your womb, and then spend the next ten years walking beside them while they figure out how to be a person.

Gil Baruch was an iron nail in a burning building, left gleaming in the ashes after everything else had been destroyed.

Does television exist for us to watch, in other words, or do we exist to watch television?

As she walked the barn he felt the urge for a drink, but it was a scar, not a scab, and he didn’t pick it.

Art exists not inside the piece itself, but inside the mind of the viewer.

Albert Einstein, who once said, “Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind.”

It’s hard to be sad when you’re being useful. And he liked that idea. That service to others brought happiness. It was self-involvement that led to depression, to spiraling questions about the meaning of things.

Because what if instead of a story told in consecutive order, life is a cacophony of moments we never leave? What if the most traumatic or the most beautiful experiences we have trap us in a kind of feedback loop, where at least some part of our minds remains obsessed, even as our bodies move on?

“It’s strange,” he says. “You hear the word sleepwalking sometimes. How some people sleepwalk through life and then something wakes them up. I don’t—that’s not how I feel. Maybe the opposite.”

Life is a series of decisions and reactions. It is the things you do and the things that are done to you. And then it’s over.