Before the Fall

by Noah Hawley

Death was not an intellectual conceit. It was an existential black hole, an animal riddle, both problem and solution, and the grief it inspired could not be fixed or bypassed like a faulty relay, but only endured.

Everyone is from someplace. We all have stories, our lives unfolding along crooked lines, colliding in unexpected ways.

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.

We all become caricatures of ourselves, if we live long enough.

The lives we live, he thinks, are filled with holes

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

Albert Einstein once said, “What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.”

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?

“True horror, you see, comes not from the savagery of the unexpected, but from the corruption of everyday objects, spaces”