The Thing Itself

by Adam Roberts

Visceral nightmares.

In my review of By Light Itself I noted adam roberts writting to be visceral

I was in Antarctica

I don't know anything about this book, is it going to be a play on The Thing movie?

‘Philosophy is my friend,’

You can call him phil

snow was as thick as a continuous shower of wood chips

Great visual

‘It’s my letter. I bought it. And I’m entitled to privacy.’

This feels like a sitcom plotline

another. I became terrified of the idea that I would perhaps knock one or more fingers clean off.

His writting reminds me of david chroneburg movies -body horror

gom jabbar,

Dune that sequence freaked me out as a kid (I had a fever when I was reading it)

Roy took a breath, lifted the flare pistol to his own head,

It'd be so much better if the character's name was Rick. The nature boy! Whoooooo¡!!!!!!!!!!

did, I broke down the vision of the Ding an sich, or reasserted the prison of categorical perception,

The John Carpenter film The Thing was on the telly a while back. That wasn’t one of the VHS tapes they gave us, to watch on base I mean. For obvious reasons.

Love that he addresses this

son, John Gutenberg, inventor of the printing press.

i would like to see that statue someday it should be made of gold imho

That evening we dined at a restaurant named Hanaczik,

How jaring after describing cowering on the cobbles from lovecraftien creatures in their devices or is this a literary device?

brow furrowed so deeply it was as though the book was a plough, carving up the soil of his head,

I dig this

through a work of German philosophy – that same Freddie Nietzsche upon whom the clever set in London is so keen. I read for the second time my copy of Herbert Wells’s War of the Worlds.

I like how this mirrors the reading genres of the guys in the antartic at the beginning of the novel

‘Mine too,’ said Albert, returning to his philosophical treatise. ‘Intestines having a fearful job chewing over this stuff. It’s unaccountable, I must say.’

Is this some distress from repressed memories of the monsters in the clouds??

The central railway station of Frankfurt is the largest and handsomest structure of its type

Again, some crazy vision in the sky immediately followed up by some banal statement, not related. What is going on here.

The strong legislate what is true, and after a while we forget that this is whence it came. Our habits of thought are stronger than strait-waistcoats. We walk about with habit-coloured spectacles before our eyes, and see everything as we are accustomed to see it.’

After luncheon, Albert returned to the hotel for a sleep, but I did not feel sleepy. Instead I walked the streets, my mind pleasantly idle.

Again, its like he's forgotten seeing the sweeper sweeping all that horror maybe even after Albert calls it rubish of course.

The stranger told me his name,

But we are not told the name -I find that interesting

‘that to tour a town with a guidebook in hand is to see only what the guidebook permits.’

Would that be guidebook spectacles?

‘Is the choice so stark, though? Slavery of the mind, or ignorance?’

Scientific romances.’

Sounds so posh compared to scifi

‘You have not seen what I have seen,’ I said, in a trembling voice, ‘because I have not seen anything.’

Amnesia or mental block?

‘That trash? Never! Never! Sir, forgive me, but I consider myself something of a literatus, and Mr Wells has no posthumous reputation to which he can look.

LOL. Like, what's his name saying no one would ever need more then 64k

Schopenhauer believed will the structuring principle of the universe; and what is will if not the idiom of mind?

seven

Magic number

But this didn’t shift my fundamental shape, and after a while I grew disheartened and gave up.

Its why i always argue beginners to the gym should focus on strength vs esthetics.

involuntary celibacy. It occurs to me that most people live this way. It occurs to me, too, that art, literature and culture have been rather derelict in their duty so far as capturing this essential truth of things is concerned.

Molly.

The high of Ectasy never lasts

cream-coloured scabs. They were on her face, across her chest, inside her thighs. They turned her back into a Jackson Pollock,

Roberts can sure paint a picture

every braille-like scab.

This prose really sticks out

I went through the four phases of sexual bereavement:

Good grief thats clever

thirteen-year-old

Gage

sine

Bill E of blue collar comedy "here's your sign"

carroty illumination of street lamps.

Brilliant!

I eventually got a handle on the drinking.

This is a great paragraph even though isn't alcohol technically a solution???

prominently. Finally: the drill. That high violin whine, and the burn-y stench of chewed-up tooth, and the shards of discomfort that slid through the protective sheath of my anaesthesia.

My teeth ache just from reading this!

wherewithal to stop at Boots on the way and fill my scrip.

Go ahead fill yer Boots scrip

But the sky! The colours in the sky passed through a series of Monet canvas richnesses;

The Monet shot

I was filled with insight, the way my skull is filled with my brain. The insight sat snugly inside me, as if the cavity had been designed to be exactly the right size to fit it. The insight was something like this: distinguishing between the outside world and my inner existence was abruptly revealed to me as a false step. Or not quite that. It was the realisation that I had been construing that distinction wrongly all this time. It was not a separation. It was an inflection, a refinement. It was a connection. The world and I constituted not two separate things, but a totality.

‘Hello,’ she said. ‘I’m here to drive you to the Institute.’

?

‘Irma

Irma going to drive you to the institute

round the roundabout

And the conversation comes roundabout

The real clincher for me is: Alzheimer’s. If mind is a product of brain, then as the disease deteriorates the brain you’d expect to see the mind decay. And that’s exactly what we do see.’

Let’s see if we can’t get further with the problems of metaphysics by assuming that the objects must conform to our cognition. Like Copernicus, who said: I know what it looks like, that the stars go around the Earth. But let’s imagine it’s the other way about, and see if that doesn’t explain things better.’

Kant is like an anti-Copernicus. We used to think we were just a part of a pre-existing cosmos, until Kant comes along and shows that, no, actually we make the universe by perceiving it.

Every time a consciousness comes into awareness and self-awareness, it’s a conceptual big bang. Space and time structure the reality of things anew with each perceiving mind.’

But I was in the grip

That was last night

‘The transcendental categories are true. Space and time as intuitions of perception, not structures innate to reality. The necessary subjectivity of all scientific investigation.’

went for some bacon.

LOL