The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. (D.O.D.O. #1)

by Neal Stephenson

“I could have just grown old and died. Death would have been less boring than surviving this last century. This is a terrible country for old people. You put them away in horrible buildings that are completely shut off from life, and then do everything possible to keep them alive. It is a very stupid system. You should all be shot.

This is like asking why doesn’t a blind person know what blue smells like.

Erzsebet was gleeful to hear that she lived in a better time period than the poor miserable Puritan witches. “It heartens me to hear somebody else suffered even more than I did for being in the wrong place at the wrong time,” she informed us.

The best analogy I can think of is how a modern physicist would react if you approached him and proposed to travel at greater than the speed of light. Mixed with this is a little bit of how Chopin would react if you proposed to play a piano by striking it with a sledgehammer.