The Intuitionist

by Colson Whitehead

The light at this hour, on this street, is the secondhand gray of ghetto twilight, a dull mercury color.

the replacement of sure violence with deferred sure violence.

We do not need cities and buildings; it is the fear of the dark which compels us to erect them instinctively, like insects.

Nothing we create works the way it should.

We must tend to our objects and treat them as newborn babes.

This slow debate about the rain: it’s not about rain at all, but the fragility of what we know. We’re all just guessing.

There are no mistakes for there is no sentence save the one nature imposes (mortality).

We choose the escalator, we choose the elevator, and these choices say much about who we are,

She couldn’t sleep for the wind’s tiresome argument with the house.

so maybe half a prayer is enough sometimes. Or has no effect one way or another.

buildings that erupt from the ground like ancient gods awakening.

Chuck is right, she thinks. She hadn’t considered all the implications of the second elevation. They will have to destroy this city once we deliver the black box.

The box is safe, but the box must also feel safe when the passengers observe the doors slide shut and they dematerialize into the nether space of the shaft. As they lose their world and gain another.

Understanding that something is always lost when it comes to human beings.

To crawl about, prey to the dull obviousness of biology, as if we were not meant to fly. To lift.

Trust in the cab, made by people like you, trust is the worst of it: it was made by people like you and you are weak and you make mistakes.

what wish could possibly weigh so much that the machine could not accommodate it?

Their violent blundering seems so pathetic to Lila Mae now, a child’s plea for attention, a good hug. They’ll never find it.

‘They were all slaves to what they could see.’

They see his skin and see a white man. Retreat behind the stone walls of the Institute does not change matters. He is still not colored. There is another world beyond this one. He was trying to tell them and they wouldn’t hear it. Don’t believe your eyes.

She understood this hatred of himself; she hated something in herself and she took it out on Pompey.

There was no hope for him as a colored man because the white world will not let a colored man rise, and there was no hope for him as a white man because it was a lie.

Intuitionism is communication. That simple. Communication with what is not-you.

How could he have expected them to be ready for it? They can barely make sense of the cities they have now.

It is important to let the citizens know it is coming. To let them prepare themselves for the second elevation.