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It happened so often—beautiful things had stupid names, and the other way around.
Sasha thought of life as a collection of identical days.
To her, existence consisted of days, and each day seemed to run like a circular ribbon—or, better yet, a bike chain, moving evenly over the cogs. Click—another change of speed, days became a little different, but they still flowed, still repeated, and that very monotony concealed the meaning of life . . .
“What are you working on?” “Willpower,” Kon said seriously. “I could be in my nice warm bed right now, sleeping soundly.”
“You’re a strange creature, Samokhina. A transcendental object. A closed book. Now you’re running. My grandpa says, every day, five in the morning. Are you some kind of a coded princess?”
A boy geared toward success. A winner of competitions and a glutton for science fiction, with high cheekbones and dark curls, dressed in shirts always neatly ironed by his mom or sister, a dandy who at sixteen knew three different tie knots.
The princess remained undeciphered.
She was an adult now, an independent person, traveling by herself, without supervision, and this was all part of the journey.
Vita nostra . . . “Our life is brief, / It will shortly end; / Death comes quickly.”
Sasha, an eternal straight-A student, got up before she had time to be surprised.
“To explain is to simplify,” Valery informed her after a short pause.
Speech is silver . . . all of your words are trash, garbage, not worth the air spent in speaking. Silence . . . Silence is what, Samokhina?” “Golden,” Sasha squeezed out.
Words did not matter. Glance, inflection, voice—all these thin threads, the antennae pointing into space, informed people of indifference or empathy, calmness, anxiety, love . . . Words did not.
Why do they stick to me, and leave you alone?”
Sick:((((
Time served no master and answered no one.
she was alive, her life was rich and colorful, and everything was back to its normal state—September, learning, auditorium 1, sunlight.
A gathering of freaks.
Anything that is truly valuable is beyond material substance if you think about it.
meaning is a projection of will onto the surface of its application. Meaning is not absolute and depends on the choice of space and the method of projection.
“Nothing corporeal has any significant value. Anything that is truly valuable is beyond material substance . . .”
The paroxysm of curiosity was similar to the sharp sensation of hunger.
There were plenty of people loved by someone, the ones who carried a seashell, a button, or a black-and-white photograph in their pockets. But no one had ever been saved by memories, no one had been protected by words and pledges, and those loved greatly by others died too.
“All things are reflected in each other. Remember? Wind changes direction getting around a stone, the stone crumbles, reflecting the wind. The chameleon changes color, reflecting leaves. An ordinary hare turns white, reflecting winter. I am reflected in you when you listen to me. You are reflected in many people more or less deeply.
Every conscientious student gets nervous when facing an exam, even if the student knows everything. You must study as hard as you can, and then nothing in the exam will be insurmountable for you.”
the step-by-step progress of how a tiny success led to a bigger one.
“What are the sparrows singing on this last day of chill? We live, we breathe, we made it, and we are living still!”
“I’m serious, Sasha: what is so important about being human? Is it because you simply haven’t experienced anything else?” “I’m used to it.” Sasha looked down.
This was a world that revolved around one single heavenly body, it was completely subordinate to the baby. Mom, not entirely healthy, still noticeably weak, could think only of the baby. Valentin sank into household duties up to his chin, and was forgoing sleep and rest for the sake of the evening bath time.
“Sasha, the world is full of entities that people cannot negotiate with. But somehow people survive, don’t they?”
He was hers.
Orgil
The meaning—a sum of meanings that this human being was comprised of—now dissolved inside Sasha as rapidly as soap in water. The lullaby linked them like shared skin.
Hekkk
she recognized herself as a sum of information.
She opened her arms. Every invisible seed in the frozen soil appealed to her as the shadow of a large, unbearably enormous word, “Life.” Each root waiting for warmth. Each drop of moisture. Life, the center of all in the universe. The only thing that had meaning. “Mine!” Sasha shouted.
“Meanings are manifold. They may estrange themselves from the willpower they originated from, they can encase themselves in a shell, decompress, and transform.”
activator is one large interactive system that allows you to detect connections between informational fragments.
A while ago she’d attempted to understand which part of her organism was responsible for completing these exercises. Brain? Yes, of course. Imagination? At top speed. Intuition? Yes, quite possibly. But all these things were parts of a larger mechanism, and not the most important ones; when this mechanism warmed up and started working at full force, it seemed to Sasha that she, Alexandra Samokhina herself, was only a fragment of the mechanism. A rear wheel.
There are concepts that cannot be imagined but can be named. Having received a name, they change, flow into a different entity, and cease to correspond to the name, and then they can be given another, different name, and this process—the spellbinding process of creation—is infinite: this is the word that names it, and this is the word that signifies. A concept as an organism, and text as the universe.
The result was word, and word was the original cause of any process;
“So beautiful,” Sasha whispered. The words slashed her with their inaccuracy, platitude, vulgarity. She blinked—chance tears fell off her eyelashes—and attempted to say the same thing without resorting to ordinary words.
“it happened all by itself.”
“I am a concept. I’m not human. You are probably a concept as well. All of us are structured fragments of information.
Have you ever seen statistical theory making out with Newton’s first law of motion?”
Love is not when you are aroused by someone, it’s when you are afraid for that person.
“All the world’s a text.” Kozhennikov clicked the light switch in the bathroom. “And all the men and women merely words . . .”
the essence of an object does not change depending on its name.
By verbally identifying an object, by giving it a name, we alter it. And at the same time we prevent it from changing. A name is like a forked stick that we use to hold a snake on the ground.”
However, there is also another misconception—by which a name automatically defines the properties of an object.
“‘Word.’ This is your first step into the world of Speech, and it shall also be your last . . . because ‘Word’ is tied and looped onto itself. ‘Word’ is at the beginning and at the end. You have learned to recognize it during your second year, that’s pretty good, but when—if—you learn to manifest it, I will tell you that you have earned your diploma with honors.”
This universe was ideally suited for exploring it deeper and deeper—from association to association, from leaf to root, and farther, and wider, analyzing, synthesizing, gasping with joy . . .
“What is meaning, Samokhina?” “Projection of will onto its field of application.”
