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She could not, once more, bear the consequences of love—so she bid Simon goodbye before he could do it to her. I don’t want you coming back.
In time was their culture. In time, not in space, was their home.
“We know something about reality, my father and I. And I bet you know it, too. Is it that reality is too much? Too painful, too limited, too restrictive of joy or opportunity? No,” she says. “I think it’s that reality is not enough.” Klara sets the mug on the floor and retrieves a cup and ball from the drawer. She puts the empty cup facedown on the table and places the ball on top. “It’s not enough to explain what we don’t understand.” She lifts the ball and holds it tight in her fist. “It’s not enough to account for the inconsistencies we see and hear and feel.” When she opens her fist, the
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true. And it takes magic to reveal how inadequate”—she puts the cup down—“reality”—she makes a fist—“is.” When she opens her fist, the red ball isn’t there. What’s there is a full, perfect strawberry. Silence stretches
Refraction, it’s called: light bends when it enters a new medium. But the human brain is programmed to assume that light travels in straight lines. What she sees is different than what’s there.
Perhaps the point is not to resist death. Perhaps the point is that there’s no such thing. If Simon and Saul are contacting Klara, then consciousness survives the death of the body. If consciousness survives the death of the body, then everything she’s been told about death isn’t true. And if everything she’s been told about death isn’t true, maybe death is not death at all.
He was not troubled by his abandonment of religion. After all, there had been no struggle. His belief went willingly, logically, the way the boogeyman disappeared once you looked under the bed. That was the problem with God: he didn’t hold up to a critical analysis. He wouldn’t stand for it. He disappeared.
“In a way, I see religion as a pinnacle of human achievement. In inventing God, we’ve developed the ability to consider our own straits—and we’ve equipped Him with the kind of handy loopholes that enable us to believe we
only have so much control. The truth is that most people enjoy a certain level of impotence. But I think we do have control—so much that it scares us to death. As a species, God might be the greatest gift we’ve ever given ourselves. The gift of sanity.”
“I suppose I think we need God for the same reason we need art.” “Because it’s nice to look at?” “No.” Mira smiled. “Because it shows us what’s possible.”
There are certainly situations in which the marriage of psychology and physiology are undeniable, if not fully understood—the fact that pain originates not in the muscles or nerves but in the brain, for instance. Or that patients whose outlooks are positive are more likely to beat disease.
It is, for him, an act of faith. Faith not in God, but in his own agency. Faith not in fate, but in choice. He would live. He will live. Faith in life.
if there was one tenet of Judaism with which she
agreed, it was this: the power of words. They weaseled under door cracks and through keyholes. They hooked into individuals and wormed through generations. The truth might change Gertie’s perception of her children, children who weren’t alive to defend themselves. It would almost certainly cause her more pain.
It was like watching the power incrementally turning off throughout a neighborhood: certain parts of her went dark, then others. Certain modes of bravery—emotional bravery—and desire. The cost of loneliness is high, she knows, but the cost of loss is higher.
The point is that you have to live a lesser life in order to live a longer one. Don’t you see that? The point is that you’re willing to make that bargain, you have made that bargain, but to what end? At what cost? Of course, your monkeys never had the choice.”
It is impossible to convey the pleasure of routine to someone who does not find routine pleasurable, so Varya does
not try. The pleasure is not that of sex or love but of certainty. If she were more religious, and Christian, she could have been a nun: what safety, to know what prayer or chore you’ll b...
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She’d tell herself that what she really wanted was not to live forever, but to stop worrying.
She feared that fate was fixed, but she hoped—God, she hoped—that it was not too late for life to surprise her. She hoped it was not too late for her to surprise herself.
“But right now, I almost feel I understand her, because suicide does not seem irrational. What’s irrational is continuing on, day after day, as if forward momentum is natural.”
The impossibility of moving beyond loss, faced against the likelihood you will: it’s as absurd, as seemingly miraculous, as survival always is.
