The Atlas Paradox (The Atlas, #2)

by Olivie Blake

“Do you think they know what it really means to love?” his projection-self mused aloud to him. “That it isn’t the simple joy of fondness, I mean. In fact it’s violent, destructive. It means to cut the heart out of your chest and give it to someone else.” He slid a sidelong glance to Callum, who didn’t look up. “To care at all about anyone or anything means inevitably to suffer. After all, what is compassion?” Callum’s projection posed, pausing for the punch line. As if it were a joke, which it was, in some capacity. “To feel the feelings of someone else is to exhaust yourself with double the pain,”

“To know what people really are and not destroy them is savagely remarkable.

from our adolescence? Tastes evolve, but there’s a particular slice of youth that never leaves us. They’re called our formative years for a reason. Because we always return to them in some form.

We can’t help clinging to our origins, Callum said. The past always seems more ordered, Rhodes. It always seems clearer, more straightforward, easier to understand. We have a craving for it, that sense of simplicity, but only an idiot would ever chase the past, because our perception of it is false—it was never that the world was simple. Just that in retrospect it could be known, and therefore understood.

“Why does anyone lie about anything? Because lies are convenient,” he answered for her, “and truths are stupid, and doing anything for any reason is based on a random series of choices built on a self-serving morality that ensures that the species survives.”

“But if you think about it, nobody asks for any of this. What they’re born into. We just get what we get, and that’s a tragedy in itself. Everybody’s got one.”

“It’s funny,” Nico said. “This library. Everything we can have.” “Yes,” said Parisa. “It’s everything until it’s nothing,” Nico said. By which he meant: Why had he given everything up when he could have stayed in one place and never known how much he didn’t know?

This was just the world. You trusted people, you loved them, you offered them the dignity of your time and the intimacy of your thoughts and the frailty of your hope and they either accepted it and cared for it or they rejected it and destroyed it and in the end, none of it was up to you. This was just what you got. Heartbreak was inevitable. Disappointment assured.