Gnomon

by Nick Harkaway

I have the shape of them, the gap they have left in me, but I cannot recapture what they were.

I pictured a rising authoritarianism on both the Left and the Right, and internationally a flagging centrist instinct struggling to find a voice that could not be shouted down.

I should call it hallucination—except that, later, I had cause to believe it had a large component either of truth or of something else whose untruthfulness did not hinder its power to work upon the world.

thing that could not properly be contained or even observed from within our reality, but which might pass through it at an angle as it traversed the tiny wrinkle of space and time that we called “everything.”

This heady cocktail of pride, virtue and sleaze worked as it always has, stoking resentment beyond the reach of words.

Poetry is a shotgun aimed at our shared experience, hoping to hit enough of the target that we all infer a great bulk of information conveyed as implication and metaphor in an approximately similar way.

becoming more than single loci which can be constrained: finding escape in dissolution into a suspension from which we precipitate at each point of conscious interaction with others, just as we are told that matter itself may exist only at the point of collision.

you will quote Proust as tomorrow’s children make jokes that derive their humour from puns invoking senses you do not have.

Go is the only game that survives futurity, because it is art as much as war.

Tracking five identities is geometrically more difficult than tracking four, and a fifth story requires a different rhythm, locks each narrative in place without the refuge of an empty space to move to when the searchlight becomes too bright.

Pattern is not presence, but nor is it nothing.

How many harmless young black men have been injured or killed in modern cities in white countries this year, for the crime of exciting someone else’s racism? Too many, and it must end.

I became obsessed with the knowledge that I would die, and day by day I played a game of it to prepare, as if by endless repetition I could somehow change sides and be not the corpse but the death, and thus survive myself.

and then you find yourself considering cavitation and then you’re wondering whether space and time themselves might be susceptible to a form of super-cavitation, and then when that seems still too irritatingly approximate you express the whole thing in numbers and you’re reaching for the as yet undefined.

What do I know? I know that human beings and fundamental particles share one absolute commonality: they exist in their interactions. In between times, their positions and trajectories are indecipherable even to themselves.

Everything depends upon its relationship to everything else for its meaning.

What is the difference between a person and a book? We can know the truth of neither. Both are encoded things seeking to make themselves clear. Both must be read and quickened within us—after all, we never know another person directly, soul to soul. We know only the gathered ghost that represents them inside our minds, the impressions they leave, the signs they give us that define them.

It is no longer enough to dismiss ideas on the basis that they sound like science fiction—almost everything about our world does.