Gnomon

by Nick Harkaway

“you will be fine. You pay attention to the dog, you feed the dog, you exercise the dog, you own the dog, it’s your dog. However, if the dog thinks you are weak, it will fuck with you. Dogs are not cosy. Dogs are dogs. They are animals. They need clear hierarchies or they get confused and when they’re confused they piss on things, bite things, and mate with things until they get less confused. That’s all. That’s what it is. There’s just you and the dog and one of you is on top.”

So simplistic but so true, and humorous!

Gods do not die, they are transformed. They are sundered, reforged, slain, reborn, eaten and regurgitated. The debts of our legends are never cancelled, because the seed of their renewal is contained in each payment.

Such an immense thing to think about, reminds me of all the similarities between certain Gods.

Consciousness, I once read in a book, is a complexly convoluted loop of information that can observe itself.

Does it seem unlikely to you that the rulers of the world would gut the economy for a year just to check up on one man? That’s because you’re not one of them. You belong to another species. If you’re not in the Fifteen Hundred, you’re not just different, you’re barely real.

Scary scary scary true!

We learned that to lie to a machine, you don’t need to be a perfect liar: rather, you need only believe that everything is a lie. If the world is not real, if everything we see is a simulation or a game, then the fictions we append to it are no different from the ones which come to us through our senses.

I’d love to give that a try on a lie detector test! lol hopefully I never have to actually take one.

But we are all changed, all the time, by each passing instant of our days. The woman who wakes tomorrow is not the woman who woke yesterday, for all that there is a line of consequence between them. They are separated from one another by event.

I remember saying something similar to this in my early twenties and blowing some other 20 year olds mind. It still blows my mind when I think about the different me’s that existed throughout my life.

Imagine a game of musical chairs: each chair has a hat on it. When you sit in the chair, you wear the hat. You are the hierophant or the pilgrim. You are the judge or the hanged man. You are the sacrifice or the god. It all depends—” “On where you’re standing at the conjunction.”

tiny fragments of blood and bone that she’s breathing in, that the cells in her nose are reporting as a sensation but which are really floating samples of the red death of Oliver Smith.

Always a weird thing to think about, smell.

The words “I am” mean so much and the more complex one is the first.

Wow.