The Passenger (The Passenger #1)

by Cormac McCarthy

vergangenheitvolk

doesnt it have to come to a full stop first?

How far down can you clamp your calipers?

Ixtaccihuatl.

St-Gaudens.

We might have very different notions about the nature of the oncoming night, he said. But as darkness descends does it matter?

The question that comes to mind of course is who is the ideal guest. Of the universe.

coldstop file.

T

Ducklescence,

As you close upon some mathematical description of reality you cant help but lose what is being described. Every inquiry displaces what is addressed. A moment in time is a fact, not a possibility. The world will take your life. But above all and lastly the world does not know that you are here. You think that you understand this. But you dont. Not in your heart you dont. If you did you would be terrified. And you’re not. Not yet. And now, good night.

horts

Lord Wartburg, he said. Mossy Creek.

Wartburg TN is just outsideOak Ridge TN, site of Manhattan project production. Mossy Creek runs nearby

Lord Wartburg, he said. Mossy Creek.

Oak Ridge area

not.

Foodbased inferiority complex compensation

My father was a country storekeeper and yours a fabricator of expensive devices that make a loud noise and vaporize people.

Grief is the stuff of life. A life without grief is no life at all. But regret is a prison. Some part of you which you deeply value lies forever impaled at a crossroads you can no longer find and never forget.

Time and the perception of time. Very different things I suppose. You said once that a moment in time was a contradiction

there could be no moveless thing. That time could not be constricted into a brevity that contradicts its own definition.

You also suggested that time might be incremental rather than linear. That the notion of the endlessly divisible in the worl...

While a discrete world on the other hand must raise the question as to what it is that connects it. Something to reflect upon. A bird trapped in a barn that moves through the slats of light bird by bird. Whose sum is one bird. We should go.

Einstein and Bohr

bored?

BohrDiscreteness v linearity and bird by bird "Do you think I'm [BOHRED]?" Punny reference to Einstein's thought experiment posed to Bohr, re photons leaving the "photon box". How do birds leave a barn? Ask Anne Lamott: Bird by bird.

You deny our brotherhood. Insisting as you do in your sly way that our genealogies and our socioeconomic standings have set us apart at birth in a manner not to be contravened. But I will tell you Squire that having read even a few dozen books in common is a force more binding than blood.

It’s all just darkness. I’m sorry.

Beauty makes promises that beauty cant keep.

I dont know, Honey. Not all that much. I think people regret what they didnt do more than what they did.

Probably off the Highway 33 bridge along with God knows what else.

shadowlane,

penetralium

heresiarch

Dont be afraid for me, she had written. When has death ever harmed anyone?

dead children

she’d seen him weeping over the cold clay of her childsbody in a nameless crossroads, kneeling to touch his dead handiwork.

Stillborn child

On the nature of that which God might flee or God abandon there was only silence, but she thought that she and the visitors to her attic might well be candidates.

wicket.

Confessional window

Walter?

six,

donkey’s

asses

helix.

Probably be my comeuppance before this thing is over.

chickens

poultryhouse.

Chicken

The last witness who could have put a name to the faces is boxed up in the ground alongside them and if not nameless as well will soon be so.

Wartburg

You’re a one-off.

Nobody is totally unique. Nope. Just you. I’m the only one. Yup. But you cant say what it is that I’m the only one of. Well, you could say the only one of a kind, I suppose. But of course you’re right. There’s no kind. Which leads us to the paradox that where there’s no kind there cant be one.

Either. You cant have anything till another thing shows up. That’s the problem. If there’s just one thing you cant say where it is or what it is. You cant say how big it is or how small or what color it is or how much it weighs. You cant say if it is. Nothing is anything unless there’s another thing. So we have you. Well. Do we?

Relationalism and uncertaintyThe part about names and in particular the part asserting "You cant have anything till another thing shows up" is an expression of one of the three basic tenets of quantum mechanics.The other two are granularity and indeterminacy (uncertainty). The principle is that quantum theory does not describe things as they “are”: it describes how things “occur,” and how they “interact with each other.” It doesn’t describe where there is a particle but how the particle shows itself to others. The world of existent things is reduced to a realm of possible interactions. Reality is reduced to interaction. Reality is reduced to relation. See Carlo Rovelli, "Reality is not what it seems..." At p 134. This aspect describes many other interesting events in the book.

Remains to be seen.

Desmodromic

If Bobby was Bobby I was Alice. That sounds really dumb. It was really dumb.

Relational. Key to character entanglement