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I think that my desire to remain totally fucking ignorant about shit that will only get me in trouble is both deep and abiding. I’m going to say that it is just damn near a religion.
After all, I’m merely an enemy of society, while he is one of God.
What the Squire has never understood is that forgiveness has a time line. While it’s never too late for revenge.
I like your friend, said Bianca. Nice ass. You’re digging a dry hole, my dear. Why? Is he gay? No. He’s in love. Pity. It’s worse than that. How so? He’s in love with his sister.
He’s actually from Wartburg. Wartburg Tennessee. Wartburg Tennessee. Yes. There is no such place. I’m afraid there is. It’s near Oak Ridge. His father’s trade was the design and fabrication of enormous bombs for the purpose of incinerating whole citiesful of innocent people as they slept in their beds.
He was up on the stage playing the mandolin with the band. Bluegrass. I’d never met him but I knew who he was. He was a mathematics major with a four point grade average.
And she was even smarter than he was. And just drop dead gorgeous. A flat out trainwrecker. He got a scholarship to Caltech and he went there and studied physics but he never got his doctorate. He came into some money and went to Europe to race cars.
He is in love with his sister. But of course it gets worse. Bianca smiled her odd smile and licked her upper lip. Okay. He’s in love with his sister and…? He’s in love with his sister and she’s dead.
You go to war you’re not really mad at anybody. You’re just trying to keep alive long enough to learn how to stay that way. It’s only when you start to see a few of your buddies get wasted that you really get a hard-on for those sons of bitches. The reason I signed up for a second tour was to try and get even. That’s all. Nothing complicated about it. Well. Not really all, I guess.
I want to know what you’re doing here. The Kid rolled his eyes upward. He looked at the other entities and shook his head. He turned to the girl. Look, Presh. At bottom it’s pretty much about structure. Something not all that thick on the ground around here, I think even you might agree. But you cant do anything until you lift the mood. Get everybody together. A little comity. Okay? We’re trying for a baseline. Otherwise it all starts to unravel. You got to use your best judgment. Work with the materials at hand. There’s a number of ugly scenarios here. Like what? Chalk outline? That’s easy.
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Who do they think you are? Who do they think we are? I dont know. Christ. I guess they think I’m a passenger. Of course you could make the case that if they’re passengers then I must be something else. But maybe not. I cant speak for them.
As the vicar said to the choirboy. To the seasoned traveler a destination is at best a rumor. I wrote that. It’s in my diary. Good for you. When you carry a child in your arms it will turn its head to see where it’s going. Not sure why. It’s going there anyway. You just need to grab your best hold, that’s all.
By the time he got to the marina he thought that the man who’d gone ashore on the island was almost certainly the passenger.
Do you believe in God? The truth? Sure. I dont know who God is or what he is. But I dont believe all this stuff got here by itself. Including me. Maybe everything evolves just like they say it does. But if you sound it to its source you have to come ultimately to an intention.
He thought that God’s goodness appeared in strange places. Dont close your eyes.
You think that when there’s somethin that’s got you snakebit you can just walk off and forget it. The truth is it aint even following you. It’s waitin for you. It always will be.
I know you, Bobby. You’re not even a fatalist. Not even. I know you dont believe in God. But you dont even believe that there is a structure to the world. To a person’s life.
I wish you could listen to yourself. Dont we all.
You will never know what the world is made of. The only thing that’s certain is that it’s not made of the world. 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.
Do you know what I find particularly galling, he told them. It’s having to share the women with you lot. To listen to you fuckwits holding forth and to see some lissome young thing leaning forward breathlessly with that barely contained frisson with which we are all familiar the better to inhale without stint an absolute plaguebreath of bilge and bullshit as if it were the word of the prophets. It’s painful but still I suppose one has to extend a certain latitude to the little dears. They’ve so little time in which to parlay that pussy into something of substance. But it nettles. That you
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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.
Well, I wont joust with you on your own ground. You’re a man of words and I one of number. But I think we both know which will prevail.
Without malefactors the world of the righteous is robbed of all meaning.
Real trouble doesnt begin in a society until boredom has become its most general feature. Boredom will drive even quietminded people down paths they’d never imagined.
it. Certainly there are mornings when I wake and see a grayness to the world I think was not in evidence before. A conversation we’ve had. I know. The horrors of the past lose their edge, and in the doing they blind us to a world careening toward a darkness beyond the bitterest speculation. It’s sure to be interesting. When the onset of universal night is finally acknowledged as irreversible even the coldest cynic will be astonished at the celerity with which every rule and stricture shoring up this creaking edifice is abandoned and every aberrancy embraced. It should be quite a spectacle.
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But I will tell you Squire that having read even a few dozen books in common is a force more binding than blood.
Being wrong is the worst thing a physicist can be. It’s up there with being dead.
Do you really believe in physics? I dont know what that means. Physics tries to draw a numerical picture of the world. I dont know that it actually explains anything. You cant illustrate the unknown. Whatever that might mean.
From that day the God of her innocence had slowly ebbed from her life. In a dream she’d seen him weeping over the cold clay of her childsbody in a nameless crossroads, kneeling to touch his dead handiwork. Until finally the Kid showed up with his companions. 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. The Kid and his shadowkind had come trekking across a vast waste. A landscape bleak and interminable.
Why dont I have a muse? Where would you get one? You’re a one-off.
The dead are not loved long, you said. You may have noticed it in your travels, you said. You could open your heart a little. I did open my heart. And this is what I got. And anyway some things cant be fixed. And history is not for everybody. Jesus. Where’s my pencil? Get this stuff down.
It’s not like I wasnt warned. Warned about what? About you, Tuliptits. What do you get out of calling me names? Names are important. They set the parameters for the rules of engagement. The origin of language is in the single sound that designates the other person. Before you do something to them.
He met her for dinner in Paris and she talked to him feverishly about mathematical ideas that to him threatened to abandon reality of any kind he’d a stake in.
The voices were like a balm to him. To be a part of some enterprise. A community of men. A thing all but unknown to him for the greater part of his life.
It’s not education. Sheddan’s got a pretty good education. Damn good, for that matter. But there’s things about you that are not true for him or me. Or Red. For instance. Maybe it’s just that people will say things about you that they wont say to you. Bad things? No. Just things that might be true about you. Do you think you can learn all there is to know about yourself from yourself? No. I dont think that.
The ancients claim that there is truth in the grape. God knows I’ve looked. I suppose that when a man is sick of pussy he’s sick of life but I do think the bitches may have finally done me in.
I’m not in a good mood. Still at heart I know there’s more wisdom in sorrow than in joy. Maybe you can see why I resent being called a cynic.
We dont move through the days, Squire. They move through us. Until the last cruel crank of the ratchet. I’m not sure I see the distinction. It’s just that the passing of time is irrevocably the passing of you. And then nothing. I suppose it should be a comfort to understand that one cannot be dead forever where there’s no forever to be dead in.
Was drinking a problem? I dont know. I guess I’d have to say it was. I’d wake up in strange places. I woke up one time in somebody’s parked car and I thought, well, what if you woke up dead? That kind of got to me. I mean, do you think if you died drunk you’d sober up before you met Jesus? Good question. I dont know. I thought about that. Standin in front of him drunk. What would he say. Hell, what would you say? I guess I dont think your soul gets drunk. Webb thought about that. Well, he said. Maybe yours dont.
When smart people do dumb things it’s usually due to one of two things. The two things are greed and fear. They want something they’re not supposed to have or they’ve done something they werent supposed to do. In either case they’ve usually fastened on to a set of beliefs that are supportive of their state of mind but at odds with reality. It has become more important to them to believe than to know.
How do I know what to trust? You dont have a choice. All you can believe is what is. Unless you’d prefer to believe what aint. I’d have thought we might be past all that by now. I’m not past anything.
What did she know? She knew that in the end you really cant know. You cant get hold of the world. You can only draw a picture. Whether it’s a bull on the wall of a cave or a partial differential equation it’s all the same thing.
They see it as a matter of belief. Belief? Yeah. As in nonbeliever. No matter the magnitude of your doubts about the nature of the world you cant come up with another world without coming up with another you.
What do you know of grief? he called. You know nothing. There is no other loss. Do you understand? The world is ashes. Ashes. For her to be in pain? The least insult? The least humiliation? Do you understand? For her to die alone? Her? There is no other loss. Do you understand? No other loss. None.
You might think that fingerprints and numbers give you a distinct identity. But soon there will be no identity so distinct as simply to have none. The truth is that everyone is under arrest. Or soon will be. They dont have to restrict your movements. They just have to know where you are. It sounds like paranoia to me. It is paranoia.
How good a mathematician was your sister? We come back to that from time to time. There’s no answer to it. Mathematics is not physics. The physical sciences can be weighed against each other. And against what we suppose to be the world. Mathematics cant be weighed against anything.
How smart was she? Who knows? She saw everything differently. She would figure something out and then half the time she couldnt explain to you how she’d done it. It was hard for her to understand what it was that you didnt understand. That smart.
It’s just that sometimes I think I would have found my life pretty funny if I hadnt had to live it.
What you write down becomes fixed. It takes on the constraints of any tangible entity. It collapses into a reality estranged from the realm of its creation. It’s a marker. A roadsign. You have stopped to get your bearings, but at a price. You’ll never know where it might have gone if you’d left it alone to go there.
Once a mathematical conjecture is formalized into a theory it may have a certain luster to it but with rare exceptions you can no longer entertain the illusion that it holds some deep insight into the core of reality. It has in fact begun to look like a tool.
