Stella Maris (The Passenger #2)

by Cormac McCarthy

doctoral candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago

Why did you? Because I was an idiot. That’s what Oppenheimer said. At the hearings.

I was deeply synesthetic and I thought that if music had an inherent reality—color and taste—that only a few people could identify, then perhaps it had other attributes yet to be discerned.

A platonic theory of music just muddies the water. Music is made out of nothing but some fairly simple rules. Yet it’s true that no one made them up. The rules. The notes themselves amount to almost nothing. But why some particular arrangement of these notes should have such a profound effect on our emotions is a mystery beyond even the hope of comprehension. Music is not a language. It has no reference to anything other than itself.

Schopenhauer says somewhere that if the entire universe should vanish the only thing left would be music.

If space contained but a single entity the entity would not be there. There would be nothing there for it to be there to.

Read this chapter c.f. Zen and the art of mm

A New Theory of Vision.

reality is forever unknowable. Kant.

solipsist

Were you interested in boys? I was interested in one boy. But it wasnt reciprocal.

Her brother

human consciousness and reality are not the same thing.

they’re often inclined to give up what they treasure for what makes them miserable.

Bach’s Chaconne. The D Minor? I cant remember. Such a raw, haunting piece. He’d composed it for his wife who’d died while he was away.

most of the scientists didnt give that much thought to what was going to happen. They were just having a good time. They all said the same thing about the Manhattan Project. That they’d never had so much fun in their lives. But anyone who doesnt understand that the Manhattan Project is one of the most significant events in human history hasnt been paying attention.

nothing can be its own explanation.

things ultimately contain no information concerning themselves.

prospect of our species having created a thing we have yet to discover.

In the parlance of the times.

Lebowski

All I can tell you is that I like numbers. I like their shapes and their colors and their smells and the way they taste. And I dont like to take people’s word for things.

While there seems to be no floor to sorrow.

Ayn rand said you only go so low no lower

Animals might whimper if they’re hungry or cold. But they dont start screaming. It’s a bad idea. The more noise you make the more likely you are to be eaten. If you’ve no way to escape you keep silent.

The more I thought about it the clearer it became to me that what I was hearing was rage.

The first time I heard Bach I had an out-of-body experience.

The rules of music that guide a composer like Bach…All right. There are not any composers like Bach. There’s just Bach. But ignoring that for the moment, these rules can be learned by laymen. They are there to be learned. Or not. They are there whether the first note of music was ever written or not.

platonic

Schopenhauer thought that if the universe vanished music alone would remain. The rules are the music. Without the ...

this set of rules—I think I’d call them laws, laws of music—is selfcontained and complete. They are known and there will never be any more of them.

The core question is not how you do math but how does the unconscious do it.

I’m not even sure that it’s all that wise to commit things to memory. What you log in becomes fixed.

for most people to leave things unrecorded is to leave them free to look around for fresh analogies.

I’m not sure I’ve heard a description of the unconscious that grants it that kind of autonomy. Well. It’s been on its own for a long time. Of course it has no access to the world except through your own sensorium. Otherwise it would just labor in the dark. Like your liver. For historical reasons it’s loath to speak to you. It prefers drama, metaphor, pictures. But it understands you very well. And it has no other cause save yours.

I dont think most children seriously consider the fact that they are going to be adults one day. And that this is what they’ll look like.

Holden caulfield

I saw through something like a judas hole into this world where there were sentinels standing at a gate and I knew that beyond the gate was something terrible and that it had power over me.

personal history—have

Donna tart

I put my hand on his arm but he pulled it away. Why did he do that? It’s complicated. All right.

The dr. Still doesn't know

there is no prototype to the violin. It simply appears out of nowhere in all its perfection.

unless you’re willing to concede that God invented the violin there is a figure who will never be known. A small man who went with his son into the stunted forests of the little iceage of fifteenth century Italy and sawed and split the maple trees and put the flitches to dry for seven years and then stood in the slant light of his shop one morning and said a brief prayer of thanks to his creator and then—knowing this perfect thing—took up his tools and turned to its construction. Saying now we begin.

Wittgenstein convinced Russell that all of mathematics was a tautology

the second chapter of Spengler’s Decline of the West. Which is entitled “The Meaning of Numbers.”

God cant add two and two. Zero and one are all he’s got to work with.

Because it was them, because it was me. That sounds like a quote. It is. Montaigne.

Your brother was very protective of you. Yes. Very. He never climbed into bed with you. My brother? No. It was the other way around.

Are you telling me that you were in love with your brother?

Shoes and ships and sealing wax.

synesthetic?

Smelling a memory

here in Wisconsin.

there are times when I miss the world of calculation itself. Solving problems. When things suddenly fall into place after days of labor

Akin to the problems involved in writing a novel that need to be solved must be very satisfying when it comes together.

When you said goodbye to the Kid.

Did McCarthy say goodbye to the kid in blood meridian. Did the character haunt his dreams.

as old as language.

Language is not biologically original. It is conceived and invented by human beings. And not the first human beings either. It developed over millennia. Original human beings didn't read or write. They only dreamed. They had to find other ways to convey the images in their minds to others.

Lithium of course always comes last because it’s not patentable. You cant turn a buck with a thing like that.

Commentary on the state of the pharmaceutical industry