Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

“Oh,” said the artisan, a little confounded by the length of Fra Orolo’s attention span. I suffer from attention surplus disorder, Fraa Orolo liked to say, as if it were funny.

ADHD joke

“It is what you don’t expect,” he’d said, “that most needs looking for.”

The whole time, they were appraising each other, as if in a competition to see which was the scientist and which was the specimen. By the time I got my wits about me to make introductions, they knew so much about each other that names hardly mattered.

boredom is a mask that frustration wears).

They knew many things but had no idea why. And strangely this made them more, rather than less, certain that they were right.

On any given day of Apert I could have written an entire book about what I was thinking and feeling, and it would have been completely different from the previous day’s book.

Nothing is more important than that you see and love the beauty that is right in front of you, or else you will have no defense against the ugliness that will hem you in and come at you in so many ways.”

when I saw any of those kinds of beauty I knew I was alive, and not just in the sense that when I hit my thumb with a hammer I knew I was alive, but rather in the sense that I was partaking of something—something was passing through me that it was in my nature to be a part of.

Diax said something that is still very important to us, which is that you should not believe a thing only because you like to believe it. We call that ‘Diax’s Rake’ and sometimes we repeat it to ourselves as a reminder not to let subjective emotions cloud our judgment.”

Boredom is a mask that frustration wears.

“I guess people like to think that they are not only living but propagating their way of life.”

People have a need to feel that they are part of some sustainable project. Something that will go on without them. It creates a feeling of stability. I believe that the need for that kind of stability is as basic and as desperate as some of the other, more obvious needs.

I saw now that in my desire to know theorics I had taken shortcuts that, just like shortcuts on a map, turned out to be longcuts.

Barb’s willingness to do things the hard way in the near term was making his advancement toward the long goal—even though he didn’t have one—swifter and surer than mine had ever been.

Why did I cry out “No!” when I’d known it all along? Not out of disbelief. It was an objection. A refusal. A declaration of war.

Anyone who pays as much attention to you as I do, which means no one.

Love

I had made a mess inside of someone else’s soul at a moment when that soul had been open to me.

“But your way isn’t just that set of rules,” Cord said. “It’s who you are—you follow that way for bigger reasons. And as long as you stay true to that, the confusion you’re talking about will sort itself out eventually.”

conviction & integrity

When the climate had been warmer, civilizations had sloshed back and forth across this glacier-planed landscape for a couple of thousand years like silt in a miner’s pan, forming drifts of built-up stuff that stayed long after the people had departed. At any given moment during those millennia, a billion might have lived on this territory that now supported a few tens of thousands. How many bodies were buried up here, how many people’s ashes scattered? Ten, twenty, fifty billion all told? Given that they all used electricity, how many miles of copper wire had been sewn through their buildings and under their pavements? How many man-years had been devoted to the one activity of pulling and stapling those wires into place? If one out of a thousand was an electrician, something like a billion man-years had been devoted to running wire from one point to another. After the weather had grown cold again and the civilizations had, over the course of a few centuries, shifted south—moving like glaciers—scavengers had begun coming up here to undo those billion man-years one tedious hour at a time, and retrieve those countless miles of wire yard by yard. Professional scavengers working on an industrial scale had gotten ninety percent of it quickly. I’d seen pictures of factories on tank treads that rolled across the north and engulfed whole city blocks at a time, treating the fabric of the ruins just as a mining robot would an ore-rich hill, grinding the buildings to rubble and sortin...

Vivid imagery of rise and fall of advanced civilizations on one planet over millennia

This was a Kelx—a Triangle ark. Its adherents were called Kedevs. It was a completely different faith from that of Ganelial Crade. It had been invented about two thousand years ago by some ingenious prophet who must have been unusually self-effacing, since little was known about him and he wasn’t worshipped as such. Like most faiths it was as fissured and fractured as the glaciers I’d been walking over lately. But all of its sects and schisms agreed that there was another world outside of and greater—in a sense, more real—than the one we lived in. That in this world there was a robber who had waylaid a family. He’d slain the father outright, raped and killed the mother, and taken their daughter with him as a hostage. Not long after, while trying to evade capture, he’d strangled the innocent girl. But he’d been caught anyway and locked up in a dungeon for a long time (“half of his life”) while waiting for his case to come before a Magistrate. At the trial he had admitted his guilt. The Magistrate had asked if there was any reason why he should not be put to death. The Condemned Man had responded that there was such a reason, one that had come to him during his years in the dungeon. As he had meditated over his hideous crimes, the one thing he’d never been able to chase from his mind was the murder of the girl—the Innocent—because in her there had been the potential to do so many things that could now never be realized. In any soul, the Condemned Man argued, was the ability ...

Each of us had the same power to create whole worlds. The hope was that one day there would be a Chosen One who would create a world that was perfect. If that ever happened, not only he and his world but all of the other worlds and their creators, back to the Condemned Man, would be saved recursively.

In each of those cases you are using your understanding of the laws of dynamics to explore a little counterfactual universe inside of your head, a universe where the bolt or the skin isn’t there, and you are then running that universe in fast-forward, like a speely, to see what would happen.

“I still think it seems fanciful to think we are all the time erecting and tearing down counterfactual universes in our minds.” “I’ve become so used to it that it seems fanciful to think otherwise,” Orolo said.

“My grand unification theory of consciousness,” Orolo joked. “Yes, you are saying that they are all rooted in a special ability that the brain has to erect models of counterfactual cosmi in the brain, and to play them forward in time, evaluate their plausibility, and so on. Which is utterly insane if you take the brain to be a normal syndev.”

“But each variant of me doesn’t exist in perfect isolation from the others,” I said, “or else it wouldn’t work.” Orolo nodded. “Quantum interference—the crosstalk among similar quantum states—knits the different versions of your brain together.” “You’re saying that my consciousness extends across multiple cosmi,” I said. “That’s a pretty wild statement.” “I’m saying all things do,” Orolo said. “That comes with the polycosmic interpretation. The only thing exceptional about the brain is that it has found a way to use this.”

And so, when my turn came, I stepped forward and sang that piece. I sang it freely and easily, because I was not troubled by any second thoughts as to whether it was the right thing to do.

I know them all, Raz. All the women of my age. And I can tell you as a matter of fact that in the cosmos where you and I are standing, there is no one like my Lise.” Tears were running freely down his face now.

Okay. So we were, in effect, locked in a room with a madman sorceror. That clarified things a little.

“An amanuensis is more than a recording device. An amanuensis is a consciousness-bearing system, and so what it observes in its cosmos has effects in others, in the manner we spoke of at Avrachon’s Dowment.”

wanted to say that they were brocade or embroidery, but life among bolt-wearing ascetics had left me with a deeply impoverished vocabulary where the decorative arts were concerned, so I’ll just say that they were fancy.

We let a few moments pass untroubled by words.

“It didn’t,” Fraa Jad said. “Prag Eshwar sensed terrible danger.” “How would you know this?” Gan Odru asked politely. Fraa Jad ignored the question. “She might explain it by claiming that she had a nightmare, or that sudden inspiration struck her in the bath, or that she has a gut feeling that tells her she ought to steer a safer course.” “And is this something that you brought about!?” Gan Odru said, more as exclamation than as question.

the Warden of Heaven’s mistake was failure to doubt.

Doubt is essential to faith, the delimiter between authentic depth and blind simplicity. One honors and transforms, the other is a veil casting darkness on the heart and soul within.