cycads and ferns > Recent Status Updates

“Small Differences mean much to you. There is Power in these?”
“The finer the Scale we work at, the more Power may we dispose….They who control the Microscopick, control the World.”

"I've always believed I could see things other people couldn't…in the chaos of things. I suppose I find these moments precious and reassuring because they take place outside me…they suggest an outer state that works somewhat the way my mind does but without the relentlessness, the predeterminative quality. I feel I'm safe from myself as long as there's an accidental pattern to observe in the physical world."

-Is it you or me that you want to kill with your drinking…when I say
-We were happy,weren't we?
you can't imagine how much it pains me to lie…my mother
-I would prefer for you to kill me rather than accept it and he didn't accept it…he humiliated himself…accepting jobs that were progressively lower paid
-Nobody's going to make dough with him
humbler,small odd jobs…bottle in your lap,I remember saying
-Daddy

There was a prophet standing in the square with arms upheld in exhortation to the beggared multitude gathered there…And the dreamer himself was caught up among the supplicants and when they had been blessed and the sun begun to blacken he did push forward and hold up his hand and call out. Me, he cried. Can I be cured? The prophet looked down as if surprised to see him…The sun paused. He said: Yes….

“What do you do….”
"Policy updates…I review the political and economic situation of the country…a complex grading system. Prison statistics weighed against the number of foreign workers. How many young males unemployed…What happens to dissidents…What seems likely? Collapse, overthrow…a balance of payments problem, maybe bodies hurled into ditches. Whatever endangers an investment."
"Then you pay."

The trouble with coming was that I actually did arrive somewhere. I arrived at the place my body had already left. I got there just in time to get a good look at what had happened where things were.

We like to think that in this house there's a ghost living with us and watching us….
The boy christened it “Without."
Why Without?
Just because he's with and without a
face, Mama.

“I enjoy it. It's an interesting part of the world. I feel I'm involved in events. Sure, sometimes I see it from a different perspective. Yours, of course. It's just insurance. It's the world's biggest, richest companies protecting their investments."
"Is that my perspective?"
"Don't I know what you hate by this time?"
"There ought to be something higher than the corporation. That's all."

…as far as he was concerned for his 'heart' was 'dead' and it was pointless mocking him now that he 'had learned to stand on his own two feet and understood everything’: he no longer believed the world was 'an enchanted place' for the only power that really existed was ‘that declared by force of arms'….

Lying back now on the bed trying to picture his father's putative invention, he sees skinless bodies moving through empty space: hundreds of them, stretching, bending and gesturing, like the dancing skeletons of folklore and travelling carnival displays. "Carrefax Cathode"
…all Serge can see is death- death broadcast out…to homes in Europe and across the world. Can death be patented?

He listened to the whine and crackle…right through till morning- and heard, or thought he heard, among its breaks and flecks, the sound of people treading cold, black water, their hands beating small disturbances into waves that had come to bury them.

The work is hard,hot;I'm fat,old,out of shape. So I shall have to get a set at Sears:shovels, picks,hoes…I might as well make digging this tunnel as easy as possible…Someday…I shall want to commemorate with plaque or song…the day I began to dig…I instinctively understood why Alice went after the rabbit or melted in her mirror:the tunnel,all the other side,was more attractive than either glass or rabbit.

I came to say goodbye to the house or my older brother, and through him, to myself…there are people who take a long time to leave us…just like the dogs abandoned far away who come back just as they abandoned me far away and I returned here…I have the waves on the beach, grab your rifle, point it at me, and order me to walk to the edge of the cliff where, contrary to our older brother, someone helps me jump.

I came to say goodbye to my older brother, and through him, to myself, I don't know…there are people who take a long time to leave us, the body goes but the eyes stay there, just like dogs who are abandoned in a remote place come back, not angry, humble, you open the door and they don't dare come in, wet from the rain….

...I would wake up in the middle of the night certain that the ocean was calling me through the closed shutters, who told it my name.…the echoes of the pines in the echo of my footsteps, which of us is the trees and which of us is me.…

‘Better to be satisfied with the meagre but at least harmless truth…we are simply the miserable subjects of some insignificant failure, alone in this simply marvellous creation; that the whole of human history is no more…than the histrionics of a stupid, bloody, miserable outcast in an obscure corner of a vast stage…the painful fact that this creation was not necessarily a brilliant success.'

"Hogwash, Sir," Uncle Ives about to become peevish with his Son, "Facts are Facts.…”
"Sir, no offense meant. I was but pointing out that a single Version, in proceeding from a single Authority….”
"Ethelmer." Ives raises a monitory Eye-brow. "Time on Earth is too precious. No one has time, for more than one Version of the Truth."
…. "Or read Novels," adds Euphrenia….

Mistress of the future, she already had courage enough to look the town full in the eye, perfectly convinced that she was standing on the threshold of sweeping changes leading to something new…and it wasn't only the usual every-day signs of collapse that confirmed her view, but …not altogether unwelcome occurrences which hastened to prove that the unavoidable resurrection…had been ordained by…heaven itself.

A spotlit table, my father's mother presiding…men raising arms and eyebrows and voices…all of them fixated on returning an exiled politician to power, an exiled politician and his dead wife who will restore democracy…while in the kitchen the exhausted maid props her head in her hands as the calls for more coffee echo off the tiled walls.

…this much is true of it…namely that reality permits us to believe anything or its opposite, as we wish, even both at the same time; it allows us to be stupid and willful and perverse and blind without any special penalty….Reality suffers fools….No, reality does not punish wickedness….the point is, Kohler, reality really doesn't give a shit; the truth plainly doesn't matter a damn.

Clotilde Armenta...was the first to see him in the glow of dawn, and she had the impression that he was dressed in aluminum. "He already looked like a ghost," she told me. The men who were going to kill him had slept on the benches, clutching the knives wrapped in newspapers to their chests, and Clotilde Armenta held her breath so as not to awaken them.

“But isn't it strange to see how easily this unfortunate gentleman believes all those inventions and lies simply because they are in the same style and manner as his foolish books….if you speak to him of other matters, he talks rationally and shows a clear, calm understanding in everything; in other words, except if the subject is chivalry, no one would think he does not have a very good mind."

"Dixon, hold…are you telling me, now, that Americans are not British?— You've heard this somewhere?"
"No more than the Cape Dutch are Dutch…? 'Tis said these people keep Slaves, as did our late Hosts,— that they are likewise inclin'd to kill the People already living where they wish to settle,—"
"Another Slave-Colony…so have I heard, as well. Christ."

My mother...she drank to the point of suicide, because a life which not only lacked love, but couldn't even catch a little indifference...was intolerable...produced...a monster upon whom she nevertheless pinned her hopes with exactly the same chance for success as anyone would who tried to drive a nail into a passing cloud- a son to whom she threw her soul at considerable peril, like a stone into a paper boat.

"God save me!" said Sancho. "Didn't I tell your grace to watch what you were doing, that these were nothing but windmills….”
"Be quiet, Sancho my friend," replied Don Quixote. "Matters of war…are subject to continual change…the same Frestón the Wise who stole my room and my books has turned these giants into windmills in order to deprive me of the glory…such is the enmity he feels for me….”

…he was assailed by a thought so terrible it almost made him abandon the enterprise…he recalled that he had not been dubbed a knight…These thoughts made him waver in his purpose; but, his madness being stronger than any other faculty, he resolved to have himself dubbed a knight by the first person he met…as he had read in the books that had brought him to this state.

Troy nodded downcountry. They say there's been a white man ambushed ever mile of this draw.
Billy studied the country. Looks like they'd of learned to stay out of it.

"Astronomy in a Realm where Slavery prevails…Slaves holding candles to illuminate the ocular Threads, whilst others hold Mirrors, should we wish another Angle. One might lie, supine, Zenith-Star position, all Night…being fann'd, fed, amus'a….I…think of this place as another Planet whither we have journey'd, where these Dutch-speaking White natives are…alien….”

Another time Billy heard Rosewater say to a psychiatrist, "I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren't going to want to go on living."

Feral trees preferred ravines to roads...
Farsighted hordes of oak groves...airier than craters. And so corralled, the georgic valley issued emissaries like a man's eye on a woman's hair. And through the highest pass the bloodless sky descended to beg indolence from the granite.