Lucía’s Reviews > In the Country of Last Things > Status Update

Everything is possible, and that is almost the same as nothing, almost the same as being born into a world that has never existed before.

Words do not allow for such things. The closer you come to the end, the more there is to say. The end is only imaginary, a destination you invent to keep yourself going, but a point comes when you realize you will never get there. You may have to stop, but that is only because you have run out of time. You stop, but that does not mean you have come to the end.

he did not treat his inventions as lies. They were part of an almost conscious plan to concoct a more pleasant world for himself—a world that could shift according to his whims, that was not subject to the same laws and bleak necessities that dragged down all the rest of us. If this did not make him a realist in the strict sense of the word, he was not one to delude himself either.

A man must live from moment to moment, and who cares what you were last month if you know who you are today?

It was a different story every time, and yet each story was finally the same. The strings of bad luck, the miscalculations, the growing weight of circumstances. Our lives are no more than the sum of manifold contingencies, and no matter how diverse they might be in their details, they all share an essential randomness in their design: this then that, and because of that, this.

The problem did not lie in the method so much as in the nature of the problem itself. There were too many people to be helped and not enough people to them. The arithmetic was overpowering, inexorable in the havoc it produced. No matter how hard you worked, there was no chance you were not going to fail. (...) Unless you were willing to accept the utter futility of the job, there was no point in going on with it.

The quandary was immense, however. The moment you accept the idea that there might be some good in a place (…), you sink into a swamp of contradictions. (…) What is better—to help large numbers of people a little bit or small numbers of people a lot? I don’t really think there is an answer to this question.

there were times when I seriously questioned whether any of it was worth it, whether it would not in fact have been better to do nothing than to hold out gifts to people and then snatch them out of their hands a moment later. There was a fundamental cruelty to the process, and more often than not I found it intolerable.

We all take things for granted (…). It is only when we lose them that we ever notice the things we had. As soon as we get them back, we stop noticing them again.

Everything disappears, people just as surely as objects, the living along with the dead.