“In the end, he sought nothing less than to see the house exact its annihilating effects on his own being. Again quoting directly from The Criteria: ‘Navidson has one deeply acquired organizing perception: there is no hope of survival there. Life is impossible. And therein lies the lesson of the house, spoken in syllables of […]
“There are only 8,160 frames in Karen’s film and yet they serve as the perfect counterpoint to that infinite stretch of hallways, rooms and stairs. The house is empty, her piece is full. The house is dark, her film glows. A growl haunts that place, her place is blessed by Charlie Parker. On Ash Tree […]
“I guess one obvious option now is to just get ride of this thing, which if Lude’s right, should put an end to all my recent troubles. It’s a nice idea but it reeks of hope. False hope. Not all complex problems have easy solutions; so says Science (so warns Science); and so Trenton once […]
“I should be dead. Why am I still here? And as that question appears––concise, in order, properly accented––I see I’m holding onto the tray loaded with all those caps and bottles of black and purple ink. Not only that but I’m already walking as fast as I can through the doorway. The door is open […]
“In 1993 the journalist James Gorman wrote: I used to speak in a regular voice. I was able to assert, demand, question. Then I started teaching. At a university? And my students had this rising intonation thing? It was particularly noticeable on telephone messages. ‘Hello? Professor Gorman? This is Albert? From feature writing?’ I had […]
“With a little luck, you’ll dismiss this labor, react as Zampanò had hoped, call it needlessly complicated, pointlessly obtuse, prolix––your word––, ridiculously conceived, and you’ll believe all you’ve said, and then you’ll put it aside––though even here, just that one word, ‘aside’, makes me shudder, for what is ever really just put aside?––and you’ll carry […]
“He was always conscious of the swiftly passing days, and the unsolved mysteries around them. He was becoming more and more certain that something was about to happen, and that they would have to abandon Rama even before it reached perihelion––the moment of truth when any orbit change must surely take place. ‘Now listen, Hub, […]
“It was as if they were approaching the edge of the world; their oval of light, cut off abruptly ahead of them, became shorter and shorter. But far out on the curved screen of the Sea their monstrous foreshortened shadows had appeared, magnifying and exaggerating every movement. Those shadows had been their companions every step […]
“Never before had Norton felt so strongly his kinship with that long dead Egyptologist. Not since Howard Carter had first peered into the tomb of Tutankhamen could any man have known a moment such as this––yet the comparison was almost laughably ludicrous. Tutankhamen had been buried only yesterday––not even four thousand years ago; Rama might […]
“The world is not a line of dominoes in which each event causes exactly one event and is caused by exactly one event. The world is a tissue of causes and effects that criss and cross in tangled patterns.” ––The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, by Steven Pinker, pg. 215