An instant of sharp pain before the numbness. The world was floods above and fire below. If there was such a thing as a soul, the soul had gambled on a sort of baptism, and had it won?

The body apologizes to the soul for its errors, and the soul asks forgiveness for squatting in the body without invitation.

A ring of expectant faces before the light dims; they move in the shadows like ghouls …

… and the creatures of makeshift lives, the hobbled together, the disenfranchised, and the abused: the Lion, the Scarecrow, the maimed Tin Woodman. Up from the shadows for an instant, up into the light; then back.

The Goddess of Gifts the last, reaching in among flames and water, cradling her, crooning something, but the words remain unclear.

• excerpt from Gregory Maguire. “Wicked”

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I live as if in someone else’s house A house that comes in dreams And in which I have died perhaps Where there is something strange In the weariness of evening Something the mirrors save for themselves—

—from “Dull Knife,” Anna Akhmatova, trans. D. M. Thomas”

(excerpted From Rose/House by Arkady Martine)

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“No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us."

― exerpt from H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

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tegeus-Cromis, sometime soldier and sophisticate of Virconium, the Pastel City, who now dwelt quite alone in a tower by the sea and imagined himself a better poet than swordsman, stood at early morning on the sand dunes that lay between his tall home and the grey line of the surf.

Excerpt from “The Pastel City” by M. John Harrison 📚 💬

He took the clay from the hand of the angel, and made Adam according to Our image and likeness, and He left him lying for forty days and forty nights without putting breath into him. And He heaved sighs over him daily, saying, ‘If I put breath into this [man], he must suffer many pains.’

And I said unto My Father, ‘Put breath into him; I will be an advocate for him.’

And My Father said unto Me, ‘If I put breath into him, My beloved Son, Thou wilt be obliged to go down into the world, and to suffer many pains for him before Thou shalt have redeemed him, and made him to come back to his primal state.’

And I said unto My Father, ‘Put breath into him; I will be his advocate, and I will go down into the world, and will fulfil Thy command.’

• from “Discourse on Abbatôn” by Timothy, Archbishop of Alexandria

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World Line

Events are the atoms of experience.

• from Black Holes: The Key to Understanding the Universe by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw

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Gideon the Ninth

In the myriadic year of our lord — the ten thousandth year of the King Undying, the kindly Prince of Death! — Gideon Nav packed her sword, her shoes and her dirty magazines, and she escaped from the House of the Ninth.

• excerpt from Gideon the Ninth by Tamsin Muir

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We are all philosophers here where I am, and we debate among many other things the question of where it is that we live. On that issue I am a liberal. I live in the interstice yes, but I live in both the city and the city.

• excerpt from China Mieville. “The City and the City”

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Limitless, I came to a world where the moon lay so huge and ivory and cratered that it blotted out the sun above a mirror-twin to Earth. Except, there in that strange land everything was alive and nothing was dead, even the dead, and I could find no familiar scent to guide me through. Where the rocks spoke to me and so did the water and so did the sand and so did the plants.

There, ultimately, I found my purpose. There, I was transformed once more and truly became the blue fox. Out where all the smells run together and you cannot trust your senses.

What lived there had lost its name long ago. What lived there changed shape and form and spoke in different voices. Had been created as one thing, brought up as another. What lived there was serious and playful and lonely but not alone. It had known me before. It knew me now, read my mind, my intent, encouraged it.

It will take time. You will not survive to see the end of it. And one day, Time will bring you back here, in some form. To this place.

“How do you know this?”

But there was just laughter in reply.

In the end, if you change the enemy enough, if you wear them down, perhaps losing is good enough.

This much I know, among all the other things I know.

Excerpt From Dead Astronauts by Jeff VanderMeer

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blackswangreen

The sequence of doors we passed made me think of all the rooms of my past and future. The hospital ward I was born in, classrooms, tents, churches, offices, hotels, museums, nursing homes, the room I’ll die in. (Has it been built yet?) Cars’re rooms. So are woods. Skies’re ceilings. Distances’re walls. Wombs’re rooms made of mothers. Graves’re rooms made of soil.

That music was swelling.

A Jules Verne hi-fi, all silvery knobs and dials, occupied one corner of the solarium. Madame Crommelynck sat on her cane throne, eyes shut, listening. As if the music was a warm bath. (This time I knew she wouldn’t be speaking for a while, so I just sat down on the armless sofa.) A classical L.P. was playing. Nothing like the rumpty-tump-tump stuff Mr. Kempsey plays in Music. Jealous and sweet, this music was, sobbing and gorgeous, muddy and crystal. But if the right words existed the music wouldn’t need to.

The piano’d vanished. Now a flute’d joined the violin.

(I can still hear it, hours later.)

• blackswangreen by david mitchell
• a reference to the Cloud Atlas Sextet by Robert Frobisher in Mitchell’s other book, Cloud Atlas

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Maybe it’s wrong when we remember breakthroughs to our own being as something that occurs in discrete, extraordinary moments. Maybe falling in love, the piercing knowledge that we ourselves will someday die, and the love of snow are in reality not some sudden events; maybe they were always present. Maybe they never completely vanish, either.

• excerpt from Peter Hoeg. “Smilla’s Sense of Snow”

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“A person creates the word. Gives in to the world, and becomes the word.” It sounded like a sigh. “You have no words. You have been separated.” Separated from her words. The world was built on a new language, and she would not be part of it, only an observer, a watcher. Berols’ Anna turned her head and gazed out on the chaos. “When all of this has become, you will remain; the people like you will remain, all of you, as you are, separate. But we will carry you.” She stroked Vanja’s cheek. “We will always carry you, little herald.”

From Karin Tidbeck. “Amatka.” 📚 💬

INTO SLEEP’s BENTHOS AND DEEPER. A SLANDER THAT THE DEEPEST parts are lightless. There are moments of phosphor with animal movement. Somatic glimmers, and in this trench of sleep those lights were tiny dreams.

A long time sleep, and blinks of vision. Awe, not fear.

Billy might surface and for a moment open his flesh eyelids not his dream ones, and two or three times saw people looking down at him. he heard always only the close-up swirl of water, except in deep dream once through muffling miles of sea a woman said, “When’ll he wake?”

He was night-krill was what he was, a single miniscule eye, looking at absence specked with presence. Plankton-Billy saw an instant’s symmetry. A flower of limbflesh outreaching. Slivers of fin on a mantle. Red rubber meat. That much he knew already.

He saw something small or in the distance. Then black after black, then it came back closer. Straight-edged, hard-lined. An anomaly of angles in that curved vorago.

It was the specimen. It was his kraken, his giant squid quite still – still in suspension in its tank, the tank and its motionless dead-thing contents adrift in deep. Sinking toward where there is no below. The once-squid going home.

One last thing, that might have announced itself as such, the finality was so unequivocal. Something beneath the descending tank, at which from way agove though already deep in pitch tiny Billy-ness stared.

Under the tank was something utter and dark and moving, something so slowly rising, and endless.

from China Mieville, Kraken

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Resolution

Tell us, they’ll say to me. So we will understand and be able to resolve things. They’ll be mistaken. It’s only the things you don’t understand that you can resolve. There will be no resolution.

excerpt from Smilla’s Sense of Snow by Peter Hoeg

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Sunlight

The sun sliced through the windshield, sealing me in light. I closed my eyes and felt the warmth on my eyelids. Sunlight traveled a long distance to reach this planet; an infinitesimal portion of that energy was enough to warm my eyelids. I was moved. That something as insignificant as an eyelid had its place in the workings of the universe, that the cosmic order did not overlook this momentary fact. Was I any closer to appreciating Alyosha’s insights? Some limited happiness had been granted this limited life.

from Haruki Murakami.“Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World” 📚 💬

Our time is up

I think our time is up.

I know. Hold my hand.

Hold your hand?

Yes. I want you to.

All right. Why?

Because that’s what people do when they’re waiting for the end of something.

Excerpt from Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy

Before the humans came we didn’t speak so much because we were like this one, who years ago was the girl who was hurt in darkness and ate what was given to her. We were like her. You decide why we were like her and why we were not like her. Why she’s like herself or is not. We’ve been like all things; we left the city during the drug time and speak more now.

Before the humans came we didn’t speak. We’ve been like countless things, we’ve been like all things, we’ve been like the animals over Embassytown in the direction of which I raise my gifting, which is a speaking you’ll come to understand. We didn’t speak, we were mute, we only dropped the stones we mentioned out of our mouths, opened our mouths and had the birds we described fly out, we were vectors, we were the birds eating in mindlessness, we were the girl in darkness, only knowing it when we weren’t anymore.

We speak now or I do, and others do. You’ve never spoken before. You will. You’ll be able to say how the city is a pit and a hill and a standard and an animal that hunts and a vessel on the sea and the sea and how we are fish in it, not like the man who swims weekly with fish but the fish with which he swims, the water, the pool. I love you, you light me, warm, you are suns.

You have never spoken before.

from Embassytown by China Mieville 📚 💬

Loveliness and stillness clasped hands in the bedroom, and among the shrouded jugs and sheeted chairs even the prying of the wind, and the soft nose of the clammy sea airs, rubbing, snuffling, iterating, and reiterating their questions – “Will you fade? Will you perish?” – scarcely disturbed the peace, the indifference, the air of pure integrity, as if the question they asked scarely needed that they should answer: we remain.

• from To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

Three dead astronauts had fallen to Earth and been planted like tulips, buried to their rib cages, then flopped over in their suits, faceplates cracked open and curled into the dirt. Lichen or mold spilled from those helmets. Bones, too. My heart lurched, trapped between hope and despair. Someone had come to the city from far, far away—even, perhaps, from space! Which meant there were people up there. But they’d died here, like everything died here.

Excerpt From: Jeff VanderMeer. “Borne.”

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“You could have a small fire at night. Maybe find a cave. A mountain stream. I’d have a canteen for water for when the time came that I was too weak to move about. After a while the water would taste extraordinary. It would taste like music. I’d wrap myself in the blanket at night against the cold and watch the bones take shape beneath my skin and I would pray that I might see the truth of the world before I died. Sometimes at night the animals would come to the edge of the fire and move about and their shadows would move among the trees and I would understand that when the last fire was ashes they would come and carry me away and I would be their eucharist. And that would be my life. And I would be happy.”

-from Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy 📚 💬