A bit later I see him go outside. He says he needs to piss, that he doesn't know how anyone can piss inside. He's addicted to the outdoors. I've no clue what he thinks is so bloody special about the sky. He likes it when it's blue and he's even happier when there aren't any clouds. Personally, I don't give a damn if I'm under the open sky or shut up in a trunk.
My baby finally empties my right tit and then my left one. My husband is watching cartoons, he does this to switch off.
So many healthy and beautiful women in the area, and he ended up falling for me. A nutcase. A foreigner. Someone beyond repair. Muggy out today, isn’t it? Seems it’ll last a while, he says. I take long swigs from the bottle, breathing through my nose and wishing, quite simply, that I were dead.
I always toy with the idea of going right through the glass and cutting every inch of my body, always aiming to pass through my own shadow.
I hope the first word my son says is a beautiful one. That matters more to me than his health insurance. And if it isn’t, I’d rather he didn’t speak at all. I want him to say magnolia, to say compassion, not Mum or Dad, not water. I want him to say dalliance.
We barely glanced at each other before going our separate ways
The strangeness that made everything sparkle came from me. Worlds rose out of my bottomless perplexity.
…every mind is shaped by its own experiences and memories and knowledge, and what makes it unique is the grand total and extremely personal nature of the collection of all the data that have made it what it is. Each person possesses a mind with powers that are, whether great or small, always unique, powers that belong to them alone. This renders them capable of carrying out a feat, whether grandiose or banal, that only they could have carried out.
Impunity: it’s always impunity that gets you dancing. What did I care about being ridiculous? I was on my way to earning a superior kind of impunity, and nobody knew it.
To let myself be, naked under the sun. To create internal silence. I have pursued this goal through all of life’s twists and turns, almost like an idée fixe. This is the small and alarming idea that stands out in the midst of all other ideas and raises the volume of psychic noise, which is already quite considerable.
Despite all our plans to change, we never voluntarily do so at the core, in our essence, which is usually where we find the knot of our worst defects. I could change it — and I surely would have already — if it were a visible defect, like a limp or acne; but it isn’t.
Language has shaped our expectations so extensively that real reality has become the most detached and incomprehensible one of all.
But the Australians, what do the Australians do? How do they structure their landscape? For a start they postulate a primal builder, whose work they presume only to interpret: the mythical animal who was active in the “dreamtime,” that is, a primal era, beyond verification, as the name indicates. A time of sleep. The visible landscape is an effect of causes that are to be found in the dreamtime. For example, the snake that dragged itself over this plain creating these undulations, etc., etc. These.. curious Aborigines make sure their eyes are closed while events take place, which allows them to see places as records of events. But what they see is a kind of dream, and they wake into a reverie, since the real story (the snake, not the hills) happened while they were asleep.
The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries.
You who read me, are You sure of understanding my language?
I know of a wild region whose librarians repudiate the vain superstitious custom of seeking any sense in books and compare it to looking for meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of one's hands . . . They admit that the inventors of writing imitated the twenty-five natural symbols, but they maintain that this application is accidental and that books in themselves mean nothing. This opinion - we shall see - is not altogether false.
The certitude that everything has been written negates us or turns us into phantoms. I know of districts in which the young men prostrate themselves before books and kiss their pages in a barbarous manner, but they do not know how to decipher a single letter. Epidemics, heretical conflicts, peregrinations which inevitably degenerate into banditry, have decimated the population. I believe I have mentioned suicides, more and more frequent with the years. Perhaps my old age and fearfulness deceive me, but I suspect that the human species -- the unique species -- is about to be extinguished, but the Library will endure: illuminated, solitary, infinite, perfectly motionless, equipped with precious volumes, useless, incorruptible, secret.
The Library is a sphere whose exact centre is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible.
Let heaven exist, though my own place be in hell. Let me be tortured and battered and annihilated, but let there be one instant, one creature, wherein thy enormous Library may find its justification.
The library will endure; it is the universe. As for us, everything has not been written; we are not turning into phantoms. We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and our future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information.
Naturally, the four mathematical operations - adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing - were impossible. The stones resisted arithmetic as they did the calculation of probability. Forty discs, divided, might become nine; those nine in turn divided might yield 300.
If someone were to tell me that there are unicorns on the moon, I could accept or reject the report, or suspend judgement, but it is something I could imagine. If, on the other hand, I were told that six or seven unicorns on the moon could be three, I would declare a priori that such a thing was impossible. The man who has learnt that three plus one are four doesn't have to go through a proof of that assertion with coins, or dice, or chess pieces, or pencils. He knows it, and that's that. He cannot conceive a different sum. There are mathematicians who say that three plus one is a tautology for four, a different way of saying "four" ... But I, Alexander Craigie, of all men on earth, was fated to discover the only objects that contradict that essential law of the human mind. At first I was in a sort of agony, fearing that I'd gone mad; since then, I have come to believe that it would have been better had I been merely insane, for my personal hallucinations would be less disturbing than the discovery that the universe can tolerate disorder. If three plus one can be two, or 14, then reason is madness.
And the reason I am so nervous is that everything I do now is leading me to one of three possible futures... Which one will it be? Time alone will tell. But still I know that writing this diary can perhaps provide the answer; it may even help produce the right future.
To be on an island inhabited by artificial ghosts was the most unbearable of nightmares,- to be in love with one of those images was worse than being in love with a ghost (perhaps we always want the person we love to have the existenceof a ghost).
The sea is endless when you are in a rowboat.
...when one is alone it is impossible to be dead.
The case of the inventor who is duped by his own invention emphasizes our need for circumspection.
