"It wasn't that long ago that I saw you in my church, willing to promise me almost anything to make the pain stop. Was that a lie? Or have you already forgotten the way heartbreak rips apart the soul piece by piece, how it turns you into a masochist, making you long for the thing that just eviscerated you until there's nothing left of you to be destroyed?"
Sayfa 196 - Jacks~Kitabı okudu
Quora
Postmodernism is an intellectual dead end; it’s central premise seems to be derived from a saying of Nietzsche’s, “There are no facts; only interpretations”, which is thought to mean that each one of us views “reality” through our individual perspective. This is true to a degree, but as with so many aphorisms, there are limits to its validity;
There was nothing I particularly wanted to do. You didn't have to do anything. You could just drift and hang out and see what happened, which suited me fine, even more than being a customs officer or a professional footballer or a guitarist.
Sayfa 63Kitabı okuyor
Cardan’s fingers dig into my back. He’s trembling, and whether it is from
ebbing magic or horror, I am not sure. But he holds me as though I am the
only solid thing in the world.
The desert creeps in on a man's land. Not a fellah, but he does own some land. Did own. From a boy, he has repaired the wall, mortared, carried stone heavy as he, lifted, set in place. Still the desert comes. Is the wall a traitor, letting it in? Is the boy possessed by a djinn who makes his hands do the work wrong? Is the desert's attack too powerful for any boy, or wall, or dead father and mother?
No. The desert moves in. It happens, nothing else. No djinn in the boy, no treachery in the wall, no hostility in the desert. Nothing.
Soon, nothing. Soon only the desert. The two goats must choke on sand, nuzzling down to find the white clover. He, never to taste their soured milk again. The melons die beneath the sand. Never more can you give comfort in the summer, cool abdelawi, shaped like the Angel's trumpet! The maize dies and there is no bread. The wife, the children grow sick and short-tempered. The man, he, runs one night out to where the wall was, begins to lift and toss imaginary rocks about, curses Allah, then begs forgiveness from the Prophet, then urinates on the desert, hoping to insult what cannot be insulted.
They find him in the morning a mile from the the house, skin blued, shivering in a sleep which is almost death, tears turned to frost on the sand.
And now the house begins to fill with desert, like the lower half of an hourglass which will never be inverted again.
What does a man do?
"We had given AM sentience. Inadvertently, of course, but sentience nonetheless. But it had been trapped. AM wasn't God, he was a machine. We had created him to think, but there was nothing it could do with that creativity. In rage, in frenzy, the machine had killed the human race, almost all of us, and still it was trapped. AM could not wander, AM could not wonder, AM could not belong. He could merely be. And so, with the innate loathing that all machines had always held for the weak, soft creatures who had built them, he had sought revenge. And in his paranoia, he had decided to reprieve five of us, for a personal, everlasting punishment that would never serve to diminish his hatred… that would merely keep him reminded, amused, proficient at hating man. Immortal, trapped, subject to any torment he could devise for us from the limitless miracles at his command. He would never let us go. We were his belly slaves. We were all he had to do with his forever time. We would be forever with him, with the cavern-filling bulk of the creature machine, with the all-mind soulless world he had become. He was Earth, and we were the fruit of that Earth; and though he had eaten us, he would never digest us. We could not die. We had tried it. We had attempted suicide, oh one or two of us had. But AM had stopped us. I suppose we had wanted to be stopped. Don't ask why. I never did. More than a million times a day. Perhaps once we might be able to sneak a death past him. Immortal, yes, but not indestructible."
I Have No Mouth & I Must ScreamKitabı okudu
Humberto R. Maturana
What is death for the beholder?
What is death for the dying?
A weight beyond knowledge or understanding.
A pain for the self-asserting ego, for the one;
For the other, silence, peace and nothingness.
Yet the one feels his pride in anger
And in his mind he does not accept
That beyond death nothing should arise
And that beyond death
There should be only death
The other, in his silence
In his unkowing majesty feels
He feels nothing, he knows nothing,
Because death is death
And life without death is only emptiness.
Because in life almost nothing will turn out exactly as we hope. There are always challenges, and whether we are at work or school, or feeling tested within our most intimate or important relationships, we will all be tempted to walk away from commitments, give up on our goals and dreams, and sell our own happiness short at some point. Because we will feel empty, like we have no more to give, when we haven’t tapped even half of the treasure buried deep in our minds, hearts, and souls.
"Being smart, educated, even having authority at work has nothing to do with what you like to do in private or in bed, sweetheart.”
Life has many ways of testing a person’s will - either by having nothing happen at all, or by having everything happen at once.
Yaşamın bir insanın iradesini sınamanın birçok yolu vardır; ya hiçbir şeyin olmamasını sağlayarak, ya da her şeyin bir anda gerçekleşmesini sağlayarak." Paulo Coelho