Pancake Day/Full Moon Day/International Tool Day/Sukkot/Pumpkin Show (Indiana)
2007-09-26 @ 8:28 p.m.

I liked The Rule Of Four very, very much. So at the end of the entry, I've stuck on all the quotes I copied down from it, because I thought some of the ideas and images were beautifully evocative. Finished this book in under 24 hours, and I'm telling you, there simply is no room for comparison with something like The Da Vinci Code! At least Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason aren't pretending that their novel's actually true. In fact, they disclaim that, stating that as of publication, no connection has been found between Savonarola and the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, despite his being the reason for the writing of it in the novel's plot. Now I'm reading Exigesis by Astro Teller, which is basically a series of e-mails between a researcher and the AI she has inadvertently created. Not bad, although the constant dictionary entries conjured up by the AI, Edgar, are kind of annoying. May actually have to do proper work tomorrow, for other people as usual, which totally sucks. I can't wait for the weekend. It's time to cut my hair again...

"Imagine, Paul said to me once, that the present is simply a reflection of the future. Imagine that we spend our whole lives staring into a mirror with the future at our backs, seeing it only in the reflection of what is here and now. Some of us would begin to believe that we could see tomorrow better by turning around to look at it directly. But those who did, without even realizing it, would’ve lost the key to the perspective they once had. For the one thing they would never be able to see in it was themselves. By turning their backs on the mirror, they would become the one element of the future their eyes could never find."

"The two hardest things to contemplate in life, Richard Curry once told Paul, are failure and age; and those are one and the same. Perfection is the natural consequence of eternity: wait long enough, and anything will realize its potential. Coal becomes diamonds, sand becomes pearls, apes become men. It's simply not given to us, in one lifetime, to see those consummations, and so every failure becomes a reminder of death.

But love lost is a special kind of failure, I think. It's a reminder that some consummations, no matter how devoutly wished for, never come; that some apes will never be men, not in all the world's ages. What’s a monkey to think, who with a typewriter and eternity still can't eke out Shakespeare?"

"...in the geometry of love, everything is triangular...and the tongue of desire is forked, kissing two but loving one. Love draws lines between us like an astronomer plotting a constellation from stars, joining points into patterns that have no basis in nature. The butt of every triangle becomes the heart of another, until the roof of reality is a tessellation of love affairs. Taken together, they have the pattern of netting; and behind them, I think, is Love. Love is the only perfect fisherman, the one who casts the broadest net, which no fish can escape. His reward is to sit alone in the tavern of life, forever a boy among men, hoping someday to tell stories about the one that got away."

"Hope, Paul said to me once, which whispered from Pandora's box only after all the other plagues and sorrows had escaped, is the best and last of all things. Without it, there is only time. And time pushes at our backs like a centrifuge, forcing us outward and away, until it nudges us into oblivion....It's a law of motion, a fact of physics that Charlie could name, no different from the stages of white dwarfs and red giants. Like all things in the universe, we are destined from birth to diverge. Time is simply the yardstick of our separation. If we are particles in a sea of distance, exploded from an original whole, then there is a science to our solitude. We are lonely in proportion to our years."

"...a good friend stands in harm's way for you the second you ask – but a great friend does it without being asked at all."

"I'd begun to realize that there was an unspoken prejudice among book-learned people, a secret conviction they all seemed to share, that life as we know it is an imperfect vision of reality, and that only art, like a pair of reading glasses, can correct it. The scholars and intellectuals I met at our dinner table always seemed to hold a grudge against the world. They could never quite reconcile themselves to the idea that our lives don't follow the dramatic arc that a good author gives to a great literary character. Only in accidents of pure perfection does the world actually become a stage. And that, they seemed to think, was a shame."