From a Low and Quiet Sea

It was from the experience of blackening that boy that I learned an important and valuable lesson: if you say something enough times, the repetition of it makes it true. Any notion you like, no matter how mad it seems, can be a fact’s chrysalis. Once you say it loud enough and often enough it becomes debatable. Debates change minds. Debate is the larval stage of truth. Constant, unflagging, loud repetition completes your notion’s metamorphosis into fact. The fact takes wing and flutters from place to place and mind to mind and makes a living, permanent thing of itself.

if you observe a man closely and properly you’ll eventually come to know the shade of his soul. No soul is brilliant white, save for the souls of infants. But there are men alive who will do evil without pause, who are without mercy, and there are men alive who would rather die than harm another, and all of the rest of us fall somewhere in between.

What’s in the past can’t be changed and what’s to come can’t be known and you can’t give your life to worrying. Sure you can’t. All you have to do is be kind and you’ll have lived a good life.

And once a thing enters a person’s mind, it’s always there, like woodworm in the leg of a chair, like cells of cancer, like rats in the cavities of the earth; it can’t ever be fully eradicated. Even things long forgotten remain in the dark infinity of the mind; there’s no unlearning. What’s said can’t be unsaid. And no law in this universe is immutable.

I took to numbers, their definiteness, their unyielding natures: even when you chop a number down to a half or a tenth or a millionth or a billionth part of its former self it still exists, it’s still whole and pristine and incorruptible. When everything else is gone, when the universe has collapsed back in on itself and time itself has stopped, there’ll still be numbers, frozen in the singularity, waiting for existence to push itself into being again, so they can put order on the great expansion, and tell it when it’s reached its terminal mass, its ineluctable point of return to its beginning.

Any notion you like, no matter how mad it seems, can be a fact's chrysalis. Once you say it loud enough and often enough it becomes debatable, Debates change minds. Debate is the larval stage of truth, Constant, unflagging, loud repetition completes your notion's metamorphis into fact. The fact takes wing and flutters from place to place and mind to mind and makes a living, permanent thing of itself.

He wondered if his daughter believed his lie-that the gunfire was the noise of a great machine that was being used to frighten birds away from crops. It was for the birds own good, he'd told her: they'd gorge themselves till they were sick if they were let. He could hear her whispering to herself, or to her teddies and her dolls, ranged along the bed's edge, questioning: Could that be true, what Daddy said? That trees can talk to other trees? It must be true or else he wouldn't have told me.

Trees live, like you and me, long lives, and they know things. They know the rule, the only one that's real and must be kept. What's the rule? You know. I've told you lots of times before. Be kind.

he waited for the water to carry him down, and fill him and slough his flesh and salt his guilty bones. But the water wouldn't take him.