Galatea 2.2

I picked up an old microscope at a flea market in Verona. In the long evenings, in my imitation of life science, I set up in the courtyard and examined local specimens. Pointless pleasure, stripped of ends. The ancient contadino from across the road, long since convinced that we were mad, could not resist coming over for a look. I showed him where to put his eye. I watched him, thinking, this is how we attach to existence. We look through awareness’s tube and see the swarm at the end of the scope, taking what we come upon there for the full field of sight itself. The old man lifted his eye from the microscope lens, crying. Signore, ho ottantotto anni e non ho mai Saputo prima che cosa ci fosse in una goccia d’acqua. I’m eighty-eight years old and I never knew what was in a droplet of water.

For a moment, looking felt like something that happened to you rather than something you did. Not 'Are you who I think you are?' Am I who you think I am?

Synapses in motion tend to stay in motion. Synapses at rest tend to stay at rest.

Speech baffled my machine. Helen made all well-formed sentences. But they were hollow and stuffed--linguistic training bras. She sorted nouns from verbs, but, disembodied, she did not know the difference between thing and process, except as they functioned in clauses. Her predications were all shotgun weddings. Her ideas were as decorative as half-timber beams that bore no building load. She balked at metaphor. I felt the annoyance of her weighted vectors as they readjusted themselves, trying to accommodate my latest caprice. You're hungry enough to eat a horse. A word from a friend ties your stomach in knots. Embarrassment shrinks you, amazement strikes you dead. Wasn't the miracle enough? Why do humans need to say everything in speech's stockhouse except what they mean?

The web: yet another total disorientation that becomes status quo without anyone realizing it.

It had to be U. U. was the only town I could still bear, the one spot in the atlas I'd already absorbed head-on. When you take too many of your critical hits in one place, that place can no longer hurt you.

Life became an interruption of my description of it.

Love is the feedback cycle of longing, belonging, loss.

It was like so, but wasn't.

The loneliness of writing is that you baffle your friends and change the lives of strangers.

People who used the web turned strange. In public panels, they disguised their sexes, their ages, their names. They logged on to the electronic fray, adopting every violent persona but their own.

I read then, everything I could lay hands on. Reading was my virgin continent. I read instantly upon awakening, and was still at it well past the hour that consciousness shut down. I read for nothing, for a pleasure difficult to describe and impossible afterward to recover.

Meaning was not a pitch but an interval. It sprang from the depth of disjunction, the distance between one circuit's center and the edge of another. Representation caught the sign napping, with its semantic pants down. Sense lay in metaphor's embarrassment at having two takes on the same thing. For the first time, I understand Emerson's saying about the use of life being to learn metonymy. Life *was* metonymy, or at least stood for it.

Quando rientrai in ufficio, l’immagine della donna che sale per le scale era diventata, a furia di riproiettarmela nella mente, una di quelle repliche di spettacoli in seconda serata di cui vorresti vedere una versione restaurata (p. 310)

La nostra vita a U. non somigliava affatto ai nostri ricordi. U. era cambiata in tutto, fuorché nei particolari. (p. 225)

Men are worthless; they always think the issue is what’s at issue.

The web began to seem a vast, silent stock exchange trading in ever more anonymous and hostile pen pals.

When you take too many of your critical hits in one place, that place can no longer hurt you.

But severed from yourself in the press of a crowd, you head back instinctively to the most recent landmark, hoping the lost other will hit on the same idea.

Limburg remained what society had been from the first: an amateur speculation. Life, the provincials insisted, might yet be anything we told it to be.