Spin

There are so many kinds of time. The time by which we measure our lives. Months and years. Or the big time, the time that raises mountains and makes stars. Or all the things that happen between one heartbeat and the next. Its hard to live in all those kinds of times. Easy to forget that you live in all of them.

We're all born strangers to ourselves and each other, and we're seldom formally introduced.

Stick out your arms," he'd say, "straight out at your sides," and when he had you in the appropriate cruciform position he'd say, "Left index finger to right index finger straight across your heart, that's the history of the Earth. You know what human history is? Human history is the nail on your right-hand index finger. Not even the whole nail. Just that little white part. The part you clip off when it gets too long. That's the discovery of fire and the invention of writing and Galileo and Newton and the moon landing and 9/11 and last week and this morning. Compared to evolution we're newborns. Compared to geology, we barely exist

Words like anchors, tethering boats of memory that would otherwise be settled by the storm.

But the world is what it is and won’t be bargained with.

The conversation was mesmerizing, not for its content but for the cadences of the talk, the rhythm we fell into when we were alone, now as before. Every conversation between friends or lovers creates its own easy or awkward rhythms, hidden talk that runs like a subterranean river under even the most banal exchange.

...slept too long. And I don’t much like the world I woke up to.

Ars moriendi ars vivendi est: the art of dying is the art of living.

Mortality, a writer of my generation once said, trumps morality.

Fifteen minutes shy of two o’clock. The thick of the night. The zone of lost objectivity.

Amazing, I thought, how busily we had turned ourselves into people who didn't know one another very well.

Here she was back in the brightly lit world she had been avoiding for twenty years, and it was exactly as awful as she remembered it.

We are as ephemeral as rain drops.

I wanted to sell tomorrow to the highest bidder and settle down forever in July second.

Words like anchors, tethering boats of memory that would otherwise be scuttled by the storm.

But physicians don’t really save lives, of course, we prolong them;

And don’t you dare say you love me, because I know that’s not true. You don’t know the difference between being in love and conducting yourself like you’re in love. It’s nice you picked me, but it could have been anybody, and believe me, Tyler, it would have been just as disappointing, one way or another.

Vanished children, I can't think where I lost them...

But it was my first evidence that Diane lived in a world even bigger than the Big House, a world where grief and joy moved as ponderously as tides, with the weight of an ocean behind them.

And the strange thing was that it felt absolutely familiar, the curve of her arm under my hand and the weight of her head against my shoulder: not discovered but remembered. She felt the way I had always known she would feel. Even the tang of her fear was familiar.

Maybe this was what the media was calling “desperate euphoria”—the we’re-all-doomed-but-anything-can-happen feeling that had begun to peak around the time Wun went public. The end of the world, plus Martians: given that, what was impossible? What was even unlikely? And where did that leave the standard arguments in favor of propriety, patience, virtue, and not rocking the boat?