Thursday, January 27, 2011

"Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance" by Richard Powers

Paperback edition.
  • "We must be able to endure seeing the truth, but above all we should pass it on to our fellow men and to posterity whether it be favorable or unfavorable to us."
  • "a man with moral cause stands outside the law"
  • "foolishness went over better in public than gravity"
  • "Technology could feed dreams of progress or kill dreams of nostalgia."
  • "He embodies the unsolvable paradox at the heart of modern man."
  • "When we don't know what we are after, we risk passing it over in the dark."
  • "Since I don't smoke or drink or swear unconvincingly, symmetry is my only vice."
  • "ordinary, characterless people chained to endless, sensual machines"
  • "Men is asbestos suits and goggled gas masks metamorphosed into green insects."
  • "The machine was our child, defective, but with remarkable survival value. Rivera had painted the baptismal portrait of a mutant offspring, demanding love, resentment, pity, even hope, but refusing to be disowned."
  • "The Chinese played with fireworks for hundreds of years without inventing the gun. Edison thought his moving pictures were just toys. The physician who first set out to discover appropriate anaesthetic dosages discovered, instead, addiction."
  • "The realities of the past become true only when they intersect the present. Then, only, they become present, known. . . Only when grief sets in - grief, like sound, that varies with the temperature of the air - does the past in fact die."
  • "Something breaks the spell of silence."
  • "a woman at once implausible, standing violently apart from the river of jugglers, scouts, vendors, and soldiers that threatened to take her in the undertow. She forced her way upstream, west, while the world all about her insisted on another direction altogether. . . she would have stood out at once from the busy scene as the figure that did not apply: she wore a full-sleeved, gathered, embroidered, bias-cut, hobble-skirt dress from out of this century. She carried a clarinet. Her hair - a brilliant strawberry red - fell all around her in ringleted profusion. From ten stories up, she seemed to be listening to something, in pain, petrified, in parade-gladness, or simply lost, out of joint in time."
  • "The discoverer became the discovery."
  • "Bluffing works because listeners impose sense on fragments . . . I am simply one amiable volunteer from the audience, pouring one colorless liquid into another. My conversant is the magician, causing the resultant fluid to shine with the colors of the rainbow."
  • "A variation an old puzzle goes: This sentence have three things rong with it. The first is the agreement, the second, the spelling of the word "wrong." The third thing wrong is that there are only two things wrong."
  • "a massive, comprehensive catalog of people written in the universal language - photography . . . a meticulous examination of human appearance, personality, and social standing, a cross sampling of representative types"
  • "Labor below ground left Sandler a pragmatist for life and marked his documentary project with grim toughness. Sandler's early descent into the mines contributed to his being one of the first to train the camera on the uglier face of humanity. Before Sandler, photographers used their machines solely to isolate beauty: (upper-class portraits, vases of flowers."
  • "the ill, insane, and disabled - who were his real people."
  • "still a boy, he was suddenly struck by how a human invention could stop the fluctuations of nature and make permanent even those qualities as accidental as shadows of moving clouds."
  • "human encyclopedia, stopping only for the century's two interruptions."
  • "He ignored the century's first principle of positivism, which forbids us to talk about what we cannot know. Instead, he did the only thing that could save a work too naively ambitious to salvage: he made it larger."
  • "he saw the facts as the century demanded, in stark images of one-legged Great War veterans, an aged syphilitic, or blind street urchins signing furiously with hands."
  • "But this very belief that he could get at the objective truth dates him, marks him as an anachronism."
  • "His work celebrated the isolated cases"
  • "More than anything else, physiognomy means an understanding of human nature. . . . We can tell from appearance the work someone does or does not; we can read in his face whether he is happy or troubled."
  • "The individual does not make the history of his time, he both impresses himself on it and expresses its meaning."
  • "viewer and viewed are fused into an indivisible whole. To see an object from a  distance is already to act on it; to change it, to be changed."
  • "Hubert met the first condition for inspiring love: he gave off an aura of cruelty coupled with basic helplessness. He was at the mercy of others."
  • "he was due to suffer at society's hands"
  • "Given a transmission long enough and a gear box to put in it, one can move the world."
  • "The creation of Belgium by the Great Powers in that year was an experiment in the idea of buffer states: an attempt to keep two fighting dogs apart by dangling a piece of raw meat between them. More remarkable than the idea's logic was its success."
  • "kindness ought not to take you more than a mile or so of your path"
  • "The fluid, folded age lines in his face came from his never knowing when he was being hurt by someone."
  • "The anonymity of an industrial city also allowed him the freedom to do shameful things."
  • "the final shape of shame: adult indifference"
  • "Age is more moldable than clay."
  • "(she) loved men to the extreme, and was never out of their company for any length of time"
  • "The most severe of lovers, she meant to save people."
  • "short sighted people who thought they were put on this earth simply to experience pleasure"
  • "He fought heroically to keep law on the far side of the street."
  • "her sainthood rose in her like a glamour stock until she felt willing to do anything for him"
  • "Innocents always present the most danger."
  • "Any innovation that did sneak through was instantly and mercilessly copied by the two rival presses until it became harmless status quo."
  • "every major power had to bloody its hands a lit to lend itself credibility"
  • "Speak softly and carry a big stick"
  • "While other bicker, we snicker."
  • "Half the world suffered from esprit de l'escalier, staircase witticism, in which on the way to bed, the victim recalls the chances for funny sayings missed during the evening. But Mays belonged to the camp suffering from esprit d'entree, in which the victim must endlessly prepare all wit in advance."
  • "What had made the figure, swimming upstreams against the crowd's current, so compelling was her aura of otherworldliness: her clothes, her carriage, her bearing all contributed to making her seem a vision glimpsed through a closing shutter. And visions were not meant to be approached up close."
  • "She was attractive, in a professional way. . . . But she was entirely too congenial to be mixed up in the sordid affair of sex."
  • "a man's worth could be gauged by how much he owed"
  • "(he) wrote two words and lapsed, wrote two more and lapsed. He tried to force fis memory - which he imagined to be an inch deep and just left of his grown... But the more he strained, the more distant and ubiquitous that unique, upstream figure became."
  • "It was merely his way of giving thanks for the end of another thankless day."
  • "And to admit it, the forgetting made my life less anxious, more comfortable. We're lucky that our memories are so much less physically persistent than they might be."
  • "Yet, I had moments, admittedly more and more isolated, seemingly spontaneous or brought on by slight associations, when the urgency and clarity of those ... came back to me with all their old force."
  • "I felt very much like the old widower who, fifteen years after the death of his wife, wonders what could be keeping her so long this fine morning."
  • "My sense of returning sanity was so strong that I instantly got up ... before the conviction could escape."
  • "Convinced that my memory was deteriorating, I began to keep a notebook. I would stay up late, and under the influence of black coffee I would fill pages with forced recollections and exercises in concentration. I would wake in the morning, eager to see the revelations waiting in longhand on the pages. I would reach for the still-open book and read over what I had written down the evening before. The small part that was legible I found romantically incoherent."
  • "Most of my time I spent in calm disinterest. While I could not remember the urgency of the picture, I had forgotten to worry much about forgetting."
  • "My work was technical enough to lose myself in it, but not so difficult as to require any real concentration."
  • "The interruptions of memory, however few, were fierce enough to force notice."
  • "But the fear generally did the chasing off by itself."
  • "I did not know it then, but I had no cause to worry. What seems a detour has a way of becoming, in time, a direct route."
  • "Trust begets trust; lack of trust begets lack of trust." Or perhaps it was the other way around.
  • "These theories seemed the product of an unhappy home life."
  • "My problem was that I threatened morale, and thereby production, with my standoffishness."
  • "Letting her work on was perhaps the only decent felony our mutual employer had ever committed."
  • "I was back on the scent. And although it was the stink of the past, it had the aroma of something new and strange."
  • "each tool, each measurement, each casual observation of the nature of things accelerates the acquisition of the next tool."
  • "As with free-falling bodies, it seems apparent that such quickening change, whether evolutionary, cultural, or technical, cannot accelerate indefinitely but must reach some terminal velocity. Call that terminal velocity a trigger point, where the rate of change of the system reaches such a level that the system's underpinning, its ability to change, is changed. Trigger points come about when the progress of a system becomes so accelerated, its tools become so adept at self-replicating and self-modifying, that it thrusts an awareness of itself onto itself and reaches the terminal velocity of self-reflection."
  • "Trigger points represent those times when the way a process develops loops back on the process and applies itself to its own source. A billion years of evolution eventually, along an increasingly steep curve, produced a species capable of comprehending evolution. After Darwin, evolution cannot ever follow the old path again. Having reached a trigger point, natural selection re-forms itself as conscious selection."
  • "In the process of psychological adaptation, the trigger came with depth psychology and Freud. Now that our culture is glibly aware of defense mechanisms, the self can never again defend itself in the old ways. . . . The Industrial Revolution cusped in the computer, a machine capable of designing its own replacement."
  • "Only the curve of progress reaches a critical moment, the second derivative goes to zero, and a new curve begins"
  • "Culture had finally created people who were not only the passive product of but also the active operators and commentators on their own culture's acceleration."
  • "No longer just a changing culture, but a culture of change."
  • "And all about, people breathed the air of a new planet, the new qualities of concurrency and self-reflexiveness."
  • "Cultural change had achieved the old joke of the runner so fast that he passed herself on the road."
  • "And this simultaneity still hold true today, with Third World militarism, bank-by-mail, television game shows, the rebirth of orthodox religion, conceptual art, punk rock, and neoromanticism thriving side by side."
  • "Hyperprogress transmutes, paradoxically, into stillness."
  • "Social culture had taken tail in mouth and rolled in a benzene ring. Art takes itself as both subject and content: post-modernism about painting; serialism about musical composition, constructivist novels about fiction. At that, the century has become about itself, history about history: a still, eclectic, universally reflexive, uniformly diverse, closed circle, the homogenous debris in space following a nova. Nothing can take place in this century without some coincident event linking it into a conspiratorial whole."
  • "The squeezing of any trigger point results in some explosion. The great War was the century's way of catching up to itself."
  • "The curve of cultural tradition had outrun itself, reached its trigger point of self-reflection, and just as a sonic boom results when an object catches up to and pushes ahead its own sound, so the twentieth century propagated a considerable shock on catching up with the twentieth century."
  • "An unthinkable number of individuals - over ten million, if the number menas anything - did not make it through the catching up. Nor did any aspect of the old order make it through untouched."
  • "The incidental cause of the war - "some foolish thong in the Balkans"
  • "The war resulted from the common attitude summed up by England's Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey: "If we are engaged in war, we shall suffer but little more than we shall suffer if we stand aside."
  • "A. J. P. Taylor observed after the fact that "No war is inevitable until it breaks out" This lucid epigram makes a formidable effort to preserve the best of humanity - reason - from itw worst, fatalism."
  • "Social developments often collect such a massy inertia that years pass before a tendency shows its results."
  • "Perhaps the dead dictate necessity to the living."
  • "Nineteen-thirteen was a time richer in Great Personalities than any since the Renaissance. . . . boasted between them Freud, Picasso, Wittgenstein, Proust, Apollinaire, Schonberg, Weber, Berg, Gide, Jarry, Debussy, Klimt, Stravinsky, Bernhardt, Mahler, the General Hospital physicians and scientists, Stein, Melies, Krauss, Werfel, and Rousseau. . . . The era is often described in paraphrased lives of these individuals."
  • "Then, perhaps, the war may have been made necessary by some genetic predisposition in humans. The love of the moribund, the belief that the sickly and perverse hold more possibly for experience than the status quo, had been our times' epidemic of preference. But an opposite mentality, a perennially unfounded optimism, is equally to blame for the catastrophe. Consider that almost every observer at the time, from the ignorant to the overly informed . . . went on record in predicting a short war."
  • "mastering the paradoxical art of political reasoning"
  • "guilty is assuming that death could never happen in their lifetime"
  • "And yet, of the war's consequences, the most material are the least important. The more than ten million dead, an unthinkable number now or then, made only the smallest dent in the steady doubling and redoubling of the world's population. In fact, influenza alone took more lives than weapons did during the war's last two years. Over twenty million surviving casualties mattered more."
  • "Of the much touted far-reaching political changes, the League of Nations and the Weimar republic were little more than failed experiments."
  • "Every citizen, not just paid soldiers, now became a direct protagonist in war in ways never before imagined and never afterward escaped."
  • "war's totality now included each individual"
  • "Europe was stalemated in a static front. War had reached that transmuting moment. It had become self-reflexive, self-knowing. It would now go on forever. It was about itself."
  • "a man asks to be buried with his Ford because it has pulled him out of every hole so far"
  • "found guilty on the principle of collective responsibility"
  • "Their plans for their daughter - education, in Paris if possible - kept them from noticing anything so slight as the impediment of reality."
  • "matrimonial bliss gone wrong"
  • "Don't talk to me about international huzza; I've got my hands full with the domestic."
  • "1914 did not much touch her. She lived in a neutral country. Hubert's madness was all that she knew of the world's."
  • "She knew by hearth the old formula for compound interest: delay is the way to compound the crime without losing the criminal's interest."
  • "The effect at the time of a light brush of fabric is beyond the imagining of a modern. The century's progress killed that sensibility."
  • "She found that the question went away if she ignored it."
  • "Having touched the seam between need and cruelty, Wies found she wanted no more of male love for the rest of her waking life."
  • "He hated asking favors of inanimate objects, especially man-made ones."
  • "And rumors, once in trade print, tend to fuel themselves into fact."
  • "The office furniture . . . was designed to anticipate all considerations except the human body."
  • "How are things with you? I mean really." -- "Pas mal. I mean, I don't have cancer. And after cancer, what's the number two killer? Everybody knows it's boredom. And that only gets me a couple of times a week. So I can't complain. After all, there is no treatment for the big B, is there? Nothing you can do except kill it by overfeeding."
  • "the little disturbances at the bottom produce large waves at the top"
  • "mastering a satisfying life"
  • "Ford alone remains an enigma, the improbable meeting of pragmatist and idealist, innovator and reactionary, peacemonger and war profiteer."
  • "In Ford's boyish industrial dream, the machine catered to the individual both inside the factory and out."
  • "Now if the diplomats and heads of state had perpetuated mass, pointless killing of Europe's youth, sustaining the whole thing on a thin, self-supporting tissue of lies, wasn't it perhaps time that a plain-sense idealist stepped in and put himself in charge of ending the foolishness?"
  • "But in the eyes of the world, the Peace Ship was an anachronistic joke, a gesture of monstrous egotism that failed miserably. . . . The ship sank, not from its own overweight idealism, but because the world refused to ballast it with belief."
  • "The plan might have been already ruined by the motive of its sponsor"
  • "a man caught in the drain of self-love"
  • "The individual is losing significance; his destiny is no longer what interests us."
  • "disorder and pleasure were forms of insanity"
  • "more poisonous in the boredom than in the physical strain"
  • "The old spell of order still kept the aroma of otherliness under lock."
  • "But war, by definition, removes the need to compromise."
  • "(his) own hopes and wishes - was the wound that had left him open to infection"
  • "He began to cry, and it only increased his joy to find that he could will the tears to stop."
  • "He fell a forgotten wholeness, each part of his self in concord with every other."
  • "a man should try to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people"
  • "(he) carried a mental checklist with him at all times that imparted an air of gravity to even his smallest actions"
  • "He struggled to write, against the dual barrier of illiteracy and marching formation, about how the war was preventative"
  • "To be on a dusty road in one's first foreign country, only a good day's walk from one's second; to spend every hour drunk on adrenaline; to hear bullets on three sides, and not know whose had the upper hand; to listen daily to how the precipitous campaign, the one that would end the war for good, was about to begin; to stand among thousands of newborn; to dissolve one's small self in the stink of dense squares of infantry; to go unwashed for days; to shit in hand buckets, feeling as if the body had never had so wonderful a purging; to have come so far since three months ago in May; to feel, in short, that all history led up to and would culminate in nothing short of a useful death, and then just as suddenly to be found wanting, guilty on the technicality of inexperience, and to be assigned to a post amounting to little more than a glorified police box is bitter."
  • "brief flirtation with history"
  • "These at the front had only death to deal with. The interior lines, on the other hand, had to cope with What If."
  • "One habituates to the worst of tragedies and expands it."
  • "anticipating was worse than taking a slug in the back"
  • "a conspiracy of clocks"
  • "to be on time was already too late"
  • "She is going to get a big fat tip" --"How do you figure?" --"I start with a maximum of twenty-five bucks and subtract a dollar for every word they say. When I go to a restaurant, I want to be waited on. If I want chat, I go home to Caroline."
  • "the desire for the redhead, if it had ever been desire per se, had long ago become just a motive for getting up in the morning and searching - for some thing, any thing - if only to overcome the sloth he suspected was at the center of his personality."
  • "(he) had no hobbies, religion, or social convictions. His job held no interest. His friends, be they ever so humble, and love affairs, be they ever so transient, grew predictable after a while. Things, he had always felt, stayed interesting only until they revealed their underlying behavior."
  • "Puzzles like this always involve some moment of insight - the instant of aha. The solution comes in a flash, all at once, so simple and obvious you wonder why you couldn't see it before. But seeing the answer requires jumping out from under bad assumptions."
  • "No more hunting of clues."
  • "the intermarriage of observer and observed, dreamer and dream, worshiper and stage celebrity"
  • "He consumed heroic amounts of alcohol and ether."
  • "The great task of ... the avant-garde was to to force two things to occupy the same place at the same time: public and private, celebrated and obscure, serious and ludicrous."
  • "Dear God! Why does the civilization keep on receding?"
  • "belonging to a lost time"
  • "the last act of heroism from a lost world"
  • "Badly strapped for funds, Sarah turned to that source of income she had considered little better than prostitution: she made films."
  • "Sorry about the delay old woman. Those things you sent me after this morning were damn hard to find. But I'll tell you what, you old witch. They must have been damn easy to lose, because I sure as hell don't have them with me now!"
  • "What did you do to get those muttons so worked up? Shit in their sheets?"
  • "She had learned this feeling many times before, learned it and lost it with each passing tragedy"
  • "The minute we go about poking our observant noses into the matter, we are involved. And there is no involvement without complicity."
  • "The world is only beginning to accustom itself to absurdity"
  • "Anything could be made to mean anything given enough ellipses."
  • "The obvious, not the obscure, always gave (him) the most trouble."
  • "She moved with a delightful self-consciousness, as if she had direct knowledge of every colony in her body."
  • "Looking over the gallery, Mays concluded that most people who came to the theater did so because it met all the requirements of what bygone eras had called "hobbies": it was expensive, it produced nothing useful, and it killed time. The problem with getting by was no longer that life was nasty, brutish and short. Lately, the difficulty was that life had become comfy, ghoulish, and long."
  • "he had never before seen anyone so totally at ease. He suspected at first that her calm was an illusion produced in comparison to his own discomfort."
  • "pull society up by its roots and plant it in another place"
  • "The show was closer to dry essay than good drama."
  • "At twenty-one, Mays decided that he no longer had time to learn anything new except what he absolutely needed to survive."
  • "His third idea, still in embryo . . . He had far to go before he could articulate it so neatly, but it ran something like: no existence independent of others."
  • "I developed for her, in a matter of hours, an affection that I normally reserve for lifelong friends."
  • "I could not conect one world to the other, and I did not want to see the two occupy the same place."

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