2
" You are God. You want to make a forest, something to hold the soil, lock up energy, and give off oxygen. Wouldn’t it be simpler just to rough in a slab of chemicals, a green acre of goo?
You are a man, a retired railroad worker who makes replicas as a hobby. You decide to make a replica of one tree, the longleaf pine your great-grandfather planted- just a replica- it doesn’t have to work. How are you going to do it? How long do you think you might live, how good is your glue? For one thing, you are going to have to dig a hole and stick your replica trunk halfway to China if you want the thing to stand up. Because you will have to work fairly big; if your replica is too small, you’ll be unable to handle the slender, three-sided needles, affix them in clusters of three in fascicles, and attach those laden fascicles to flexible twigs. The twigs themselves must be covered by “many silvery-white, fringed, long-spreading scales.” Are your pine cones’ scales “thin, flat, rounded at the apex?” When you loose the lashed copper wire trussing the limbs to the trunk, the whole tree collapses like an umbrella.
You are a sculptor. You climb a great ladder; you pour grease all over a growing longleaf pine. Next, you build a hollow cylinder around the entire pine…and pour wet plaster over and inside the pine. Now open the walls, split the plaster, saw down the tree, remove it, discard, and your intricate sculpture is ready: this is the shape of part of the air.
You are a chloroplast moving in water heaved one hundred feet above ground. Hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen in a ring around magnesium…you are evolution; you have only begun to make trees. You are god- are you tired? Finished? "
― Annie Dillard , Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
4
" ...while epic fantasy is based on the fairy tale of the just war, that’s not one you’ll find in Grimm or Disney, and most will never recognize the shape of it. I think the fantasy genre pitches its tent in the medieval campground for the very reason that we even bother to write stories about things that never happened in the first place: because it says something subtle and true about our own world, something it is difficult to say straight out, with a straight face. Something you need tools to say, you need cheat codes for the human brain--a candy princess or a sugar-coated unicorn to wash down the sour taste of how bad things can really get.
See, I think our culture has a slash running through the middle of it, too. Past/Future, Conservative/Liberal, Online/Offline. Virgin/Whore. And yes: Classical/Medieval. I think we’re torn between the Classical Narrative of Self and the Medieval Narrative of Self, between the choice of Achilles and Keep Calm and Carry On.
The Classical internal monologue goes like this: do anything, anything, only don’t be forgotten. Yes, this one sacrificed his daughter on a slab at Aulis, that one married his mother and tore out his eyes, and oh that guy ate his kids in a pie. But you remember their names, don’t you? So it’s all good in the end. Give a Greek soul a choice between a short life full of glory and a name echoing down the halls of time and a long, gentle life full of children and a quiet sort of virtue, and he’ll always go down in flames. That’s what the Iliad is all about, and the Odyssey too. When you get to Hades, you gotta have a story to tell, because the rest of eternity is just forgetting and hoping some mortal shows up on a quest and lets you drink blood from a bowl so you can remember who you were for one hour.
And every bit of cultural narrative in America says that we are all Odysseus, we are all Agamemnon, all Atreus, all Achilles. That we as a nation made that choice and chose glory and personal valor, and woe betide any inconvenient “other people” who get in our way. We tell the tales around the campfire of men who came from nothing to run dotcom empires, of a million dollars made overnight, of an actress marrying a prince from Monaco, of athletes and stars and artists and cowboys and gangsters and bootleggers and talk show hosts who hitched up their bootstraps and bent the world to their will. Whose names you all know. And we say: that can be each and every one of us and if it isn’t, it’s your fault. You didn’t have the excellence for it. You didn’t work hard enough. The story wasn’t about you, and the only good stories are the kind that have big, unignorable, undeniable heroes. "
― Catherynne M. Valente
5
" Above all, be at ease, be as natural and spacious as possible. Slip quietly out of the noose of your habitual anxious self, release all grasping, and relax into your true nature. Think of your ordinary emotional, thought-ridden self as a block of ice or a slab of butter left out in the sun. If you are feeling hard and cold, let this aggression melt away in the sunlight of your meditation. Let peace work on you and enable you to gather your scattered mind into the mindfulness of Calm Abiding, and awaken in you the awareness and insight of Clear Seeing. And you will find all your negativity disarmed, your aggression dissolved, and your confusion evaporating slowly like mist into the vast and stainless sky of your absolute nature. "
― Sogyal Rinpoche , The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
8
" The last time I saw Collin was in 1917, at the foot of Mort-Homme.
Before the great slaughter, Collin’d been an avid angler. On that day, he was standing at the hole, watching maggots swarm among blow flies on two boys that we couldn’t retrieve for burial without putting our own lives at risk.
And there, at the loop hole, he thought of his bamboo rods, his flies and the new reel he hadn’t even tried out yet.
Collin was imaging himself on the riverbank, wine cooling in the current his stash of worms in a little metal box and a maggot on his hook, writhing like… Holy shit. Were the corpses getting to him?
Collin. The poor guy didn’t even have time to sort out his thoughts.
In that split second, he was turned into a slab of bloody meat. A white hot hook drilled right through him and churned through his guts, which spilled out of a hole in his belly.
He was cleared out of the first aid station. The major did triage. Stomach wounds weren’t worth the trouble. There were all going to die anyway, and besides, he wasn’t equipped to deal with them.
Behind the aid station, next to a pile of wood crosses, there was a heap of body parts and shapeless, oozing human debris laid out on stretchers, stirred only be passing rats and clusters of large white maggots.
But on their last run, the stretcher bearers carried him out after all… Old Collin was still alive.
From the aid station to the ambulance and from the ambulance to the hospital, all he could remember was his fall into that pit, with maggots swarming over the open wound he had become from head to toe… Come to think of it, where was his head? And what about his feet?
In the ambulance, the bumps were so awful and the pain so intense that it would have been a relief to pass out. But he didn’t. He was still alive, writhing on his hook.
They carved up old Collin good. They fixed him as best they could, but his hands and legs were gone. So much for fishing.
Later, they pinned a medal on him, right there in that putrid recovery room.
And later still, they explained to him about gangrene and bandages packed with larvae that feed on death tissue. He owed them his life. From one amputation and operation to the next – thirty-eight in all – the docs finally got him “back on his feet”. But by then, the war was long over. "
― Jacques Tardi , Goddamn This War!
13
" If you leave without me, I’ll just follow you. You can’t stop me, Cassie. How are you going to stop me?”
I shrug helplessly, fighting back tears. “Shoot you, I guess.”
“Like you shot the Crucifix Soldier?”
The words hit me like a bullet between the shoulder blades. I whirl around and fling open the door. He flinches, but stands his ground.
“How do you know about him?” Of course, there’s only one way he could know. “You read my diary.”
“I didn’t think you were going to live.”
“Sorry to disappoint you.”
“I guess I wanted to know what happened—”
“You’re lucky I left the gun downstairs or I would shoot you right now. Do you know how creepy that makes me feel, knowing you read that? How much did you read?”
He lowers his eyes. A warm red blush spreads across his cheeks.
“You read all of it, didn’t you?” I’m totally embarrassed. I feel violated and ashamed. It’s ten times worse than when I first woke up in Val’s bed and realized he had seen me naked. That was just my body. This was my soul.
I punch him in the stomach. There’s no give at all; it’s like I hit a slab of concrete.
“I can’t believe you,” I shout. “You sat there—just sat there—while I lied about Ben Parish. You knew the truth and you just sat there and let me lie! "
― Rick Yancey , The 5th Wave (The 5th Wave, #1)
14
" Little is known about the love lives of the undead. Really, past the brain-eating, reanimated corpse angle, not much is said for the zombie’s perspective. So they ate brains—big deal! Sure, they were corpses—so what? Indeed, there was the smell, but whose fault was that?
At first glance they were brain-hungry cannibals, (Mmm, brains. Maybe with a little cilantro or a garlic rub—mashed potatoes and brainsloaf—brains pot pie—penne a la brains...) but in reality, zombies were not the mindless man-eaters or virus-addled lunatics jonesing for human flesh depicted in the movies. Just like everything in life—or rather, unlife—things were more complicated. Zombies were, until very recently, people. And with that came wants, desires, longings. Needs.
Asher had been troubled by the zombie loneliness until Brenda, the attractive corpse he’d met in a less animated state earlier, pulled him into the cemetery, threw him down on a slab and shagged him silly. "
― Daniel Younger , Zen and the Art of Cannibalism: A Zomedy
15
" ...crossed the room to where a selection of implements was arranged on a table top. These could have been mistaken for the trade tools of a cook, physician, or torturer, save for the fact that the surface on which they rested was a slab of polished pink marble, topping a white and gilt dressing table-cum-sculpture, done up in the new, hyper-Baroque style named Rococo. It was adorned, for example, with several cherubs, bows drawn, eyes asquint, as they drew beads on unseen targets, butt cheeks polished to a luster with jeweler’s rouge. It had, in other words, all the earmarks of a gift that had been sent to the princess by someone with a lot of money who did not know her very well. "
― Neal Stephenson
