7
" One by one our skies go black. Stars are extinguished, collapsing into distances too great to breach. Soon, not even the memory of light will survive. Long ago, our manifold universes discovered futures would only expand. No arms of limit could hold or draw them back. Short of a miracle, they would continue to stretch, untangle and vanish – abandoned at long last to an unwitnessed dissolution. That dissolution is now. Final winks slipping over the horizons share what needs no sharing: There are no miracles. You might say that just to survive to such an end is a miracle in itself. We would agree. But we are not everyone. Even if you could imagine yourself billions of years hence, you would not begin to comprehend who we became and what we achieved. Yet left as you are, you will no more tremble before us than a butterfly on a windless day trembles before colluding skies, still calculating beyond one of your pacific horizons. Once we could move skies. We could transform them. We could make them sing. And when we fell into dreams our dreams asked questions and our skies, still singing, answered back. You are all we once were but the vastness of our strangeness exceeds all the light-years between our times. The frailty of your senses can no more recognize our reach than your thoughts can entertain even the vaguest outline of our knowledge. In ratios of quantity, a pulse of what we comprehend renders meaningless your entire history of discovery. We are on either side of history: yours just beginning, ours approaching a trillion years of ends. Yet even so, we still share a dyad of commonality. Two questions endure. Both without solution. What haunts us now will allways hunt you. The first reveals how the promise of all our postponements, ever longer, ever more secure – what we eventually mistook for immortality – was from the start a broken promise. Entropy suffers no reversals. Even now, here, on the edge of time’s end, where so many continue to vanish, we still have not pierced that veil of sentience undone. The first of our common horrors: Death. Yet we believe and accept that there is grace and finally truth in standing accountable before such an invisible unknown. But we are not everyone. Death, it turns out, is the mother of all conflicts. There are some who reject such an outcome. There are some who still fight for an alternate future. No matter the cost. Here then is the second of our common horrors. What not even all of time will end. What plagues us now and what will always plague you. War. "
― Mark Z. Danielewski , One Rainy Day in May (The Familiar #1)
8
" He is a stem, a husk, barren and thin, withered by sun, erased by wind, emptied by seasons of dullness, marked by seconds of duty, scarred by regret only the faintest of lines dare to write out, which no one, not even him, can interpret anymore. People have told him a crow will reveal more than anything his face has to share. "
― Mark Z. Danielewski , One Rainy Day in May (The Familiar #1)
13
" From The Familiar Volume 5:
Charlie drains his glass. "That's true. Drinking helps."
Both men share a shallow laugh.
"Impressive," Astair says. "And you're still smiling." Charlie refills all their glasses (emptying the bottle (getting up (no doubt) to find another )). "Is drinking really your secret?"
"Not at all," Mr. Hatterly smiles (maybe a little softer this time (sadder?)). "I've actually given this a little thought. When we are young, we look forward to things: all the stuff we can see, do taste, and have. We're probably born with that. And for good reason: what we desire helps us to plan, to attain, to achieve. However, when you get older, when you look to the future, more and more you find illness and infirmity. Forget death itself, it's the dying that dominates the horizon. Which is where the trouble comes in: a lifetime spent looking forward makes for a lot of frightened, angry, old people. Charlie and I made a vow when we met to practice looking at one thing every day. A vow we've kept. Can you guess?"
"The practice of looking at what's now?
"Oh no, we're not that enlightened! We look at each other. We pay attention to each other. "
― Mark Z. Danielewski , One Rainy Day in May (The Familiar #1)
