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Satin Island QUOTES

Satin Island QUOTES

21 " You still haven't told me how you came to be in that airport, I said to Madison as we lay in bed one evening. There's lots of things I haven't told you, she replied. If people were to tell other people everything about themselves, we'd live in a dull world. If knowing everything about a person were the be-all and end-all of human interaction, she said, we'd just carry memory-sticks around and plug them into one another when we met. We could have little ports, slits on our sides, like extra mouths or ears or sex organs, and we'd slip these sticks in and upload, instead of talking or screwing or whatever. Would you like that, Mr Anthropologist? No, I told her; I don't want to know everything about you. This was true: I hadn't asked her very much about herself at all her family, her background, any of that stuff not back in Budapest when we'd first met, and not since, either. Our liaison had been based throughout on minimum exchange of information. I don't want to know everything about you, I repeated. I just want to know what you were doing in Turin. I wasn't in Turin, she said again. Torino-Caselle, I replied; whatever. Why? she asked. I'm intrigued, I told her. What, professionally? she goaded me. That's right, I said: professionally. Well then you'll have to pay me, she said. "

― Tom McCarthy , Satin Island

22 " To the anthropologist, there’s no such thing as a singular episode, a singular phenomenon – only a set of variations on generic ones; the more generic, therefore, the more pure, the closer to an unvariegated or unscrambled archetype. "

― Tom McCarthy , Satin Island

23 " And that we, far from being its authors, or its operators, or even its slaves (for slaves are agents who can harbour hopes, however faint, that one day a Moses or a Spartacus will set them free), were no more than actions and commands within its key-chains. "

― Tom McCarthy , Satin Island

24 " 11.8 Christmas came and went. Parties; provincial exile; a return to London more relieved than joyous; more parties. On the 1st of January I found myself sitting, once more, beside my desk and blotter, looking through the window at the dawn. I always wake up early after drinking. It was a clear dawn, a good one to usher the new year in. The first phase of the Project would be going live this year. I looked at the pond, this site (since I’d rescued the girl there) of a minor resurrection, and thought of Vanuatans once again. On New Year’s Day, the men ride out on horses or just run about a stretch of pasture firing arrows up into the air: straight up, more or less vertically. The arrows, naturally, fall back down, with pretty much the same velocity as that with which they flew up in the first place. The men ride or run around until an arrow lands on one of them and kills him. Then they stop: the ritual demands that one man must be taken every year. Hungover, jaded, generally un-invigorated by the world, I found myself, in reverie, wishing—just as I had as a child when jumping from my sisters’ bed—that I could be one of these Vanuatan warriors, galloping about the fields, new-year’s wind biting at my cheeks, death whistling all around me, whistling me to life … "

― Tom McCarthy , Satin Island