J[E] M[E PROMèNE]

“[H]ow wonderful, truly, to have a friend whose silence you adored.”

It was a world of shouting men and it stank of them!

“Most insecurities were palimpsests, scars long since grown over but still feared.”

“I knew a wrench married in an afternoon as she went to the garden for parsley to stuff a rabbit, and so may you, sir.”

“We were a generation raised on behavioral theory. We could see both the buttons and the fingers that pushed them, but that awareness did nothing to shield us from their effects.”

“(To be a girl is to have your edges torn away by people who do not deserve any part of you.)”

“They put their coats in a small square locker, Hector handed out coins for the lockers, and Ina smiled when she realized he must have planned ahead, he knew that the lockers only accepted coins, so he had saved four coins to ensure a smooth entry to the aquarium. For some people, love needed to be proven with diamond rings or surprise weekends in Paris, but for Ina, love meant the ability to plan ahead and seeing Hector hand out those coins to her sisters made her realize that he loved her.”

“How did her feet manage to walk? She would thank them all her life.”

“What was a country but the idea of it? … How often could you attack it before it crumbled? To undo something took practice; it was a dark art and they were perfecting it. With each argument the next would be easier, would become a compulsive act, and like wrecking a marriage, it would be impossible to keep away, to stop picking at wounds even if the wounds were your own.”

“These words that took direct aim at something elusive had the deliberateness of previous consideration, she realized with a thud of joy.”

“I walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn't expect to arrive.”

“Our lives here are inexpressibly trivial and momentous at once, it seems he's about to wake up and say. Both repetitive and unprecedented. We matter greatly and not at all. To reach some pinnacle of human achievement only to discover that your achievements are next to nothing and that to understand this is the greatest achievement of any life, which itself is nothing, and also much more than everything. Some metal separates us from the void; death is so close. Life is everywhere, everywhere.”

“We exist now in a fleeting bloom of life and knowing, one finger-snap of frantic being, and this is it. This summery burst of life is more bomb than bud. These fecund times are moving fast.”

“The planet is shaped by the sheer amazing force of human want, which has changed everything, the forests, the poles, the reservoirs, the glaciers, the rivers, the seas, the mountains, the coastlines, the skies, a planet contoured and landscaped by want.”

A deep curiosity, a brain of ornate architecture, a focus, an optimism and a pragmatism; an astronaut to his bones before he even knew what an astronaut was. But a robot, no. There in his chest is a heart that tilts and pitches. He can keep its beats slow and smooth, of fear or panic or impulse, stop it yearning too much for home, curb its unhelpful states of abandon. Calm and steady, calm and steady. Metronome pacing out the breath. Yet still at times it tilts and pitches. It wants what it wants and hopes what it hopes and needs what it needs and loves what it loves. So strenuously unrobotic is the astronaut's heart that it leaves the earth's atmosphere and it presses out - gravity stops pressing in and the counterweight of the heart starts pressing out, as if suddenly aware it is part of an animal, alive and feeling. An animal that does not just bear witness, but loves what it witnesses.