'Humans achieve their peak in different ways. But whoever you are, once you're over the summit, it's downhill all the way. Nothing anyone can do about it. And the worst of it is, you never know where that peak is. You think you're still going strong, when suddenly you've crossed the great divide. No one can tell. Some people peak at twelve, then lead rather uneventful lives from then on. Some carry on until they die; some die at their peak. Poets and composers have lived like furies, pushing themselves to such a pitch they're gone by thirty. Then there are those like Picasso, who kept breaking ground until well past eighty.
And what about me?
My peak? Would I even have one? I hardly had had anything you could call a life. A few ripples. Some rises and falls. But that's it. Almost nothing. Nothing born of nothing. I'd loved and been loved, but I had nothing to show. It was a singularly plain, featureless landscape. I felt like I was in a video game. A surrogate Pacman, crunching blindly through a labyrinth of dotted lines. the only certainty was my death.
No promises you're gonna be happy, the Sheep Man had said. So you gotta dance. Dance so it all keeps spinning.'
Dance Dance Dance
(Pages 209-210)
'...long ago, on a world as close as shadow:
A very different version of North America cradled a huge, landlocked, saline sea. This sea teemed with microbial life. All this life served a single tremendous organism.
And on this world, under a cloudy sky, the entirety of the turbid sea crackled with a single thought.
I . . .
This thought was followed by another.
To what purpose?'
The Long Earth
(Page 14)
In some ways, the only real contribution i make to this blog is the "reviewing" of books.
Other than that, i say very little and it's probably just as well.
I don't have anything very interesting or eloquent to say.
But my brain being what it is - an obnoxious fucktard - has robbed me for the time being of the simple act of processing thought.
This happens on occasion.
Usually when i feel bone-tired, withdrawn and under medicated - yay! for prescription drugs, boo! for the ones that fail to work.
It's taking me forever alone just to right this brief paragraph.
There's no way in the hell i've the brainpower for a review any time soon.
So until my brainpan resumes full working order, i'll say this.
Dance Dance Dance . . . splendid.
The Long Earth . . . okay, i suppose.
Consider yourself inarticulately reviewed.
Boom?
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