Sheep are funny,” the Whitlock said. “Now, you look at how they behave when you throw some grub over the fence to them, such as corn stalks. Why, they’ll spot that from a mile away.” The Whitlock chuckled. “They’re smart when it comes to what concerns them. And maybe that helps us see what true smartness is; it isn’t having read a lot of big books, or knowing long words... it’s being able to spot what’s to our advantage. It’s got to be useful to be real smartness.
If you boys are psychologist types and you’ve been listening to my endless debriefings with Hank, what the hell is Donna’s handle? How do I get next to her? I mean, how is it done? With that kind of sweet, unique, stubborn little chick?
Mr. Tagomi turned to a passer-by, a thin man in rumpled suit. “What is that?” he demanded, pointing. The man grinned. “Awful, ain’t it? That’s the Embarcadero Freeway. A lot of people think it stinks up the view.
Having nothing else to do or think about, he began to work out theoretically the life cycle of the bugs, and, with the aid of the Britannica, try to determine specifically which bugs they were.
His projected face bony and intense, Garth peered out of his booth like an aroused turtle.
Emptiness. He saw no one, only a large chamber with pewlike rows of seats and, at the far end, a casket surrounded by flowers. Off in a small sideroom an old-fashioned reed pump organ and a few wooden folding chairs. The mortuary smelled of dust and flowers, a sweet, stale mixture that repelled him. Think of all the Iowans, the thought, who’ve embraced eternity in this listless room.
But if that’s Olham, then I must be...
I chose God over the material universe.
Maybe there’s a machine in Berkeley that will save me, too. Perhaps my problems can be automated out of existence.
Secretaries, he thought acidly, read that junk, at home alone in bed at night. It stimulates them. Instead of the real thing. Which they’re afraid of. But of course really crave.
Better a live dog than a dead prince.
It would have been rewarding to talk to Dave, he decided. Dave would have approved what I did. But also he would have understood the other part, which I don’t think even Mercer comprehends. For Mercer everything is easy, he thought, because Mercer accepts everything. Nothing is alien to him. But what I’ve done, he thought; that’s become alien to me. In fact everything about me has become unnatural; I’ve become an unnatural self.
And who am I? The wrong person; I can tell you that.
I had a lot of fears that the universe would discover just how different I was from it.
It is therapeutic to meet these people who have intimidated you. And to discover what they are really like. Then the intimidation goes.
But she looked – smaller. As if something in her had dwindled away, as if she had dried up. It was almost – age. Yet not quite. Could their separation have done this much damage? He doubted it. His wife, since he had seen her last, had become frail, and he did not like this; despite his animosity he felt concern.
This rehearsal will end, the performance will end, the singers will die, eventually the last score of music will be destroyed in one wya or another; finally the name “Mozart” will vanish, the dust will have won. If not on this planet then another. We can evade it awhile.
Human beings had invented war, invented and manufactured the weapons, even invented the players, the fighters, the actors of the war. But they themselves could not venture forth, could not wage it themselves.
They see through the here, the now, into the vast black deep beyond, the unchanging. And that is fatal to life. Because eventually there will be no life; there was once only the dust particles in space, the hot hydrogen gases, nothing more, and it will come again. This is an interval, ein Augenblick. The cosmic process is hurrying on, crushing life back into granite and methane; the wheel turns for all life. It is all temporary.
We did not fall because of a moral error; we fell because of an intellectual error: that of taking the phenomenal world as real. Therefore we are morally innocent.