People have invoked the ghost of Hemingway quite a few times in writing about the book. I could get into sticky territory here if I let myself go on about this subject. The more I hear it, the more it rankles, frankly.
Your life has more blue in it than a James Cameron movie.
You could not be more correct. It does matter. All of it.
Regardless of whether you believe in the Singularity, you will most likely experience the benefits of it. But we don’t really know.
Partying means drinking. It also means playing records by Lou Reed and Chicago, which I thought was a city but is also a band it turns out.
The urge to move is natural and understandable. As will be the case throughout your life, no matter how long or brief, the choice is, in the end, yours. Simply bear in mind that most every choice will have consequences, and in this instance those consequences would likely be quite grave.
Love, in its purest form, is biology.
Don’t repackage your fear and try to sell it to me as indifference.
I am not your God. Or if I am, I’m no God you can seek out for deliverance or explanation. I’m the kind of God who would eat you without compunction if I were hungry.
All of which raises the question – your task, burden, privilege, call it what you like – a question which men and women, great and not-so of every color, creed and sexual persuasion have asked since they first had the language to do so, and probably before: Does Anything I Do Matter?
But the thing is, from the perspective of a novelist there is a brand of lying that feels more honest than the actual facts of an event. Lying as a way to move closer to the truth, or to illuminate ow something actually feels in a way the mere facts cannot.
I haven’t written a whole lot of nonfiction, but what I have written leads me to believe that it’s an entirely different muscle. The ongoing paradox is that sometimes it’s harder to get to the emotional truth of something when you only have the facts at your disposal.
If I had a nickel for every time someone told me apologetically “I don’t read fiction,” I wouldn’t have to write fiction anymore. And I share that fascination with the truth. I’m not looking down my nose at it.
Whenever someone asks me craft questions like that I feel like I can give one of two answers. I can give the academy answer and say that it was very deliberate and I had a plan in mind and I executed that plan exactly to the letter. But this isn’t the case.
I wonder if kids growing up now are actually going to have that – if they’re ever going to be able to unplug and have that ability to concentrate, or if it’s just never going to happen for them. It’s a little unnerving, frankly.
When you’re a child – and my understanding of it is very basic – but when you’re a very young child, the stimuli around you prompt your brain to form synapses. Once they’re there, they’re there, but if they don’t form by a certain age, they’re not going to.
Singularity is seen as an event horizon. There’s everything that comes before it and everything that comes after it and never the twain shall meet, in much the same way that Judeo-Christian theology presents its notion of the afterlife – there’s a very clear and impermeable demarcation there.