People who read, rock!

I’ve always appreciated being in the company of other “readers.” Perhaps not surprisingly, working at Starbucks gives me regular contact with such folks, sometimes in the form of fellow co-workers (or partners, as we’re called), but more often than not, in the form of customers.

I can’t recall what exactly I was talking about with one customer in particular, but the conversation ended with her passing along to me a copy of Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel, Forty Signs of Rain. It’s the first in a trilogy of books about the fallout of global warming set in Washington DC.

I’ve really enjoyed the first two books so far, and can’t wait until I get my hands on the third…

As usual, some of my favorite passages:


Robinson, Kim Stanley. Forty Signs of Rain. New York: Bantam Books, 2004.

(79) “The only things people understand are sensory,” Frank insisted. “We’re hard-wired to understand life on the savannah. Someone gives you mean, they’re your friend. Someone takes your meat, they’re your enemy. Abstract concepts like surplus value, or statistics on the value of a year’s work, these just aren’t as real as what you see and touch. People are only good at what they can think out in terms of their senses. That’s just the way we evolved.”

(109-110) Sucandra saw this and continued, “So, if curiosity is a value—a quality to be treasured—a form of contemplation, or prayer—they you must reduce suffering to reach [end 109] that state. So, in Buddhism, understanding works to reduce suffering, and by reduction of suffering gains more knowledge. Just like science.”

(265) “But, when we come to what we should do, it returns to the simplest of words. Compassion. Right action. Helping others. It always stays that simple. Reduce suffering. There is something…reassuring in this. Greatest complexity of what is, greatest simplicity in what we should do. Much preferable to the reverse situation.”

(269) There were nods, little smiles. Even that one word, often the highest expression of praise in the scientific tongue, was against type for him. He was making a fool of himself. His group expected him to conform to his persona. That was how group dynamics worked. Surprising people was an unusual thing, faintly unwelcome. Except was it? People certainly paid to be surprised; that was comedy; that was art. It could be proved by analysis. Right now he wasn’t sure of anything.

(269) The elevator door opened; Frank saw it was his floor. He got out and went to his office. He stood there in the doorway looking at all his stuff, scattered about for disposal or for packing to be mailed back west. Piles of books, periodicals, offprints, Xeroxed sheets of stapled or loose paper, folded or rolled graphs and charts and tables and spreadsheets. His exteriorized memory, the paper trail of his life. An excess of reason.

(270) He could see how this might be what Buddhists called a koan, a riddle without an answer, which if pondered long enough might cause the thinking mind to balk, and give up thinking. Give up thinking! That was crazy. And yet, in that moment, perhaps the sensory world would come pouring in. Experience of the present, unmediated by language. Unspeakable by definition. Just felt. Experienced in mentation of a different sort, languageless, or language-transcendent. Something other.

(273-274) “Frank almost ran into a woman walking the other direction, almost said, “Sorry ma’am, I’m in the midst of a paradigm shift.” He was disoriented. He saw that moving from one paradigm to the next was not like moving from one skyscraper to another, as in the diagrams he had once seen in a philosophy of [end 273] science book. It was more like being inside a kaleidoscope, where he had gotten used to the pattern, and now the tube was twisting and he was falling and every aspect of what he saw was clicking to something different, click after click: colors, patterns, everything awash. Like dying and being reborn. Altruism, compassion, simple goddamned foolishness, loyalty to people who were not loyal to you, playing the sap for the defectors to take advantage of, competition, adaptation, displaced self-interest—or else something real, a real force in the world, a kind of physical constant, like gravity, or a basic attribute of life, like the drive to propagate one’s DNA to subsequent generations. A reason for being. Something beyond DNA. A rage to live, and urge to goodness. Love. A green force, élan vital, that was a metaphysics, that was bad, but how else were you going to explain the data?

(353) Roy laughed heartily. “Dreams are so funny.”
“Yeah, but bold. So bold. Sometimes I wake up and wonder why I’m not as bold as that all the time. I mean, what have we got to lose?”

Robinson, Kim Stanley. Fifty Degrees Below. New York: Random House, 2005.

(22) If you don’t act on it, it wasn’t a true feeling.

(87-88) The thing is, he thought as he waited, nobody knows you. No one can. Even if you spent almost the entirety of every day with someone, and there were people like that—even then, no. Everyone lived alone in the end, not just in their heads but even in their physical routines. Human contacts were parcellated, to use a term from brain science or systems theory; parceled out. There were:

1. the people you lived with, if you did; that was about a hundred hours a week, half of them asleep;
2. the people you work with, that was forty hours a week, give or take;
3. the people you played with, that would be some portion of the thirty or so hours left in a week;
4. then there were the strangers you spent time with in transport, or eating out or so on. This would be added to an already full [end page 87] calendar according to Frank’s calculations so far, suggesting they were all living more hours a week than actually existed, which felt right. In any case, a normal life was split out into different groups that never met; and so no one knew you in your entirety, except you yourself.

(117) But the sad part is that the corruption doesn’t just happen to the people with power. It spreads from them. They spread it around.

(213-214) For a while they talked in a different way than they usually did, about how things felt; and they agreed that lives were not easily told to others. Frank speculated that many life stories consisted precisely of a search for a reiterated pattern, for habits. Thus, one’s set of habits was somehow unsatisfactory, and you needed to change them, and were thereby thrown into a plot, which was the hunt for new habits, or even, but exceptionally, the story of the giving up of such a hunt in favor of sticking with what you have, or remaining chaotically in the existential moment (not adaptive if reproductive [end page 213] success were the goal, he noted under his breath). Thus Frank was living a plot while Anna was living a life, and when they talked about personal matters he had news while she had the “same old same old,” which was understood by both to be the desired state, irritating and difficult though it might be to maintain.

(245-246) What was worry, after all, but a kind of fear? It was fear for the future. And in fact the future was bound to bring its share of bad things, there was no avoiding that. So worry was really a hopeless enterprise, in that it could not [end page 245] do anything. In was an anticipation of grief, a nightmare of the future. A species of fear; and she was determined not to be afraid.

(249) Maybe we have to take a stand. Maybe that’s what it means to get involved in politics. You have to declare. You have to talk about what people should do.

(287) How you think about what you’re doing makes a huge difference.

(385-386) Now he saw a frightened person. Well, he had seen that before. It was not so very unfamiliar. He had never been [end page 385] so sure of himself when he was young. When had certainty arrived? Was it not a kind of hardening of the imagination, a dulling? Had he fallen asleep as the years passed?

(448) Life was feeling one’s way toward a goal which ultimately equated to achieving and maintaining certain feelings.

(459) We love the art that tells our story.

(554) It occurred to him that maybe this was what conversation always was, two people talking to themselves in different languages, mostly in order to clarify themselves to themselves.

(602-603) Rudra shook his head. “No one can see inside you. So no matter what they see, they don’t know. Everyone only judges themself.”
“That’s not good!” Frank said. “I need someone more generous than that!”
“Ha ha. You are funny.”
“I’m serious!”
“A good thing to know, then. You are the judge. A place to start.”
Frank shuddered, rubbed his face. Cold hands, cold face; and dead behind the nose. “I don’t see how I can. I’m so different in these different situations. It’s like living multiple lives. I mean I just act the parts. People believe me. But I don’t know what I feel. I don’t know what I mean.”
“Of course. This is always true. To some you are like this, to others like that. Sometimes a spirit comes down. Voices take over inside you. People take away what they [end page 602] see, they think that is all there is. And sometimes you want to fool them in just that way. But want to or not, you fool them. And they fool you! And on it goes—everyone in their own life, everyone fooling all the others—No! It is easy to live multiple lives! What is hard is to be a whole person.”

One of the things I especially appreciate about books and music lyrics are the ways in which they are food for my own thoughts. I could use each and every one of these quotations as an epigraph to a blog post (which I will hopefully do, eventually)…