- "But of course the worst part is that animals eat d131y because there is nothing else around to eat, and then they get Z’ed up, and then they become cannibalistic corn evangelists, too."
- "Holly was well and truly Z’ed out, but still she looked more like me than anyone left on the planet, and seeing her made me feel the only thing I am still capable of feeling besides hope and dread: I loved her. And so I took care of her. I came to the conclusion a while ago that there is nothing romantic or supernatural about loving someone: Love is the privilege of being responsible for another. It was, for a time, what kept me going: Each morning, for a little while, I got to feel the weight of the yoke on my back as I pulled the ancient cart of my species."
- "There was this sociologist Peter Berger (not known to be deceased but presumed to be Z’ed up) who once wrote this famous line: “The di$erence between people and dogs is that dogs know how to be dogs.” I know this to be true, at least insofar as Mr. President is an exemplary dog: Even today, with three bottles of wine left and the air soaked with putrid death, Mr. President is a dog in full possession of his dogness: His pacing is not "nally about the great existential questions," because the pacing goes away the moment he eats...And I know nothing more about how to be a person than I did in the Beez. The system of my consciousness remains open--I cannot for the life of me answer the question of why satisfactorily. One could make a case, I suppose, that the reason for our existence was to marvel at creation, to see and appreciate the beauty of the universe and indeed to contribute to that beauty in ways that aren’t available to organisms without consciousness, but A. aesthetic arguments-- as Caroline often pointed out to me--have the air of bullshit about them, and B. there is precious little beauty left to appreciate, and the mechanics of contribution have become quite a bit more complicated. ...Dogs know how to be dogs. But people do not know how to be people unless and until they learn from other people. Which got me to wondering whether it’s possible to learn how to be a person in a world where all the people are dead."
- “I told him they built a statue of Schultz, and then he said that a monument is cold comfort to a dead man, and then I said that the statue was built not for Schultz, but for us--to remind us how to be human.”
dec 18 2011 ∞
mar 13 2012 +
mar 13 2012 +