But we had lost something more subtle than a few lights in the sky. We had lost a reliable sense of place. The Earth is round, the moon circles the Earth, the Earth circles the sun: that was as much cosmology as most people owned or wanted, and I doubt one in a hundred thought more about it after high school. But they were baffled when it was stolen from them.
So I told him about my second-year anatomy class. Along with a dozen other students I had dissected a human cadaver and sorted its contents by size, color, function, and weight. There was nothing pleasant about the experience. Its only consolation was its truth and its only virtue was its utility.
A human body, she said, ought to contain love, hate, courage, cowardice, soul, spirit…not this slimy assortment of blue and red imponderables. Yes. And we ought not to be dragged unwilling into a harsh and deadly future. But the world is what it is and won’t be bargained with. I had said as much to Candice.
about the first manned moon landing back in 1969. At that time, the book said, some of the very elderly—men and women born in the nineteenth century, old enough to remember a world before automobiles and television—had been reluctant to believe the news. Words that would have made only fairy-tale sense in their childhood (“two men walked on the moon tonight”) were being offered as statements of fact. And they couldn’t accept it. It confounded
“Would it, though? Whose fault exactly? Yours? Mine? No, it would have been the result of several billion human beings making relatively innocuous choices: to have kids, drive a car to work, keep their job, solve the short-term problems first. When you reach the point at which even the most trivial acts are punishable by the death of the species, then obviously, obviously, you’re at a critical juncture, a different kind of point of no return.”
“Simon’s more devout than I am. I envy him that. I know how it must sound. Put those books in the trash, like he’s being monstrous, arrogant. But he isn’t. It’s an act of humility, really—an act of submission. Simon can give himself to God in a way I can’t.” “Lucky Simon.” “He is lucky. You can’t see it, but he’s very peaceful. He’s found a kind of equanimity at Jordan. He can look the Spin in the face and smile at it, because he knows he’s saved.”
“I don’t mean to imply he’s pressuring me. ‘Put it in God’s hands,’ he says. Put it in God’s hands and it’ll work out right.” “But you’re too smart to believe that.” “Am I? Oh, Tyler, I hope not. I hope that isn’t true.”
And I relished the eager, open expression on his face. En belonged to a generation capable of regarding the future with more hope than dread. No one in my generation of grotesques had ever smiled into the future like that. It was a good, deeply human look, and it made me happy, and it made me sad.
“There are so many kinds of time. The time by which we measure our lives. Months and years. Or the big time, the time that raises mountains and makes stars. Or all the things that happen between one heartbeat and the next. It’s hard to live in all those kinds of time. Easy to forget that you live in all of them.”