Literature Notes

link to back cover

Some quotes:

• "Today, again, the sun will rise in the sky and day will break. And no one will remark on this astonishing maggic, no one will great this extraordinary ordinariness with enthusiastic applause." [p. 2]
  
  
• "Nothing is simpler than to step through the doors of the universe. First, you switch on your computer. Then rapture begins, when you teeter on the edge with the world at your fingertips, gaping open like a gigantic box of candies that your two hands and your one lifetime could never hope to exhaust." [p. 5]
  
  
• "We designed them eye-catching Web sites, we offered them a spotlight on the world's greatest stage, we were made for them like fleas for a dog and maple syrup for hypoglycemics, even if not everyone knew it yet." [p. 8]

I guess this also applies to me and this Web site.

• "In a 300-page book, there are always 250 pages too many. Reading books slows you down, it softens you, it wipes you out. When you open a book, a particularly underhanded book, you're neutralized for hours ... " [p. 9]

Selecting a few quotes, as I am doing would suggest that more than 250 pages are too many. On the other hand, a book can also energize you and stimulate you to have thoughts that would not otherwise have happened. One also needs context for the few special sentences - thus the need for the extra pages.

• "Open a truly dangerous book and you cannot easily close it again. " [p. 55]
  
  
• "When train dispatchers do their job, the trains stay on the tracks and the passengers are happy. Real flesh-and-blood train dispatchers no longer exist. They have been replaced by us, the masters of infinitesmal movement, tamers of chips the size of microscopic fleas. " [p. 74]

• "Follow-up is for bureaucrats. Zeno and I never follow up on anything. We never waste a minute on files from the past; we're too busy leaping from peak to summit in search of something new." [p. 79]

This Web site is all follow-up .

• "People. People who need people. So many of them, so many industrious, bright faces, old, young, colored, pale, all pushing towards the banquet table to tear a bite from the magical, inaccessible fruit before none remains, wandering through the termite colony blind to the path to the center, to the delectable heart of the Big Apple, constantly seeking, finding for a brief instant, losing it once more, then setting off in dogged pursuit through the Bowery, Greenwich Village, Battery Park, along Broadway and Canal Street, hopes and fears as countless as human faces." [p. 89]
  
  
• "I went our walking late at night, side by side with endless variations of human beings kept awake by fear and desire. I brushed up against a thousand universes in a single minute, each one different, forever parallel. The gold of New York isn't its skyscapers. It's the people." [p. 108]
  
• "You're never as happy as when you never intended to be." [p. 125]
  
  
• "Presenting the story in schematic form explains nothing, because the plot is no more than a brass plate upon which to serve the main course, and the main course is wild emotion carried along by the words themselves. How can words on paper be transformed into heat and violence? Who knows? It is a deep mystery one step removed from sorcery." [p. 157]
  
  
• " 'First and foremost,' he began, 'is curiosity.' " [p. 173]

  This reminds me of my favorite quotation. The first sentence in Isaac Asimov's "New Guide to Science" is "Almost in the beginning was curiosity."

• "Heard enough, read enough, caught enough hot air from this clandestine crackpot who knew nothing about the sophistication of modern existence. Had he ever switched on a computer or written an E-mail?" [p. 174]
  
  
• "Humanity patches up its differences and smooths its wrinkles in laughter." [p. 176]
  
  
• "Think carefully, Florence. Explore the space rich in possibilities that is opening before you. Reality has its limitations, while whatever you invent has none, and never will." [p. 222]
  
  
• "Writing fiction is a way for him to step far enough back from reality to grasp its totality, the music of all the elements combined. The farther away you are, the clearer everything becomes." [p. 261]
  
  
• "Every word has its uses, every word communicates a stimulus that attracts othe words to it in equal reaction. And as they travel back and forth, a fragile bridge takes shape, spanning the abyss over which we might cross with most infinite of precautions." [p. 264]
  
  
• "It was so rare to be at home, sitting in my favorite armchair, indolent, remote from the complex world of the Web." [p. 266]

SUMMARY of the session: This is a great story of young techies in Montreal. A fascinating read, it is a rare book that is much more than the sum of its words. The book was originally written in French, leaving one to wonder how much better it likely was in its original form.