Before I go off and submerge myself in organic chemistry, I want to share some quotations from Oryx and Crake. (My 8 pages of reading notes will not be wasted!)
Jimmy:
His time, what a bankrupt idea, as if he's been given a box of time belonging to him alone, stuffed to the brim with hours and minutes that he can spend like money. Trouble is, the box has holes in it and the time is running out, no matter what he does with it.
Jimmy's Mother and Father:
M: 'You use to be so...you had ideals then.'
F: 'Sure, [...] I've still got them. I just can't afford them'
Jimmy and Crake:
J: 'Why don't we use a real set? [...] The old kind. With plastic men' It did seemed weird to have the two of them in the same room, back to back, playing on computers.
C: 'Why [...] Anyways this is a real set'
J: 'No it's not'
C: 'Okay, granted, but neither is plastic men'
J: 'What?'
C: 'The real set is in your head'
Jimmy:
These planned departures made him uneasy: they reminded him of Alex the parrot sating I'm going away now. There was too fine a line between Alex the parrot and the assisted suicide and his mother and the notes she'd left for him. All three gave notice of their intentions; then all vanished.
'What is toast?' says Snowman to himself, once [the Crakers] have run off. Toast is when you take a piece of bread-What is bread? Bread is when you take some flour-What is flour [...] and then this 'toaster'shoots the slice up into the air, and it falls into the floor...
'Forget it' says Snowman. 'Let's try again.' Toast was a pointless invention from the Dark Ages. Toast was an implement of torture [...] Toast cannot be explained by any rational means.
Toast is me.
I am toast.
Crake:
But human beings hope they can stick their souls into someone else, some new version of themselves, and live on forever.
J: 'As a species we're doomed by hope, then?'
C: 'You could call it hope. That, or desperation'
J: ' But we're doomed without hope as well'
C: 'Only as individuals'
J: 'Well, it sucks'
Oryx:
Of course, having a money value was no substitute for love. Every child should have love, every person should have it. [...] -but love was undependable, it came and then it went, so it was good to have a money value, because then at least those who want to make a profit from you would make sure you were fed enough and not damaged too much. Also there were many who had neither love nor a money value, and having one of these things was better than having nothing.
J: 'Learned what?'
O: 'That everything has a price.'
J: 'Not everything. That can't be true. You can't buy time. You can't buy...' He wanted to say love, but hesitated. It was too sappy.
O: 'You can't buy it, but it has a price. Everything has a price.'
J: 'I don't buy it' Where was her rage, how far down was it buried, what did he have to do to dig it up?
O: 'You don't buy what?'
J: 'Your whole fucking story. All this sweetness and acceptance and crap.'
O: 'If you don't want to buy that, Jimmy [...] what is it that you would like to buy instead?'
Jimmy:
He doesn't know which is worse, a past he can't regain or a present that wull destroy him if he looks at it too clearly. Then there's the future. Sheer vertigo.
'Tomorrow is another day' he declaims to the pink and purple clouds. But if tomorrow is another day, what's today?
Jimmy didn't understand how he could be so nil about it - it was horrible, the thought of Crake watching his own mother dissolve like that. [...] It was Crake preserving his dignity, because the alternative would have been losing it.
Crake:
C: 'Those walls and bars are there for a reason [...] Not to keep us out, but to keep them in. Mankind needs barriers in both cases.'
J: 'Them?'
C: 'Nature and God.'
J: 'I thought you didn't believe in God'
C: 'I don't believe in Nature either, or not with a capital N."
Jimmy:
So Crake never remembered his dreams. It's Snowman that remembers them instead. Worse than remembers: he's immersed in them, he'd wading through them, he's stuck in them. Every moment he's lived in the past few month was dreamed first by Crake. No wonder Crake screamed so much.
So this was the rest of his life. It felt like a party to which he'd been invited, but at an address he couldn't actually locate. Someone must be having fun at it, this life of his; only right at the moment, it wasn't him.
He was drinking alone now, at night, a bad sign. He shouldn't be doing that, it only depressed him, but he had to dull the pain. The pain of what? The pain of the raw torn places, the damaged membranes where he'd whanged up against the Great Indifference of the Universe. One big shark's mouth, the universe. Row after row of razor-sharp teeth.
He doesn't expect to hear anything, but expectation isn't the same as desire.
J: 'What pays for all of [the state of the art Luxuries Mall]?'
C: 'Grief in the face of inevitable death, the wish to stop time. The human condition.'
and lastly, the comparson of Crake's fridge magnets, in school versus working:
No Brain, No Pain Where God is, Man is not.
Siliconsciousness There are two moons, the you can see and the
I wonder from Space to Space one you cannot
Wanna Meet a Meat Machine? Du musz dein Leben andern
Take Your Time, Leave Mine Alone. We understand more than we know.
Little spoat/gider, who made thee? To stay human is to break a limitation.
Life experiments like a rakunk at play. Dream steals from its lair towards its prey.
I think, therefore I spam. I think, therefore.
The proper study of Mankind is Everything.
No comments:
Post a Comment