You dig a hole and the next thing they say is fill it in; fill it in and they tell you to dig a hole. They're always screwing with the guy in the field.
To keep myself awake, I concentrated on the baseball game being broadcast on the cab radio. I don't follow baseball, so for convenience sake I rooted for the team currently at bat and against the team in the field. My team was behind, 3-1.
"Do you ever regret giving up your shadow?"
"I have no regrets," speaks the old officer, shaking his head. "I never do anything regrettable."
"Watch this," he says. He runs the sliver of wood between the bricks. It hardly penetrates a fraction of an inch. He tosses the wood away, and draws the tip of his knife over the bricks. This produces an awful sound, but leaves not a mark. He examines his knife, then puts it away.
"This Wall has no mortar," the Gatekeeper states. "There is no need. The bricks fit perfect; not a hair-space between them. Nobody can put a dent in the Wall. And nobody can climb it. Because this Wall is perfect. So forget any ideas you have. Nobody leaves here."
As the autumn deepens, the fathomless lakes of their eyes assume an ever more sorrowful hue. The leaves turn color, the grasses wither; the beasts sense the advance of a long, hungry season. And bowing to their vision, I too know a sadness.
The Town is neither too big nor too small. That is to say, it is not so vast that it eclipses my powers of comprehension, but neither is it so contained that the entire picture can be easily grasped.
"Money's no object here. This is war. Nobody would win a war if they stopped to calculate the cost."
I'd read Rudin before, but that was fifteen years ago in university. Rereading it now, lying all bandaged up, sipping my whiskey in bed in the afternoon, I felt new sympathy for the protagonist Rudin. I almost never identify with anybody in Dostoyevsky, but the characters in Turgenev's old-fashioned novels are such victims of circumstance, I jump right in. I have a thing about losers. Flaws in oneself open you up to others with flaws.
Not that Dostoyevsky's characters don't generate pathos, but they're flawed in ways that don't come across as faults. And while I'm on the subject, Tolstoy's characters' faults are so epic and out of scale, they're as static as backdrops.
I was in too much pain, physically, to reflect more deeply on closing this chapter in my life. I hurt too much and I was too tired. Better not to think at all than to think halfway.
After thirty-six steps—I'm a habitual step counter
"And for how long does that world go on?" "Forever," said the Professor.
"I don't get it," I said. "What do you mean 'forever'? The physical body has its limits. The body dies, the brain dies. Brain dies, mind ceases. Isn't that the way it goes?"
"No, it isn't. There's no time to tautologies. That's the difference between tautologies and dreams. Tautologies are instantaneous, everything is revealed at once. Eternity can actually be experienced. Once you set up a closed circuit, you just keep spinnin' 'round and 'round in there. That's the nature of tautologies. No interruptions like with dreams. It's like the encyclopedia wand."
"The encyclopedia wand?" I was evolving into an echo. "The encyclopedia wand's a theoretical puzzle, like Zeno's paradox. The idea is't'engrave the entire encyclopedia onto a single toothpick. Know how you do it?" "You tell me."
"You take your information, your encyclopedia text, and you transpose it into numerics. You assign everything a two-digit number, periods and commas included. 00 is a blank, A is 01, B is 02, and so on. Then after you've lined them all up, you put a decimal point before the whole lot. So now you've got a very long sub-decimal fraction. 0.173000631… Next, you engrave a mark at exactly that point along the toothpick. If 0.50000's your exact middle on the toothpick, then 0.3333's got't'be a third of the way from the tip. You follow?"
"Sure."
"That's how you can fit data of any length in a single point on a toothpick. Only theoretically, of course. No cxistin' technology can actually engrave so fine a point. But ihis should give you a perspective on what tautologies are like. Say time's the length of your toothpick. The amount of information you can pack into it doesn't have anything't'do with the length. Make the fraction as long as you want. It'll be finite, but pretty near eternal. Though if you make it a repeatin' decimal, why, then it is eternal. You understand what that means? The problem's the software, no relation to the hardware. It could be a toothpick or a two-hundred-meter timber or the equator—doesn't matter. Your body dies, your consciousness passes away, but your thought is caught in the one tautological point an instant before, sub-dividin' for an eternity. Think about the koan: An arrow is stopped in flight. Well, the death of the body is the flight of the arrow. It's makin' a straight line for the brain. No dod-gin' it, not for anyone. People have't'die, the body has't'fall. Time is hurlin' that arrow forward. And yet, like I was sayin', thought goes on subdividin' that time for ever and ever. The paradox becomes real. The arrow never hits."
"In other words," I said, "immortality."
"There you are. Humans are immortal in their thought. Though strictly speakin', not immortal, but endlessly, asymptotically close to immortal. That's eternal life."
How can it be, here in this timeless Town, I have so little time?