Status Updates From Watt

For it was an attitude become, with frequent repetition, so part of his being, that there was no more room in his mind for resentment at a spit in the eye, to take a simple example, than if his braces had burst, or a bomb fallen on his bum.

"And so always, when the impossibility of my knowing, of Watt's having known, what I know, what Watt knew, seems absolute, and insurmountable, and undeniable, and incoercible, it could be shown that I know, because Watt told me, and that Watt knew, because someone told him, or because he found out for himself"

Summary of Watt and Watt so far: "But to elicit something from nothing requires a certain skill and Watt was not always successful, in his efforts to do so ... For the only way one can speak of nothing is to speak of it as though it were something ... in foisting a meaning there where no meaning appeared, he was most often neither the one, nor the other" (61-62).

Too fearful to assume himself the onus of a decision, said
Mr Hackett, he refers it to the frigid machinery of a time-space
relation.

A minimalism and angularity so severe that every word seems to carry the weight of a steel stage-brick.