Status Updates From Notes on the Sonnets

Told myself I wasn’t going to pick this up until I’d finished reading the other books I’ve got on the go but, fuck me. FUCK. Me. Fuck…

‘—we have discovered over 600 outward and inward wits—the problem is when someone has the ability to make you laugh—you share up to 590—it is only a short leap of lightning between their synapses and yours—Almost everything comes down to timing, and little clumps of stuff that look like knots from a distance or up close, but really it’s just that there’s a lot going on. Which is maybe what a knot is, who knows—’

‘Take away the stimulus/response and eventually, without your having to make any effort whatsoever, the brain finds new pathways because it has to—We all have our core training in pretending nothing is wrong and in the end it might be all we really needed. Needless to say, I am so fucking irritable today and I wonder if you are too. Build it then let the seas rush in.’

‘By now I've usually found an astronomer to harangue. ‘I find the concept of a “gas giant” planet deeply disappointing—“Who cares if 1300 Earths could fit inside Jupiter—it’s just a fucking cloud around a ball bearing—Saturn is just a helium balloon without the balloon. —In your absence I like to make a list of things that remind me of you and deliberately take no pleasure in them when I encounter them in the world’