Status Updates From Children of God (The Sparro...

"Not superstition. Psychology. It is a scholar's task to find patterns in nature or cycles in history. Initially, it's no different from finding portraits of animals and heroes in the stars. The question is: Have you discovered a preexisting truth? Or have you imposed an arbitrary meaning on whatever it is you're considering?"

Love mercy, the prophets taught. Do justice. There was so much to share! And yet, the history of her home planet was one of almost continual warfare, and with tragic frequency, war's taproot was set deep in fervent religion and unquestioning belief. I don't know what to do, she thought. Even the laws of physics resolve to probabilities. How can I know what to do?

will come me back to this later

My body is healed, he was asking her to understand; my soul is still bleeding. It's all one thing to me.

She was held in tension just before movement, about to walk back toward the house. Later she would think: If I had turned away, I'd have missed the moment he fell in love.

He would not remember it that way. What he experienced was not so much the beginning of love as a cessation of pain.

That night, he meditated on the absence of magnitude, on the cypher that separates positive from negative, on the nothing, on the No Thing. When such comparisons were made, orgasm became as inexhaustibly beautiful as mathematics, its gradations-- it's inequalities-- sublimely arrayed for the highly aesthete to recognize and appreciate. Art cannot exist without inequality, which is itself established by comparison.

Mistaking bloodless lethargy for calm, she believed as well that she felt no grief. With practice, she told herself, she had come to accept that tears were no remedy for death. Her life had been blessedly unburdened by happiness. When some period of fleeting contentment ended, Sofia did not register it as outrageous, but merely noted a return to life's normal condition. Rain falls on everyone; lightning strikes some.