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For years now he had re-mythologized his own childhood. The image in his mind of a small boy playing endlessly by himself in a long suburban garden surrounded by a high fence seemed strangely comforting…Perhaps even his marriage to Catherine, a failure by anyone else's standards, had succeeded precisely because it recreated for him this imaginary empty garden.

One day in August a man disappeared. He had simply set out for the seashore on a holiday, scarcely half a day away by train, and nothing more was ever heard of him.

…this omniscient presence would love me…with a cold, unwilling obsession…so all the time that it was observing me it was also biding its time, as if waiting for the right moment to strike me down…I was unable to imagine love without dominion….

“…modern chemistry only starts coming in to replace alchemy around the same time capitalism really gets going…What do you make of that?”
Webb nodded agreeably. “Maybe capitalism decided it didn’t need the old magic anymore…Had their own magic…instead of turning lead into gold, they could take poor people’s sweat and turn it into green-backs, and save that lead for enforcement purposes.”

The most sublime act is to set another before you.
-WILLIAM BLAKE, Proverbs of Hell

Publication date: May 2026

I HAD REACHED the age of six hundred and fifty miles. Beyond the door the guildsmen were assembling for the ceremony in which I would be admitted as a guild apprentice…I recalled that my father had sometimes referred…to men who bore as titles the names of their guilds. I had heard of the Bridge-Builders…How was a bridge fundamental to the city's survival? Why was a militia necessary?
Indeed,what was the future?

Lew found himself surrounded by a luminosity new to him, not even observed in dreams, nor easily attributable to the smoke-inflected sun beginning to light Chicago.
He understood that things were exactly what they were. It seemed more than he could bear.

Something tells me Tabby will never finish her dissertation. Part of her wants to finish just to finish. She wants "PhD" after her name. But realistically, she's never going to teach. There are no jobs in robot literature or manservant literature. I don't know what the literature of deception is.

The scene superimposed translucently upon this one was that world of blue that I never got to see, calling out from afar. Now, from over a great distance, that blue came slipping this way. From my fixed avian vantage point, I held those blues on top of one another in my vision, waiting for them to disappear.

Then she said, “Duck and cover! Duck and cover! Duck and cover!”
…He liked to duck and cover. There was a sense of acting in unison that he found satisfying…He felt the comfort of numbers…an odd belonging in the duck-and-cover…a community of lookalikes and do-alikes, heads down, elbows tucked, fannies in the air…In their prayer posture they could have been anyone from anywhere.

"Yesterday I lost something Jody," she said.
Now the elder one faced the bathroom mirror dully. "Oh."
"I lost a knob."
It's so hard to get hold of this world, with its onslaughts of implements, voices, and sun.

He was just a word for me. I did not see the man in the name any more than you do. Do you see him? Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you…a vain attempt….

At the point I departed from? Or at the point I'm headed to? Can there be an in-between? Am I like that lost day when you fly east, and that regained night that comes from going west? Am I subject to…quantum physics…that a particle may exist in two places at once? Or to a different law…that says that you can doubly not exist in the same place?

He must've noticed me…the monotonous squeak of his suitcase wheels drew closer. As the distance between us gradually lessened, I could tell that both the far-off time and my frozen memory had begun to thaw….

That evening is the limit of the world, and I've just happened upon it, by accident…My own presence is the only thing with a distinct outline now, an outline that quivers and undulates…And all of a sudden I know: there's nothing for it now, here I am.

There’s all sorts in the water now that wasn’t there when he was just a lad. Strange chemicals and pesticides and sewage…Fleeting things, but if you’re asking him, they augur trouble - it’s been hard to sleep of late. His dreams are full of slag heaps made from rotten shrimp, and he’s there in amongst them with a shovel, trying to clear a path.

THE SKY ABOVE the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel...and he was no console man, no cyberspace cowboy. Just another hustler, trying to make it through. But the dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo, and he'd cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark…..trying to reach the console that wasn't there.

Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire. What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! …The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires.

BUT YOU SAID IT YOURSELF -
"WE'RE ALL THE SAME:" THE REVOLUTIONARY IS NO DIFFERENT FROM THE OVERLORD, WE ALL WANT TO BE ON TOP OF THE HIERARCHY - IF WE CAN'T BE RICHER OR STRONGER, WE'LL BE MORALLY SUPERIOR.

Been thinking about authenticity, and about how we have been done a great disservice by being taught that what we are to be authentic to is our feelings, as opposed to our values.

I was decades younger then. The sisters were younger than I. Living with them on that narrow yet warm ledge, trying to hang on to that life, I did not care if I was free to leave or not. I disliked the notion of independence and wanted to shut it away as the sky with its range of blues locks out the infinite every day.

She began to understand that this was Vietnam Week on campuses across the country.
And this was Dow Day here in Madison, a protest against Dow Chemical…whose products included a new and improved form of napalm with a polystyrene additive that made jellied matter cling more firmly to human flesh…Common Sense, Uncommon Chemistry. This was Dow's catchy ad slogan…

She opened the door. "Is it starting to lift?" she asked.
"I think so," he said.
They stood side by side, looking out at the garden. It was the moment, a small lapse in the ritual of the visit, when something might have been said, but nothing was.

A feeling that he will completely reject me, that I don't know what's going on, or that he's mad. A feeling that I could occupy myself with this feeling forever. A feminist feeling. A few minutes later he returned and untied me.

"All things were made by him; / and without him was not any thing made that was made." What does that mean? The Word was there before God. Or: God was first within it, as Word. The Word strode forth from itself as differentiation. As God, it named and called into being by naming-even itself. Thus did the world arise as the difference between Wordgod and Godword.

And the two men…Could just as easily be Oppenheimer and Teller, their bodies greased with suntan oil as they quote Hindu scriptures to each other.
Om does not rhyme with bomb. It only
looks that way.
Death and magic, that's the mushroom. Or death and immortal life.

"Yes, there is," he said, pointing at his chest. “It's in here. It's the most discreet sort of number, so it never comes out where it can be seen. But it's here." We fell silent for a moment, trying to picture the square root of minus one in some distant, unknown place.

A World Without Selfie Sticks

“It seemed that Not-Debbie was also named Deborah, but she hadn't come to New York that morning from Australia. She'd come from a parallel world. I'm not kidding that's what she said between sips of her weak cappuccino. She wasn't part of an alien invasion or the result of a scientific military experiment gone wrong. She was here as a contestant on a TV game show….”

And perhaps he wouldn't even have been admitted to the United States…the authorities would have sent him home….ignoring…he no longer had a home country. For one could not hope for pity here in this country,and the things that Karl had read about America in that regard were quite true; here it was only those who were fortunate who truly seemed to enjoy their good fortune amid the indifferent faces on all sides.

-At Love Canal,the Hooker Chemical Corporation was found guilty of monstrous violations of the law,I heard him say…
-For years…those people were found guilty of the most flagrant abuses of public health,I heard him say…
-Of dumping chemicals…no regard for public health…I heard him say…
-In immense quantities…thousands of leaking barrels,I heard him say…
-For that was their business,I heard him say…