Sadia C > Recent Status Updates

“When I wasn't playing my violin in the airship terminal I liked to walk my dog in the streets between the towers. In those streets everyone moved faster than me, but what they didn't know was that I had already moved too fast, too far, and wished to travel no further. I've been thinking a great deal about time and motion lately, about being a still point in the ceaseless rush.”

“I would keep him off balance. […] I would call him son because he hated being called son, and his irritation would distract him. I would bring up my dead wife because he was embarrassed by his own failed marriage. I would make him feel insecure about his accent, because accents and dialects are what he struggled with the most in training. But first, I would lull his with the quiet of my life.”

“He stood before me, clapping awkwardly. I was so embarrassed for him—for me? for us? That it was difficult to meet his eyes, but I managed it. I was grateful that my dog had slept through my younger self’s incompetence.”

“He was calm these days, in a way he wouldn’t have expected. In the early evenings, Gaspery liked to sit on the farthest possible edge of his bunk, almost falling off the end, because from that angle, there was a sliver of sky visible through the window, and through it, he could see the moon.”
Interesting to think about someone feeling nostalgic for the moon and feeling foreign on the earth

“What had happened was terrible, he was in prison in the wrong century and he was going to die here, but as months slipped into years, he found his regrets were very few. Warning Olive Llewellyn of the approaching pandemic was not, no matter how he turned the moment over in his mind, the wrong thing to do. If someone’s about to drown, you have a duty to pull them from the water. His conscience was clear.”

“I told her I was going to 1918 as part of the investigation. I was really there to try to save Edwin St. Andrew from dying in an insane asylum.”
[…]
“If you hadn’t changed the timeline,” Ephrem said to Gaspery, “he still would’ve died of the flu, just 48 hours later and in an insane asylum. You see how pointless that was?”
“You’re missing the point” Gaspery said.

“I believe you’re in a somewhat delicate state, and I thought perhaps it might ease your mind. Just a little to know that you might be sooner than you think” — Gaspery to Edwin
Edwin started focusing on the garden after this. Then gaspery starts to leave: “Edwin watched him go, and then remained on his bench for a long time, hours, watching the way the garden faded into twilight”

Right after gaspery dropped the “bomb”, “ Edwin‘s gaze drifted away from the man’s face to the mild decrepitude of the September garden […] He was struck by an understanding of what his life could be from this moment: he could live here quietly, and care for the garden, and that might eventually be enough.”

“He felt more empathy for his mother than previously[…]edwin understood more vividly now that she was mourning a loss[…]it wasn’t her fault that the world she’d grown up in had seized to exist” about how they used to be annoyed by her recounting the same stories about her time in British occupied India when they were growing up. Now he can relate w/ the loss of his own best friend and lover during war.

I really liked this chapter about Edwin meeting gaspery in his war ptsd era. There was something relatable, rare, and lulling about it.

The way the author lady from the past just happened to hear a conversation from both gaspery and zoey even though Zoey never travels and they are talking about how he saved olive and then leaves. Corny writing isn’t such a bad thing im realizing, as long as it moves the story along

“In a world that no longer exists but whose exact end date is unclear” (Marienbad excerpt)

[…]

"But all of this raises an interesting question," Olive said.
"What if it always is the end of the world?"
She paused for effect. Before her, the holographic audience was almost perfectly still. "Because we might reasonably think of the end of the world," Olive said, "as a continuous and never-ending process."

"—and my point is, there's always something. I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we're living at the climax of the story. It's a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we're uniquely important, that we're living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it's ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.”

Okay now it’s finally catching my interest. I hope they reshow the timelines they already showed. Bc I am NOT reading

“There’s a faction, myself among them, that believes time travel works better than it should[…] I mean that sometimes we change the time line and the the time line seems to REPAIR itself[…] sometimes events seemingly change to accommodate the time traveler’s interference so that a generation later it’s as if the traveler were never there”—my past hypomanic visions and physics prove something similar

“What you have to understand is that bureaucracy is an organism, and the prime goal of every organism is self protection. Bureaucracy exists to protect itself.”

Relatable at some points, corny writing in some points, plot holes, the best parts so far have been reading just the first chapter, the excitement when I realize the dimension is about to change when there’s a book part page and the realization I’m about to read a person POV of actually time traveling. It’s boring to me the inbetween parts and that the mysteries have been solved with the time traveling element.