S.E. Sonder > Recent Status Updates

“Television has become, so to speak, the background radiation of the social and intellectual universe, the all-but-imperceptible reside of the electronic big bang of a century past, so familiar and so thoroughly integrated with American culture that we no longer hear its faint hissing in the background or see the flickering grey light.”

Wait WHAT? 🤨😧🤢

The entire first half of this book is literally just this man waking up and figuring out what’s going on. Wells is certainly an imaginative world-builder, but there is both so much and absolutely nothing going on at the same time here.

“Literature is doomed if liberty of thought perishes. Not only is it doomed in any country which retains a totalitarian structure; but any writer who adopts the totalitarian outlook, who finds excuses for persecution and the falsification of reality, thereby destroys himself as a writer. There is no way out of this. No tirades, no pious platitudes can get over the fact that a bought mind is a spoiled mind.”

“The real objective of socialism is human brotherhood. Men use up their lives in heart-breaking political struggles or get themselves killed in civil wars, not in order to establish some central-heated, air-conditioned, strip-lighted Paradise, but because they want a world in which human beings love one another instead of swindling and murdering one another. And they want that world as a first step.”

“The proof of this is the extreme difficulty of seeing any literary merit in a book that seriously damages your deepest beliefs. And no book is ever truly neutral. Some or other tendency is always discernible, in verse as much as in prose, even if it does no more than determine the form and the choice of imagery.”

“The night sky is dotted in bright little specks; the night sky is dotted in monstrous fireballs. I am the size of ten million ants, and I don’t make up even one percentage of the weight of the rock that I’m floating on. Everything matters so much and so little; it is disgusting.”

I am Gilda. Gilda is me.

Oh my goodness, I didn’t expect to be just a few pages in and reading what feels like a glimpse into my own brain from the outside.

“Historians observe the world, and scientists try to explain it, but engineers transform it. Step by step they’ve replaced village matchmakers with dating apps, town criers with social media, local doctors with diagnostic tools. The time has come for sages, mystics, and prophets to cede to an AI. In this way, history marches on.”

“When she looked down, she saw no safety net, only a forest of skyscrapers stabbing upward like needles upon which she would be impaled. Could you blame her for tucking her daughter onto a safe ledge while she herself plummeted?”

“We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”

“…practices which had been long abandoned, in some cases for hundreds of years—imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions, the use of hostages and the deportation of whole populations—not only became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and progressive.”

“We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone.”