Lucia > Recent Status Updates

“Their goal was a still stranger world, almost twice as far from the Sun — across another half billion miles of comet-haunted emptiness.”

Shakespeare wrote, in a different context, that “conscience doth make cowards of us all.” I think what he meant is that listening to and acting on our conscience is a scary and lonely exercise. We fear our conscience for the same reason we fear the truth. (77)

“What counts is our ability to recognize the small miracles sprouting in our midst and to share them with others.”

“Life is not a problem that can be solved. It must be lived each day, and each day brings a jumble of choices that challenge our practical wisdom, common sense, yearning for truth. Your choices in life are enormous. […] You have been learning from the cradle that it’s important to be good at something[…] Remember also to pay attention to the spirit’s first command — to be good at life.” (45-6)

Voilà something unforgettable:
“The fat man was flabbily fat with bulbous pink cheeks and lips and chins and neck, with a great soft egg of a belly that was all his torso, and pendant cones for arms and legs. As he advanced to meet Spade all his bulbs rose and shook and fell separately with each step, in the manner of clustered soap-bubbles not yet released from the pipe through which they had been blown.” 😂

“There is no future and no past. There is no remedy for death — or birth — except to hug the spaces in between. Live loud. Live wide. Live tall.”

“Love was to blame, and passion. Passion such as theirs, brief as it was, was strong enough to shake the balance of the natural world, and test its synchronicity. Where there is sex, then there is death. They are the dark co-ordinates of one straight line. Grief is death eroticized. And sex is only shuffling off this mortal coil before its time to plummet to the post-coital afterlife.”

“[F]ear of death is fear of life, a cliché amongst scientists, and preachers too. Both know that life and death are inextricably entwined, the double helix of existence. Both want to give life meaning only because it clearly has none, other than to replicate and decompose. Hard truths.”

“Living in the high-rises required a special type of behavior, one that was acquiescent, restrained, even perhaps slightly mad. A psychotic would have a ball here […]. Vandalism had plagued these slab and tower blocks since their inception. Every torn-out piece of telephone equipment, every handle wrenched off a fire safety door, every kicked-in electricity meter represented a stand against de-cerebration.”