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A vivid, honest, and beautiful coming-of-age story that captures the horrors as well as the unbounded wonders of being a child, and a reckoning with the inevitability of change and maturity. It's also a rather curious window into 1980s small-town England, bringing the Falkland war or Thatcher into reality but only through the narrow understanding of a 13-year old. This is a great work of creativity and embodiment, fu

And then I argued with myself.—You can't say
everything. What will he think of you? Besides, to speak
everything is to exhaust mystery.

Types of cognitive models -- descriptive, process, causal framework.

- Simplex
- Simulated annealing
- Genetic algorithms

Limitations and implications of aggregating data.

The River in the Boat is, quite possibly, the best chapter ever written. Nothing short of magic.

"Ammu saw that he saw. She looked away. He did too. History's fiends returned to claim them. To re-wrap them in its old, scarred pelt and drag them back to where they really lived. Where the Love Laws lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much."

"In that brief moment, Velutha looked up and saw things that he hadn't seen before. Things that had been out of bounds so far, obscured by history's blinkers. Simple things. For instance, he saw that Rahel's mother was a woman."

"Centuries telescoped into one evanescent moment."

"Maybe you'll be a midget," Sophie Mol suggested. "That's taller than a dwarf and shorter than a... Human Being."
The silence was unsure of this compromise.

"Things can change in a day."

"There are things you can't do—like writing letters to a part of yourself. To your feet or hair. Or heart."

"[She was] surprised that her child seemed to have a sub-world that excluded her entirely. A tactile world of smiles and laughter that she, her mother, had no part in. Ammu recognized vaguely that her thoughts were shot with a delicate, purple tinge of envy. She didn't allow herself to consider who it was that she envied. The man or her own child. Or just their world of hooked fingers and sudden smiles."

"Anything's possible in Human Nature," Chacko said in his Reading Aloud voice. Talking to the darkness now, suddenly insensitive to his little fountain-haired niece. "Love. Madness. Hope. Infinite joy."

Of the four things that were Possible in Human Nature, Rahel thought that Infinnate Joy sounded the saddest. Perhaps because of the way Chacko said it.

"Some things come with their own punishments. Like bedrooms with built-in cupboards. They would all learn more about punishments soon. That they came in different sizes. That some were so big they were like cupboards with built-in bedrooms. You could spend your whole life in them, wandering through dark shelving."

Plotinian Forms are a captivating, if tricky to grasp, perspective in which Being emerges from the act of (recursive) self-contemplation.

"If Nature does design these organisms, it must do so by an art which is immediate."

"My contemplation engenders the product of my contemplation... I contemplate, and the lines of bodies come into existence, as if they were issuing forth from me."

What would Darwin think?

"When you hurt people, they begin to love you less. That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less."

Following the molestation of Estha (orangedrink lemon drink), Roy presses us to consider the double-sided coin of harshness and (white egg white) honesty.

“Dad-a-chum? Dum-a-chum? Ded-a-chek? Did-a-chick?”

"When you hurt people, they begin to love you less. That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less."

Contrast prev. quote with BCS' "Objects," in particular:
One notices, if one will trust one's eyes
The shadow cast by language upon truth.
- W. H. Auden

"After all, our consciousness is only an inner sensation: it requires us to split into two, for there must be a temporal distance—however infinitesimal—between that which sees and that which is seen. Consciousness is thus more of a memory than a presence. It is inexorably tangled up in time. All it can give us is images, which it tries to fixate by expressing them in language."

Just a thought: how is it that we are sculpted, so as to inhabit the material world? Is it—as the Christians would have it—divine providence which has dictated the types of souls which ; and why, then, into such inane and limiting "filth"? Or—as Dennett might have it—is it that very metaphysical "filth" which constitutes our being and gives rise to God? To shift the dialect—is Rilke justified in his portrait of God?

"When one of his students asked his permission to have a portrait made of him, he refused outright. He gave the following explanation: 'Isn't it enough that I have to bear this image with which Nature has covered us? Must I also consent to leaving behind me an image of that image—this one even longer-lasting—as if it were an image of something worth seeing?'"

"Memory was that woman on the train. Insane in the way she sifted through dark things in a closet and emerged with the most unlikely ones—a fleeting look, a feeling. The smell of smoke. A windscreen wiper. A mother's marble eyes. Quite sane in the way she left huge tracts of darkness veiled. Unremembered."

The real secret was that communism crept into Kerala insidiously. As a reformist movement that never overtly questioned the traditional values of a caste-ridden, extremely traditional community. The Marxists worked from within the communal divides, never challenging them, never appearing not to. They offered a cocktail revolution. A heady mix of Eastern Marxism and orthodox Hinduism, spiked with a shot of democracy.

"We're Prisoners of War," Chacko said. "Our dreams have been doctored. We belong nowhere. We sail unanchored on troubled seas. We may never be allowed ashore. Our sorrows will never be sad enough. Our joys never happy enough. Our dreams never big enough. Our lives never important enough. To matter."

"For the Yukuna, the dances of the Kai-ya-ree tell the story of life, expressing all that they believe about the origins and evolution of the natural world. In taking on the images of supernatural beings and wild creatures, in balancing the forces of good and evil, the dancers ensure the health and fertility not only of their people but of the earth itself."