Michael’s Reviews > Collected Fictions > Status Update

“Tennyson said that if we could but understand a single flower we might know who we are and what the world is. Perhaps he was trying to say that there is nothing, however humble, that does not imply the history of the world and its infinite concatenation of causes and effects.”

“There was the cat, asleep. He ordered a cup of coffee, slowly spooned sugar into it, tasted it (a pleasure [ ] forbidden him in the clinic) and thought, while he stroked the cat’s black fur, that this contact was illusory, that he and the cat were separated as though by a pane of glass, because man lives in time, in successiveness, while the magical animal lives in the present, in the eternity of the instant.”

“At that same period there was hope that the fundamental mysteries of mankind—the origin of the Library and of time—might be revealed. In all likelihood those profound mysteries can indeed be explained in words; if the language of the philosophers is not sufficient, then the multiform Library must have produced the extraordinary language that is required, together with the words and grammar of that language.”