Chiang, Ted

Exhalation

The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate

p.3 – “The story I have to tell is truly a strange one, and were the entirety to be tattooed at the corner of one’s eye, the marvel of its presentation would not exceed that of the events recounted, for it is a warning to those who would be warned and a lesson to those who would learn.”
p.14 – “This surprised me. ‘The future is fixed, then? As unchangeable as the past?’ ‘It is said that repentance and atonement erase the past.’ ‘I have heard that, too, but I have not found it to be true.’ "
p.24 – “So every afternoon for many days, Raniya met Hassan at her rented house and instructed him in the art of love, and in doing so she demonstrated that, as is often said, women are Allah’s most wondrous creation. She told him, ‘The pleasure you give is returned in the pleasure you receive,’ and inwardly she smiled as she thought of how true her words really were. Before long, he gained the expertise she remembered, and she took greater enjoyment in it tha she has as a young woman.”
p.27 – " ‘And that you cannot avoid the ordeals that are assigned to you. What Allah gives you, you must accept.’ ‘I remind myself of that every day of my life.’ ‘Then it is my honor to assist you in whatever way I can,’ he said.”
p.29 – “Over the years I became wealthy, but I never remarried. Some of the men I did business with tried to match me with a sister or a daughter, telling me that the love of a woman can make you forget your pains. Perhaps they are right, but it cannot make you forget the pain you caused another. Whenever I imagined myself marrying another woman, I remembered the look of hurt in Najya’s eyes when I last saw her, and my heart was closed to others.”
pp.29-30 – “Perhaps I could rescue Najya and bring her back with me to the Baghdad of my own day. I knew it was foolhardy; men of experience say, ‘Four things do not come back: the spoken word, the sped arrow, the past life, and the neglected opportunity,’ and I understood the truth of those words better than most. And yet I dared to hope that Allah had judged my twenty years of repentance sufficient and was now granting me a chance to regain what I had lost.”
p.31 – “Bashaarat smiled. ‘Coincidence and intention are two sides of a tapestry, my lord. You may find one more agreeable to look at, but you cannot say one is true and the other is false.’ "
p.35 – “She left, and I wandered the streets for hours, crying tears of release. All the while I thought on the truth of Bashaarat’s words: past and future are the same, and we cannot change either, only know them more fully. My journey to the past had changed nothing, but what I had learned had changed everything, and I understood that it could not have been otherwise. If our lives are tales that Allah tells, then we are the audience as well as the players, and it is by living these tales that we receive their lessons.”
p.36 – “Nothing erases the past. There is repentance, there is atonement, and there is forgiveness. That is all, but that is enough.”

Exhalation

pp.37-38 – “But in the normal course of life, our need for air is far from our thoughts, and indeed many would say that satisfying that need is the least important part of going to the filling stations. For the filling stations are the primary venue for social conversation, the places from which we draw emotional sustenance as well as physical.”
p.41 – “More than that, how wonderful would it be to decipher the very oldest of a deceased person’s memories, ones that he himself had forgotten? None of us can remember much more than a hundred years in the past, and written records– accounts that we ourselves inscribed but have scant memory of doing so– extend only a few hundred years before that. How many years did we live before the beginning of written history? Where did we come from? It is the promise of finding the answers within our own brains that makes the inscription hypothesis so seductive.”
p.48 – “Watching the oscillations of these flakes of gold, I saw that air does not, as we had always assumed, simply provide power to the engine that realizes our thoughts. Air is in fact the very medium of our thoughts. All that we are is a pattern of air flow. My memories were inscribed, not as grooves on foil or even teh position of switches, but as persistent currents of argon.”
p.50 – “This is why, at the beginning of this engraving, I said that air is not the source of life. Air can neither be created nor destroyed; the total amount of air int eh universe remains constant, and if air were all that we needed to live, we would never die. But in truth the source of life is a difference in air pressure, the flow of air from spaces where it is thick to those where it is thin.”
p.53 – “I do not share their optimism; I believe that the process of equalization is inexorable. Eventually, all the air in our universe will be evenly distributed, no denser or more rarefied in one spot than in any other, unable to drive a piston, turn a rotor, or flip a leaf of gold foil. It will be the end of pressure, the end of motive power, the end of thought. The universe will have reached perfect equilibrium.”
p.53 – “However, I maintain that we have indeed learned something important about the past. The universe began as an enormous breath being held. Who knows why, but whatever the reason, I am glad that it did, because I owe my existence to that fact. All my desires and ruminations are not more and no less than eddy currents generated by the gradual exhalation of our universe. And until this great exhalation is finished, by thoughts live on.”
p.54 – “At some point our limbs will cease moving altogether. I cannot be certain of the precise sequence of events near the end, but I imagine a scenario in which our thoughts will continue to operate, so that we remain conscious but frozen, immobile as statues. Perhaps we’ll be able to speak for a while longer, because our voice boxes operate on a smaller pressure differential than our limbs, but without the ability to visit a filling station, our every utterance will reduce the amount of air left for thought and bring us closer to the moment when our thoughts cease altogether. Will it be preferable to remain mute to prolong our ability to think, or to talk until the very end? I don’t know.”
p.55 – “It cheers me to imagine that the air that once powered me could power others, to believe that the breath that enables me to engrave these words could one day flow through someone else’s body. I do not delude myself into thinking that this would be a way for me to live again, because I am not that air, I am the pattern that is assumed, temporarily.”
p.56 – “I will assume that one day your thoughts too will cease, although I cannot fathom how far in the future that might be. Your lives will end just as ours did, just as everyone’s must. No matter how long it takes, eventually equilibrium will be reached.”
p.57 – “Though I am long dead as you read this, explorer, I offer to you a valediction. Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so. I feel I have the right to tell you this because, as I am inscribing these words, I am doing the same.”

What’s Expected of Us

p.59 – “Eventually, a third of those who play with a Predictor must be hospitalized because they won’t feed themselves. The end state is akinetic mutism, a kind of waking coma.”
p.60 – “My message to you is this: Pretend that you have free will. It’s essential that you behave as if your decisions matter, even though you know they don’t. Teh reality isn’t important; what’s important is your belief, and believing the lie is the only way to avoid a waking coma. Civilization now depends on self-deception. Perhaps it always has.”

The Lifecycle of Software Objects

p.66 – “As a girl she dreamed of following Fossey and Goodall to Africa; by the time she got out of grad school, there were so few apes left that her best option was to work in a zoo; now she’s looking at a job as a trainer of virtual pets. In her career trajectory you can see the diminution of the natural world, writ small.
pp.75-76 – “Blue Gamma’s mascots are the oldest Neuroblast digients running, and management originally hoped they would provide the test team with a preview of digient behavior before customers encountered it. In practice, it hasn’t worked out that way; it’s impossible to predict how digients raised in a thousand different settings will turn out. In a very real sense, each digient owner is exploring new territory, and they turn to one another for help. Online forums for digient owners spring up, filled with anecdotes and discussions, advice sought and given.”
p.86 – “Marco thinks about that, and Derek’s delighted to see that the digient’s face actually suggests incredulity. _‘Outsice world dumb,’ the digient announces.”
p.92 – “Her eyes still tear up when she thinks about the last time she saw her apes, wishing that she could explain to them why they wouldn’t see her again, hoping that ehy could adapt to their new homes. When she decided to retrain for the software industry, she was glad that she’d never have to face another such farewell in her new line of work. Now here she is, against all expectation, confronted with a strangely reminiscent situation.”
pp.93-94 – " ‘People always say that we’re evolved to want babies, and I used to think that was a bunch of crap, but not anymore,’ Robyn’s facial expression is one of transport; she’s no longer speaking to Ana exactly. ‘Cats, dogs, digients, they’re all just substitutes for what we’re supposed to be caring for. Eventually you start to understand what a baby means, what it really means, and everything changes. And then you realize that all the feelings you had before weren’t–’ Robyn stops herself. ‘I mean, for me, it just put things in perspective.’ "
p.94 – “The customers who kept their digients running formed a Neuroblast user group to keep in touch; it’s a smaller community than before, but the members are more active and engaged, and their efforts are bearing fruit.”
p.108 – “The time he spends with Ana is a relief, a chance for him to enjoy the digients’ company unapologetically. When he’s angry he thinks it’s Wendy’s fault for driving him away, but when he’s calm he realizes that’s unfair.”
p.109 – “Data Earth has long been a fixture in the universe of virtual worlds, resistant to growth spurts or sharp downturns, but now its topography begins to erode; one by one, its virtual landmasses disappear like real islands, vanishing beneath a rising tide of consumer indifference.”
pp.113-114 – " ‘I just want to make sure we’re clear about our motivations. It’d be terrific if our digients learned practical skills, but we shouldn’t think of them as failures if they don’t. Maybe Jax can make money, but Jax isn’t for making money. he’s not like the Draytas, or the weedbots. Whatever puzzles he might solve or work he might do, those aren’t the reason I’m raising him.’ "
p.121 – “Whatever he decides to do, he’ll have to do it without Wendy; they’ve decided to file for divorce. The reasons are complicated, of course, but one thing is clear: raising a pair of digients is not what Wendy wants from life, and if Derek wants a partner in this endeavor, he’ll have to find someone else. Their marriage counselor has explained that the problem isn’t the digients per se, it’s the fact that Derek and Wendy can’t find a way to accommodate their having different interests. Derek know the counselor’s right, but surely having common interests would have helped.”
p.129 – “The problem is that genomic engines are old news. Developers are drawn to new, exciting projects, and right now that means working on neural interfaces or nonomedical software. There are scores of genomic engines languishing in various states of incompletion on the open-source repositories, all in need of volunteer programmers, and the prospect of porting the dozen-year-old Neuroblast engine to a new platform may be the least exciting of them all. Only a handful of students is contributing to the Neuroblast port, and considering how little time they’re able to devote, the Real Space platform will itself be obsolete before the port is finished.”
p.137 – “The comment catches Ana off guard. None of the digients has access to the user-group forums, so Jax must have come up with the idea on his own. ‘Do you really want that?’ she asks. ‘Not really. Want stay awake, know what happening. But sometimes get frustrated.’ Then he asks, ‘You sometimes wish you don’t have take care me?’ She makes sure Jax is looking her in the face before she replies. ‘My life might be simpler if I didn’t have you to take care of, but it wouldn’t be as happy. I love you, Jax.’ ‘Love you too.’ "
p.145 – " ‘You could call it that,’ says Chase. ‘But try looking at it another way: our ideas of what constitutes healthy sex have always broadened over time. People used to think homosexuality, BDSM, and polyamory were all symptoms of psychological problems, but there’s nothing intrinsic about those activities that’s incompatible with a loving relationship. The problem was having one’s desires stigmatized by society. We believe that in time, digient sex will likewise be accepted as a valid expression of sexuality. But that requires being open and honest about it, and not pretending that a digient is a human.’ "
p.149 – “At Blue Gamma they’d chosen not to put that kind of physical self-protectiveness into the digients– it didn’t makes sense for their product– but what does physical intimacy mean if there aren’t those barriers to overcome? She doesn’t doubt that it’s possible to give a digient an arousal response close enough to human that both parties’ mirror neurons would kick in. But could Binary Desire teach a digient about the vulnerability that came with being naked, and what you were telling someone with your willingness to be naked in their presence?”
p.151 – " ‘I’m not saying we should accept Binary Desire’s offer. But I think what we need to ask ourselves is, If we make the digients sexual, would that encourage other people to love them in a way that’s good for the digients?’ "
p.154 – " ‘When I corporation, I free make own mistakes,’ says Marco. ‘That whole point.’ "
pp.154-155 – " ‘Yes, you’re right. When you’re a corporation, you’ll be free to do thing that I think are mistakes.’ ‘Good,’ says Marco, satisfied. ‘When you decide I ready, it not because I agree you. I can be ready event if I not agree you.’ ‘That’s right. But please, tell me you don’t want to edit your own reward map.’ ‘No, I know dangerous. Might make mistake that stop self from fixing mistake.’ He’s relieved. ‘Thank you.’ ‘But let Binary Desire edit my reward map, that not dangerous.’ ‘No, it’s not dangerous, but it’s still a bad idea.’ ‘I not agree.’ ‘What? I don’t think you understand what they want to do.’ Marco gives him a look of frustration. ‘I do. They make me like what they want me like, even if I not like it now.’ Derek realizes Marco does understand. ‘And you don’t think that’s wrong?’ ‘Why wrong? All things I like now, I like because Blue Gamma made me like. That not wrong.’ ‘No, but that was different.’ He thinks for a moment to explain why. ‘Blue Gamma made you like food, but they didn’t decide what specific kind of food you had to like.’ ‘So what? Not very different.’ ‘It is different.’ ‘Agree wrong if they edit digients not want be edited. But if digient agree before be edited, then not wrong.’ Derek feels himself growing exasperated. ‘So do you want to be a corporation and make your own decisions, or do you want someone else to make your decisions? Which one is it?’ Marco thinks about that. ‘Maybe I try both. One copy me become corporation, second copy me work for Binary Desire.’ ‘You don’t mind having copies made of you?’ ‘Polo copy of me. That not wrong.’ "
p.155 – “On the one hand Marco made some good arguments, but on the other Derek remembers his college years well enough to know that skill at debate isn’t the same as maturity.”
p.160 – " ‘Not so much bored as aware of his limitations. I could see that that neuroblast genome was teh wrong approach. Sure Fitz was smart, but it would take forever before he could do any useful work. I’ve got to hand it to you for sticking with Jax for so long. What you’ve achieved is impressive.’ He makes it sound like she’s built the world’s largest toothpick sculpture.”
p.161 – “Brauer isn’t convinced, though. ‘Talk about a risky investment. You’re showing us a handful of teenagers and asking us to pay for their education in the hopes that when they’re adults, they’ll found a nation that will produce geniuses. Pardon me if I think there are better ways we could spend our money.’ "
p.163 – “She wants to tell them that Blue Gamma was more right than it knew: experience isn’t merely the best teacher; it’s the only teacher. If she’s learned anything raising Jax, it’s that there are no shortcuts; if you want to create the common sense that comes from twenty years of being in the world, you need to devote twenty years to the task. You can’t assemble an equivalent collection of heuristics in less time; experience is algorithmically incompressible.”
pp.164-165 – “Her objection is to Polytope’s strategy for getting people to spend that time. Blue Gamma’s strategy had been to make the digients lovable, while Polytope is starting with unlovable digients and using pharmaceuticals to make people love them. It seems clear to her that Blue Gamma’s approach was the right one, not just more ethical but more effective.”
p.167 – “Marco seems entirely comfortable thinking of himself as a digient rather than a human. It’s possible he doesn’t fully appreciate the consequences of what he’s suggesting, but Derek can’t shake the feeling that Marco in fact understands his own nature better than Derek does. Marco and Polo aren’t human, and maybe thinking of them as if they were is a mistake, forcing them to conform to his expectations instead of letting them be themselves. Is it more respectful to treat him like a human being, or to accept that he isn’t one?”
pp.171-172 – “She imagines Jax maturing over the years, both in Real Space and in the real world. Imagines him incorporated, a legal person, employed and earning a living. Imagines him as a participant in the digient subculture, a community with enough monty and skills to port itself to new platforms when the need arises. Imagines him accepted by a generation of humans who have grown up with digients and view them as potential relationship partners in a way that members of her generation will never be able to. Imagines him loving and being being loved, arguing and compromising. Imagines him making sacrifices, some hard and some made easy because they’re for a person he truly cares about.”

Dacey’s Patent Automatic Nanny

p.174 – “Given his mathematical inclination, he viewed a child’s emotional state as an example of a system in unstable equilibrium.”
pp.174-175 – “It appears not to have occurred to him that Lionel might behave differently with the nannies than with Dacey himself; instead he concluded that the nannies were too temperamental to follow his guidelines.”
p.178 – “To demonstrate that the Automatic Nanny was safe, Dacey boldly announced that he would entrust his next child to the machine’s care. If he had successfully followed through with this, he might have restored public confidence in the machine, but Dacey never got the chance because of his habit of telling prospective wives of his plans for their offspring. The inventor framed his proposal as an invitation to partake in a grand scientific undertaking and was baffled that none of the women he courted found this an appealing prospect.”

The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling

p.186 – “She’s smart and dedicated to her job at an art museum when she could be earning more money elsewhere, and I’ve always been proud of her accomplishments. But there is still the past me who would have been appalled to see his daughter lose her ability to spell, and I can’t deny that I am continuous with him.”
p.188 – “His name was Moseby, and he thanked everyone who had worked on the huts. He tried to help, but it quickly became clear that he didn’t know how to do anything, so eventually he just sat in the shade of a locust-bean tree and wiped his head with a piece of cloth.”
pp.190-191 – “When the public interest is involved, finding out what actually happened is important; justice is an essential part of the social contract, and you can’t have justice until you know the truth.”
p.192 – “Here was the line at which the pursuit of truth ceased to be an intrinsic good. When the only persons affected have a personal relationship with each other, other priorities are often more important, and a forensic pursuit of the truth could be harmful. Did it really matter whose idea it was to take the vacation that turned out so disastrously?”
p.193 – " ‘Making information more accessible is an intrinsic good,’ she said. ‘Ubiquitous video has revolutionized law enforcement. Businesses become more effective when they adopt good record-keeping practices. The same thing happens to us as individuals when our memories become more accurate: we get better, not just at doing our jobs, but at living our lives.’ "
p.194 – “Anyone who has wasted hours surfing the Internet knows that technology can encourage bad habits.”
p.196 – “The sounds a person made while speaking were as smooth and unbroken as the hide of a goat’s leg, but the words were like the bones underneath the meat, and the space between them was the joint where you’d cut if you wanted to separate it into pieces. By leaving spaces when he wrote, Moseby was making visible the bones in what he said.”
p.197 – “But having a perfect memory wasn’t the blessing one might imagine it to be. Reading a passage of text evoked so many images in Shereshevskii’s mind that he often couldn’t focus on what it actually said, and his awareness of innumerable specific examples made it difficult for him to understand abstract concepts. At times, he tried to deliberately forget things. He wrote down numbers he no longer wanted to remember on slips of paper and then burned them, a kind of slack-and-burn approach to clearing out the undergrowth of his mind, but to no avail.”
p.198 – “What I feared was that Remem would make it impossible for this feedback loop to get rolling. By fixing every detail of an insult in indelible video, it could prevent the softening that’s needed for forgiveness to begin.”
pp.198-199 – “If someone’s marriage was built on– as ironic as it might sound– a cornerstone of forgetfulness, what right did Whetstone have to shatter that? The issue wasn’t confined to marriages; all sorts of relationships rely on forgiving and forgetting. My daughter, Nicole, has always been strong-willed; rambunctious when she was a child, openly defiant as an adolescent. She and I had many furious arguments during her teen years, arguments that we have mostly been able to put behind us, and now our relationship is pretty good. If we’d had Remem, would we still be speaking to each other?”
pp.201-202 – “The paper version of the story was curiously disappointing. Jijingi remembered that when he had first learned about writing, he’d imagined it would enable him to see a storytelling performance as vividly as if he were there. But writing didn’t do that. When Kokwa told the story, he didn’t merely use words; he used the sound of his voice, the movement of his hands, the light in his eyes. He told you the story with his whole body, and you understood it the same way. None of that was captured on paper; only the bare words could be written down. And reading just the words gave you only a hint of the experience of listening to Kokwa himself, as if one were licking the pot in which okra had been cooked instead of eating the okra itself.”
pp.202-203 – " ‘I write the words down so I do not forget what I want to say when I give the sermon.’ ‘How could you forget what you want to say? You and I are speaking right now, and neither of us needs paper to do so.’ ‘A sermon is different from conversation.’ Moseby paused to consider. ‘I want to be sure I give my sermons as well as possible. I won’t forget what I want to say, but I might forget the best way to say it. If I write it down, I don’t have to worry. But writing the words down does more than help me remember. It helps me think.’ "
p.205 – “As he practiced his writing, Jijingi came to understand what Moseby had meant: writing was not just a way to record what someone said; it could help you decide what you would say before you said it. And words were not just the pieces of speaking; they were the pieces of thinking. When you wrote them down, you could grasp your thoughts like bricks in your hands and push them into different arrangements. Writing let you look at your thoughts in a way you couldn’t if you were just talking, and having seen them, you could improve them, make them stronger and more elaborate.”
p.206 – “Just as there’s a feedback loop in softening harsh memories, there’s also one at work in the romanticization of childhood memories, and disrupting that process will have consequences.”
p.207 – “Regarding the role of truth in autobiography, the critic Roy Pascal wrote, ‘On the one side are the truths of fact, on the other the truth of the writer’s feeling, and where the two coincide cannot be decided by any outside authority in advance.’ "
p.208 – “People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we’ve lived; they’re the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments. Which is why, even when we’ve experienced the same events as other individuals, we never constructed identical narratives: the criteria used for selecting moments were different for each of us, and a reflection of our personalities. Each of us noticed the details that caught our attention and remembered what was important to us, and the narratives we built shaped our personalities in turn.”
p.208-209 – “But, I wondered, if everyone remembered everything, would our differences get shaved away? What would happen to our sense of self? It seemed to me that a perfect memory couldn’t be a narrative andy more than unedited security-cam footage could be a feature film.”
p.217 – “I remembered that argument as being a turning point for me. I had imagined a narrative of redemption and self-improvement in which I was the heroic single father, rising to meet the challenge. But the reality was… what? How much of what had happened since then could I take credit for?”
p.226 – “But more than that, it would move the Tiv down the path of regarding paper as the source of truth; it would be another stream in which the old ways were washing away, and he could see no benefit in it.”
pp.226-227 – “The idea that accounts of the past shouldn’t change is a product of literate cultures’ reverence for the written word. Anthropologists will tell you that oral cultures understand the past differently; for them, their histories don’t need to be accurate so much as they need to validate the community’s understanding of itself. So it wouldn’t be correct to say that their histories are unreliable; their histories do what they need to do.”
p.227 – “It would be easy for me to assert that literate cultures are better off than oral ones, but my bias should be obvious, since I’m writing these words rather than speaking them to you. Instead I will say that it’s easier for me to appreciate the benefits of literacy and harder to recognize everything it has cost us. Literacy encourages a culture to place more value on documentation and less on subjective experience, and overall I think the positives outweigh the negatives. Written records are vulnerable to every kind of error, and their interpretation is subject to change, but at least the words on the page remain fixed, and there is real merit in that.”
p.229 – “Digital memory will not stop us from telling stories about ourselves. As I said earlier, we are made of stories, and nothing can change that. What digital memory will do is change those stories from fabulations that emphasize our best acts and elide our worst, into ones that– I hope– acknowledge our fallibility and make us less judgmental about the fallibility of others.”

The Great Silence

p.231 – “One proposed solution to the Fermi Paradox is that intelligent species actively try to conceal their presence, to avoid being targeted by hostile invaders.”
p.235 – “So the extinction of my species doesn’t just mean the loss of a group of birds. It’s also the disappearance of our language, our rituals, our traditions. It’s the silencing of our voice.”
p.236 – “The message is this: You be good. I love you.”

Omphalos

p.239 – “The past has left its traces on the world, and we only have to know how to read them.”
p.241 – “I asked them to imagine what it would be like if we lived in a world where, no matter how deeply we dug, we kept finding traces of an earlier era of the world. I asked them to imagine being confronted with proof of a past extending so far back that the number lost all meaning: a hundred thousand years, a million years. Then I asked, wouldn’t they feel lost, like a castaway adrift on an ocean of time? The only sane response would be despair.”
p.245 – “I found this very heartening to hear, because many people are so quick to classify events as miraculous that it devalues the word. It’s that type of thinking that leads people to look to the mummies for a cure when medicine can’t provide one, and even if the Church no longer makes claims about the healing power of relics, it doesn’t do enough to dissuade the desperate.”
p.249 – “Guide me toward the proper course of action, Lord. I recognize that my desire to seek answers, while necessary in scientific endeavors, is not always welcome outside of it. Help me to know when it’s appropriate to keep looking and when it’s better to ignore my doubts. Let me always be inquisitive, but never be suspicious.”
p.251 – “Is it wrong of me to question whether the construction of cathedrals is, as we approach the twenty-first century, the best use of countless millions of dollars and the effort of generations of people? I agree that a project lasting longer than a human life span provides its participants with aspirations beyond the temporal. I even understand the motivation for carving a cathedral out of the Earth’s substrate, to create a testament to both human and divine architecture. But for me, science is the true modern cathedral, and edifice of knowledge every bit as majestic as anything made of stone. If fulfills all the goals that Yosemeti Cathedral does and more, and I wish more people appreciated that.”
p.254 – “It’s the essential nature of stars that they have so few characteristics; they’re the backdrop against which the Earth stands out, reminding us of how special we are. Choosing to study them has always felt a bit like choosing to taste the plate that food is served on.”
p.255 – “I told Wilhelmina I would have to speak to her parents about what she had done. She seemed unconcerned. ‘I won’t apologize for bringing people closer to God. I know I’ve broken rules in doing so, but it’s the rules that need to be changed, not my behavior.’ "
p.256 – “I was preparing to bring a criminal to justice, and instead I have to inform parents about their child’s misbehavior. She is neither child nor criminal, but I’m uncertain as to what she is. had she been a criminal, I would know better where I stand. Instead I’m just perplexed. Help me to understand other people’s position’s, Lord, even when I don’t share them. At the same time, grant me the strength to not ignore wrongdoing simply because it is committed by someone who is well intentioned. let me be compassionate while remaining true to my convictions.”
p.257 – “I told Dr. McCullough that it wasn’t my intention to pry, but the theft of property might legitimately be a concern of the museum’s board of trustee’s, and I needed a more detailed explanation in order to be comfortable with not informing them. I asked him whether, if our positions were reversed, he would accept an explanation like the one he had given me. He glared at me so severely that if I’d been a subordinate of his, I might have left the matter alone. I wasn’t, though, so it seemed like we were at an impasse.”
p.262 – “I told him what I surmised: that the only thing that had made his son’s death bearable was the knowledge that it was part of a greater plan. But if humanity is not in fact the focus of your attention, Lord, then there is no such plan, and his son’s death was meaningless.”
p.263 – “I told him that science can be a salve to our wounds, but that shouldn’t be the only reason we pursue it. i said we have a duty to search for the truth.”
p.264 – “You asked whether the Church oughtn’t be disturbed by the discovery just as much as the secular scientific community, and to that I would say yes, they ought to be. But the Church as an institution has always been able to derive strength from the evidence when it’s useful and ignore it when it’s not.”
p.265 – “I understand, Rosemary, if this doesn’t disturb you or Alfred the way it does me. I don’t know how most people will react when Lawson’s discovery becomes widely known. Wilhelmina McCullough anticipated that others would respond the way her father did, adn in my case she was correct. I wish this didn’t affect me so deeply. Would that we could choose the things that trouble us, but we can’t.”
p.266 – “While each of us must find our own way forward through this forest of doubt, it is only with the support of others that we’ll be able to do so.”
p.267 – “Why did the primordial humans set about building civilization, if not out of a desire to fulfill divine purpose? Avoiding cold and hunger would motivate them to secure necessities, but why did they advance beyond those? Why did they begin inventing all the art and technology that has made humanity what it is today, if not to carry out your will, Lord?”
p.268 – “Each moment follows inexorably from the previous one and is followed inexorably by the next, links forged in a causal chain.”
p.268 – “I believe the primordial humans made a choice. They found themselves in a world full of possibilities but with no guidance as to what to do. They didn’t do what we would have expected, which is to merely survive; instead, they sought to improve themselves so that they might become masters of their world.”
p.269 – “I’ve devoted my life to studying the wondrous mechanism that is the universe, and doing so has given me a sense of fulfillment. I’ve always assumed that this meant that I was acting in accordance with you will, Lord, and your reason for making me. But if it’s in fact true that you have no purpose in mind for me, then that sense of fulfillment has arisen solely from within myself. What that demonstrates to me is that we as humans are capable of creating meaning for our own lives.”

Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom

p.277 – " ‘Another would be to consider whether anything you learn about the other branch would actually be helpful. It could be that nothing you find out about some other branch will change you situation here in this branch.’ "
p.300 – “A pained look crossed Dana’s face, but she quickly rearranged her expression. ‘We’ve all made mistakes,’ she said. ‘Believe me, I’ve made my share. But there’s a difference between accepting responsibility for our actions and taking the blame for random misfortunes.’ "
p.309 – " ‘It’s not like she’s the worst person I’ve ever met; at least she has the decency to feel bad about what she did. But there are people you can count on for anything, and then there are people you can count on only for some things, and you’ve got to know who’s who.’ "
p.328 – " ‘I’m not sure about the math,’ said Dana. ‘But I definitely think that your choices matter. Every decision you make contributes to your character and shapes the kind of person you are. If you want to be someone who always gives the extra money back to the cashier, the actions you take now affect whether you’ll become that person.’ "
p.329 – " ‘I know it’s not,’ said Dana. ‘But the question was, given that we know about other branches, whether making good choices is worth doing. I think it absolutely is. None of us are saints, but we can all try to be better. Each time you do something generous, you’re shaping yourself into someone who’s more likely to be generous next time, and that matters.’ "
p.336 – " ‘I feel good about what I did, but it’s not like I deserve a medal or anything. Because there are other people for whom being generous comes easily, without a struggle. And it’s easy for them because in the past they made a lot of little decisions to be generous. It was hard for me because I’ve made a lot of little decisions to be selfish in the past. So I’m the reason it’s hard for me to be generous. That’s something I need to fix. Or that I want to fix. I’m not sure if this is the right group for that, but this is the first place I thought of.’ "

Story Notes

p.344 – “Having a real relationship, whether with a lover or a child or a pet, requires that you be willing to balance the other party’s wants and needs with your own.
p.345 – “Finally, let me quote Molly Gloss, who gave a speech in which she talked about the impact that being a mother had on her as a writer. Raising a child, she said, ‘puts you in touch, deeply, inescapably, daily, with some pretty heady issues: What is love and how do we get ours? Why does the world contain evil and pain and loss? How can we discover dignity and tolerance? Who is in power and why? What’s the best way to resolve conflict?’ If we want to give an AI any major responsibilities, then it will need good answers to these questions. That’s not going to happen by loading the works of Kant into a computer’s memory; it’s going to require the equivalent of good parenting.”