“I still want a war. A great power has to act. We were struck hard. We need to retake the future. The force of will, the seer visceral need. We can’t let others shape our world, our minds. All they have are old dead despotic traditions. We have a living history and I thought I would be in the middle of it. But in those rooms, with those men, it was all priorities, statistics, evaluations, rationalizations”
(page 30)
(…)
The first sentence was, “A government is a criminal enterprise”.
The last sentence was, “In future years, of course, men and women, in cubicles, wearing headphones, will be listening to secret tapes of the administration’s crimes while others study electronic records on computer screens and still others look at salvaged videotapes of caged men being subjected to severe physical pain and finally others, still others, behind closed doors, ask pointed questions of flesh-ad-blood individuals.”
(page 33)
(…)
“Ask yourself this question. Do we have to be human forever? Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field”
(…)
The foolishness, the vanity of the intellectual. The blind vanity, the worship of power.
(pages 52,53)
“Consciousness accumulates. It begins to reflect upon itself. Something about this feels almost mathematical to me. There’s almost some law of mathematics or physics that we haven’t quite hit upon, where the mind transcends all direction inward. The omega point.”, he said. ”Whatever the intended meaning of this term, if it has a meaning, it it’s not a case of language that’s struggling toward some idea outside our experience.”
“What idea’”
“What idea. Paroxysm. Either a sublime transformation of mind and soul or some worldly convulsion. We want it to happen”
“You think we want it to happen”
“We want it to happen. Some paroxysm
He liked this word. We let it hang there.
(pages 72,73)
(…)
It seemed so much dead echo now. Point omega, a million years away. The point omega has narrowed, here and now, to the point of a knife as it enters a body. All the man’s grand themes funneled down to local grief, one body, out there somewhere, or not.
(…)
“I want to die after a long traditional illness. What about you?
(All plots tend to move deathwards. This is the nature of plots.)
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