It’s—it’s frustrating. I would rather see what happens then. Sometimes I get so curious. About the history we’ll never know. The future after our death. And all the rest of it. Do you know what I mean?”

remembered or conveyed in any way to others—the stream of one’s consciousness never shared except in thimblefuls, even by the most prolific mathematician, the most diligent diarist.

Habits were such lies, such lies, lulling them into the feeling that there was something that was lasting, when really nothing lasted.

history was a wave that moved through time slightly faster than an individual life did,

But just when people most need help is when their isolation is the most extreme.

And of all the humans who ever existed and ever will exist, these people are the only ones alive at the same time we are. Just being alive at the same time, that makes us all contemporaries. And your contemporaries are the only ones who are ever going to really understand you.”

“It’s like a rainbow. Without an observer at a twenty-three-degree angle to the light reflecting off a cloud of spherical droplets, there is no rainbow. The whole universe is like that. Our spirits stand at a twenty-three-degree angle to the universe. There is some new thing created at the contact of photon and retina, some space created between

chromotropics

Spencer had offered an offhand explanation, over beer one night on the Odessa corniche—in an expanding universe, Spencer had said, order was not really order, but merely the difference between the actual entropy exhibited and the maximum entropy possible. This difference was what humans perceived as order.