Stella Marris

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This is the sequel to The Passenger, and the last book that McCarthy wrote before he passed away in 2023. It’s structured as series of dialogues between Alicia Western and her psychiatrist. While most McCarthy novels have philosophical interludes, this one is pretty much nothing but that. Below are some quotes that stood out to me.

Chapter I

Well. I think maybe it’s harder to lose just one thing than to lose everything. p. 11

Your question suggests too that you think there might be some possibility of orchestrating this inane menagerie. Somehow or other. Each figure of which all but shimmers with reality. I can see the hairs in their nostrils and I can see into their earholes and I can see knots in their shoelaces. You think that you might be able to stage out of this an opera of my troubled mental processes. I wish you luck. p. 16

The factual and the suspect are both subject to the same dimming with time. There is a fusion in the memory of events which is at loose ends where reality is concerned. You wake from a nightmare with a certain relief. But that doesnt erase it. It’s always there. Even after it’s forgotten. The haunting sense that there is something you have not understood will remain long after. p. 21

The more naive your life the more frightening your dreams. Your unconscious will keep trying to wake you. In every sense. Imperilment is bottomless. As long as you are breathing you can always be more scared. p. 22

I guess what I understand is that at the core of the world of the deranged is the realization that there is another world and that they are not a part of it. They see that little is required of their keepers and much of them. pp. 22–23

I think your experience the world is largely a shoring up against the unpleasant truth that the world doesnt know you’re here. And no I’m not sure what that means. I think the more spiritual view seeks grace in anonymity. To be celebrated is to set the table for grief and despair. p. 27

Talking is just recording what you’re thinking. It’s not the thing itself. When I’m talking to you some separate part of my mind is composing what I’m about to say. But it’s not yet in the form of words. So what is it in the form of? There’s certainly no sense of some homunculus whispering to us the words we’re about to say. Aside from raising the spectre of an infinite regress – as in who is whispering to the whisperer – it raises the question of a language of thought. Part of the general puzzle of how we get from the mind to the world. A hundred billion synaptic events clicking away in the dark like blind ladies at their knitting. p. 28

You’re pretty much obliged to reckon that at the last suspiration the dying become not only acceptant of death but dedicated to it. That there must be some epiphany that makes it possible for even the dullest and most deluded of us to accept not only what is unacceptable but unimaginable. The absolute terminus of the world. Which will not wonder even for the briefest second what might have become of us. p. 29

Chapter II

The spiritual nature of reality has been the principal preoccupation of mankind since forever and it’s not going away anytime soon. The notion that everything is just stuff doesnt seem to do it for us. p. 36

But why some particular arrangement of these notes should have such a profound effect on our emotions is a mystery beyond even the hope of comprehension. Music is not a language. It has no reference to anything other than itself. p. 38

One of the problems is that each memory is the memory of the memory before. You cant remember the occasion of the actual memory. How would you do that? You just remember remembering it. And only the most recent memory at that. p. 39

One of the things I realized was that the universe had been evolving for countless billions of years in total darkness and total silence and that the way that we imagine it is not the way that it was. In the beginning always was nothing. The novae exploding silently. In total darkness. The stars, the passing comets. Everything at best of alleged being. Black fires. Like the fires of hell. Silence. Nothingness. Night. Black suns herding the planets through a universe where the concept of space was meaningless for want of any end to it. For want of any concept to stand it against. And the question once again of the nature of that reality to which there was no witness. All of this until the first living creature possessed of vision agreed to imprint the universe upon its primitive and trembling sensorium and then to touch it with color and movement and memory. It made of me an overnight solipsist and to some extent I am yet. p. 40

But one’s convictions as to the nature of reality must also represent one’s limitations as to the perception of it. p. 48

If a psychosis was just some synapses misfiring why wouldnt you simply get static. But you dont. You get a carefully crafted and fairly articulate world never seen before. Who’s doing this? Who is it who is running around and hooking up the dangling wires in new and unusual ways. Why is he doing it? What is the algorithm he follows? Why do we suspect there is one? p. 51

I kept thinking of the lines: What a piece of work is a man. I couldnt stop crying. p. 59

Chapter III

In his later years Gödel drifted away from mathematics into philosophy. Then he went crazy. p. 65

Mathematics is constantly being questioned. That’s what it’s for. Some good mathematicians have left the discipline. Exceeding even the number who have wound up in the madhouse. p. 66

Cantor, Gauss, Riemann, Euler. Hilbert. Poincaré. Noether. Hypatia. Klein, Minkowski, Turing, von Neumann. Hardly even a partial list. Cauchy, Lie, Dedekind, Brouwer. Boole. Peano. Church is still alive. Hamilton, Laplace, Lagrange. The ancients of course. You look at these names and the work they represent and you realize that the annals of latterday literature and philosophy by comparison are barren beyond description. p. 67

Wittgenstein was fond of saying that nothing can be its own explanation. p. 67

The simplest undertaking is predicated upon a future that has no warrant. p. 71

Chapter IV

And of couse it shouldnt come as a surprise to find that people in rubber rooms have a worldview at odds with that of the people who put them there. p. 91

The world you live in is shored up by a collective of agreements. Is that something you think about? The hope is that the truth of the world somehow lies in the common experience of it. Of course the history of science and mathematics and even philosophy is a good bit at odds with this notion. Innovation and discovery by definition war against the common understanding. One should be wary. pp. 91–92

You dont know what antipsychotics are and you dont know how they work. Or why. All we have finally is the spectacle of tardive dyskinetics feeling their way along the wall. Jerking and drooling and muttering. Of course for those trekking toward the void there are waystations where the news will very suddenly become altogether bleaker. Maybe a sudden chill. There’s data in the world available only to those who have reached a certain level of wretchedness. You dont know what’s down there if you havent been down there. Joy on the other hand hardly even teaches gratitude. A thoughtful silence. p. 92

And it may be a superstition with us that if we will just give up those things we are fond of then the world will not take from us what we truly love. Which of course is a folly. The world knows what you love. pp. 93–94

The injustice over which they are so distraught is irredeemable. And rage is only for what you believe can be fixed. All the rest is grief. At some point they get this. p. 97

The realization was that I was hopelessly in love and had been for some time. That my life had been resolved. While I wasnt looking, so to speak. Not that uncommon. p. 111

A disappointed longing has a legacy of which its fulfillment can only dream. p. 112

Chapter V

People have been afraid of the dark for a long time. The dark in every sense of it. They’ve always attributed a will to the forces of malevolence. Then suddenly in our day war and famine and pestilence are just random events. p. 123

When Wittgenstein convinced Russell that all of mathematics was a tautology Russell gave up mathematics. p. 132

It took pretty much the same path as any doomed enterprise. It would move along a gradual downward slope and then drop precipitously. p. 135

For a long time I’ve suspected that we might be simply incapable of imagining the epochal evils of which we stand rightly accused and I thought it at least a possibility that the structure of reality itself harbors something like the forms of which our sordid history is only a pale reflection. I thought that it was something Plato might have considered but could in no way bring himself to express. I see by your look that you have at last beheld the very incubation of lunacy. p. 150

That there was an ill-contained horror beneath the surface of the world and there was always had been. That at the core of reality lies a deep and eternal demonium. All religions understand this. And it wasnt going away. And that to imagine that the grim eruptions of this century were in any way either singular or exhaustive was simply a folly. p. 152

Chapter VI

I think you can make a good case that all of human sorrow is grounded in injustice. And that sorrow is what is left when rage is expended and found to be impotent. p. 164

Chapter VII

The arrival of language was like the invasion of a parasitic system. Co-opting those areas of the brain that were the least dedicated. The most susceptible to appropriation. p. 174

Gödel never says outright that there is a covenant to which all of mathematics subscribes but you get a clear sense that the hope is there. I know the allure. Some shimmering palimpsest of eternal abidement. p. 180