Great Throughts Treasury

"A man should enjoy things if he can; he should spend his final days in the sun. Mine will be spent by a reading lamp."

"And as with any harsh journey, not everything survived."

"And this one fact seemed to point to other facts and others still: Love frays and humans fail, time passes, eras end."

"A single red bucket dangled from a single spoke like the last fruit of summer, or like autumn's final leaf."

"After the slowing, every action required a little more force than it used to. The physics had changed. Take, for example, the slightly increased drag of a hand on a knife or a finger on a trigger. From then on, we all had a little more time to decide what not to do. And who knows how fast a second-guess can travel? Who has ever measured the exact speed of a regret? But the new gravity was not enough to overcome the pull of certain other forces, more powerful, less known--no law of physics can account for desire."

"And who knows fast a second-guess can travel? Who has ever measured the exact speed of regret?"

"Art thrives in times of uncertainty."

"But doesn't every precious era feel like fiction once it's gone? After a while, certain vestigial sayings are all that remain. Decades after the invention of the automobile, for instance, we continue to warn each other not to 'put the cart before the horse'. So, too, we do still have 'day'dreams and 'night'mares, and the early-morning clock hours are still known colloquially (if increasing mysteriously) as 'the crack of dawn'. Similarly, even as they grew apart, my parents never stopped calling each other 'sweetheart'."

"But I guess it never is what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophes are always different - unimagined, unprepared for, unknown."

"But among the artifacts that probably will not discover never-between objects likely to disintegrate long before anyone gets anywhere, there is a certain piece of sidewalk on a street in California, where once, on a dark late summer almost a year after the start of the downturn, two children knelt on the cold floor. We put fingers into wet cement and wrote the most honest and simple truths we knew: our names, the date and the words: We were here '."

"But I guess every bygone era takes on a shade of myth."

"But in California Most houses were built without roots, leaving us trapped With The light above ground."

"Doesn't every previous era feel like fiction once it's gone?"

"For days afterward, a series of magical thoughts flew through my mind. For instance, it seemed somehow surprising that the hours continued to pass in spite of what I knew. It was almost shocking that time did not, in fact, stop."

"From then on, we all had a little more time to decide what not to do. And who knows how fast a second-guess can travel? Who has ever measured the exact speed of regret?"

"How impossibly clean-cut, with its twin sets of twelve, neat as walnut shells."

"How much sweeter life would be if it all happened in reverse, if, after decades of disappointments, you finally arrived at an age when you had conceded nothing, when everything was possible."

"But the past is long, and the future is short."

"I could no longer remember the way my mother's eyes looked before the slowing. Had they always been so red around the edges? Surely, those pockets of gray beneath her lower lashes were new. She still wasn't sleeping well, but perhaps what I was seeing was just age, a gradual shift that I'd failed to register. I sometimes felt the urge to study recent photographs of her in order to locate the exact point in time when she had come to look so weary."

"Even beauty, in abundance, turns creepy."

"I guess it never is what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophes are always different?unimagined, unprepared for, unknown."

"I had grown into a worrier, a girl on constant guard for catastrophes large and small, for the disappointments I now sensed were hidden all around us right in plain sight."

"I felt an urgency like love."

"I kept quiet, but the knowledge gathered like a storm. I could see the future: My father wasn't coming back. And this one fact seemed to point to other facts and others still: Love frays and humans fail, time passes, eras end."

"I knew everything about the back of that head - the swirl of his hair, the curve of his ear, the straight, sharp line of his jaw. I liked the way he smelled like soap even late in the afternoon."

"I liked the idea, how the past could be preserved, fossilized, in the stars. I wanted to think that somewhere on the other end of time, a hundred light years from then, someone else, some distant future creature, might be looking back at a preserved image of me and my father at that very moment in my bedroom."

"I never knew until then that snow made everything quiet, somehow silencing all the world's noise."

"I should have known by then that it's never the disasters you see coming that finally come to pass; it's the ones you don't expect at all."

"I listened for a while to the reassuring sound of that boy breathing near me. I watched the slight movement of his eyelids as he dreamed. It wasn?t enough just to be near him. I wished I could see what he was dreaming right then. I would have traveled even there with him."

"In late November, the day came to have forty hours."

"It was a rough crossing, the one from childhood to the next life. And as with any other harsh journey, not everything survived."

"I think we lost something else when we lost that crisp rhythm, some general shared belief that we could count on certain things."

"It was that time of life: Talents were rising to the surface, weaknesses were beginning to show through, we were finding out what kinds of people we would be. Some would turn out beautiful, some funny, some shy. Some would be smart, others smarter. The chubby ones would likely always be chubby. The beloved, I sensed, would be beloved for life. And I worried that loneliness might work that way, too. Maybe loneliness was imprinted in my genes, lying dormant for years but now coming into full bloom."

"It is never what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophes are always different - unimagined, unprepared for, unknown."

"It still amazes me how little we actually know. We had rockets, satellites and nanotechnology. We had robotic arms and hands, robots to explore the surface of Mars. Our drones, remotely piloted, voices could be heard five miles away. We could make artificial skin, cloned sheep. We could make a dead heart to pump blood into the body of a stranger. We were making great strides in the realm of love and sadly had medicines to arouse desire and to quell the pain. We carried out all sorts of miracles could make the blind see and the deaf would hear, and doctors were able to remove babies daily to infertile women's uterus. At the time of the slowdown, stem cell researchers were about to cure paralysis: Disabled would definitely go again. Yet still exceeded the unknown to the known. Never got to determine the cause of the slowdown. The reason for our suffering remained a mystery."

"I've become a collector of stories about unlikely returns: the sudden reappearance of the long-lost son, the father found, the lovers reunited after forty years. Once in a while, a letter does fall behind a post office desk and lie there for years before it's finally discovered and delivered to the rightful address. The seemingly brain-dead sometimes wake up and start talking. I'm always on the lookout for proof that what is done can sometimes be undone."

"Later would think that these were the early days when we learned as a species that walked worried about the wrong things: the hole in the ozone layer, the melting of polar ice caps, the West Nile virus, Swine Flu and the killer bees. The real disasters were always different - unimaginable without warning, unknown."

"Love deteriorates, humans fail, were concluded."

"Later, I would come to think of those first days as the time when we learned as a species that we had worried over the wrong things: the hole in the ozone layer, the melting of the ice caps, West Nile and swine flu and killer bees. But I guess it never is what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophes are always different?unimagined, unprepared for, unknown."

"Love frays and humans fail, time passes, eras end."

"Later, I thought about those early days when we learned as a species that we had worried about the wrong things: the hole in the ozone layer, the disappearance of the polar ice caps, swine flu and the Nile, the bees? killer. Although I suppose what worries us is never just going to end. The real catastrophes are always different, unimaginable, unexpected and unknown."

"Maybe it had begun to happen before the slowing, but it was only afterward that I realized it: My friendships were disintegrating. Things were coming apart. It was a rough crossing, the one from childhood to the next life. And as with any other harsh journey, not everything survived."

"Months later, Michaela's mother would spread a star chart before us and explain to me that the slowing had shifted everyone's astrological signs. Fortunes had changed. Personalities had rearranged. The unlucky had turned lucky. The lucky had turned less so. Our fates, so long ago written in the stars, had been rewritten in a day."

"Maybe loneliness was imprinted in my genes, lying dormant for years but now coming into full bloom."

"My grandfather liked any story in which the unlikely turned out to be true."

"Of all the strange phenomena that befell us that year, maybe nothing surprised me more than the sound of that small question rolling out of Seth Moreno's mouth: Want to come?"

"Of my grandfather's eighty-six years on the planet, he had lived two of them in Alaska...But those two years had expanded, sponge-like, in his memory, overtaking much of the rest. Whole decades had passed in California without producing a single worthy anecdote."

"Ours was a sudden bond, the kind possible only for the young or the imperiled."

"Perhaps the reasons for a man to leave his life were too obvious for him to name."

"Seth and I used to like to picture how our world would look to visitors someday, maybe a thousand years in the future, after all the humans are gone and all the asphalt has crumbled and peeled away. We wondered what these visitors would find here. We liked to guess at what would last. Here the indentations suggesting a vast network of roads. Here the deposits of iron where giant steel structures once stood, shoulder to shoulder in rows, a city. Here the remnants of clothing and dishware, here the burial grounds, here the mounds of earth that were once people's homes. But among the artifacts that will never be found - among the objects that will disintegrate long before anyone from elsewhere arrives - is a certain patch of sidewalk on a Californian street where once, on a dark afternoon in summer at the waning end of the year of the slowing, two kids knelt down together on the cold ground. We dipped our fingers in the wet cement, and we wrote the truest, simplest things we knew - our names, the date, and these words: We were here."