Against the Day

“Fortune-telling! Impossible!”
“Unless we can allow that certain texts are—”
“Outside of time,” suggested one of the Librarians.
“Holy Scripture and so forth.”

“There are stories, like maps that agree . . . too consistent among too many languages and histories to be only wishful thinking. . . . It is always a hidden place, the way into it is not obvious, the geography is as much spiritual as physical. If you should happen upon it, your strongest certainty is not that you have discovered it but returned to it. In a single great episode of light, you remember everything.”

“About what I’d expect from the Brits,” thoughtfully countered Dr. Vormance. “Half the dwelling units of that island have been visibly haunted at some time or other. They see ghosts, they see fairies under every fungus, edible and otherwise. They believe in astral projection, foreknowledge, reincarnation, and other proofs of immunity to Time.”

“But if you look at the history, modern chemistry only starts coming in to replace alchemy around the same time capitalism really gets going. Strange, eh? What do you make of that?”
Webb nodded agreeably. “Maybe capitalism decided it didn’t need the old magic anymore.”

“Many people believe that there is a mathematical correlation between sin, penance, and redemption. More sin, more penance, and so forth. Our own point has always been that there is no connection. All the variables are independent. You do penance not because you have sinned but because it is your destiny. You are redeemed not through doing penance but because it happens. Or doesn’t happen."

It’s always night, or we wouldn’t need light.
—THELONIOUS MONK

“I used to read Dickens as a child. The cruelty didn’t surprise me, but I did wonder at the moments of uncompensated kindness, which I had never observed outside the pages of fiction. In any world I knew, it was a time-honored principle to do nothing for free.”

The noted Quaternionist Dr. V. Ganesh Rao of Calcutta University was seeking a gateway to the Ulterior, as he liked to phrase it, having come to recognize the wisdom of simply finding silence and allowing Mathematics and History to proceed as they would.

“This is a miniature copy of an inukshuk that actually stands up on a ridge-line far away in the interior, rocks piled in roughly the shape of a human, not to threaten the stranger but to guide him in country where landmarks are either too few or too many to keep straight.”
“Sounds like my average day.”

The skies were interrupted by dark gray storm clouds with a flow like molten stone, swept and liquid, and light that found its way through them was lost in the dark fields but gathered shining along the pale road, so that sometimes all you could see was the road, and the horizon it ran to. Sometimes she was overwhelmed by the green life passing in such high turbulence, too much to see, all clamoring to have its way

Everybody took a moment of silence, as if considering this. “What I worry about,” said Roswell at last, “is that the Æther will turn out to be something like God. If we can explain everything we want to explain without it, then why keep it?”

“Don’t know. Too much of the modern economics for me, for there’s surely more to life than just wages.”
“Oh? What?”
“Well, give me a few minutes with that one.”

Lew found himself surrounded by a luminosity new to him, not even observed in dreams, nor easily attributable to the smoke-inflected sun beginning to light Chicago.
He understood that things were exactly what they were. It seemed more than he could bear.

This person greeted the Cohen by raising his left hand, then spreading the fingers two and two away from the thumb so as to form the Hebrew letter shin, signifying the initial letter of one of the pre-Mosaic (that is, plural) names of God, which may never be spoken.
"Basically wishing long life and prosperity", explained [to Lew Basnight] the Cohen, answering with the same gesture.

The Professor was literally having an attack of nausea. Every time Tesla’s name came up, this was the predictable outcome. Vomit. The audacity and scope of the inventor’s dreams had always sent Heino Vanderjuice staggering back to his office in Sloane Lab feeling not so much a failure as someone who has taken a wrong turn in the labyrinth of Time and now cannot find his way back to the moment he made it.

Somehow the metal frame [of bed] also acts as a receiving antenna, allowing dreamers to pick up traces of the dreams of whoever slept there just before them, as if, during sleep, we radiated in frequencies as yet undiscovered

Their [shamans'] notion of time is spread out not in a single dimension but over many, which all exist in a single, timeless instant.