Oryx and Crake

Разумеется, еще он был несчастлив. Это само собой. Он столько сил на это потратил.

Все бывшие привычки живут где то в теле, дремлют, как цветы в пустыне. В подходящих условиях расцветут пышным цветом.

He needed to forget the past – the distant past, the immediate past, the past in any form. He needed to exist only in the present, without guilt, without expectation.

If only haunts him. But if only what? What could he have said or done differently? What change would have altered the course of events? In the big picture, nothing. In the small picture, so much.

“So I learned about life,” said Oryx.

“Learned what?” said Jimmy. He shouldn’t have had the pizza, and the weed they’d smoked on top of that. He was feeling a little sick.

“That everything has a price.”

“Not everything. That can’t be true. You can’t buy time. You can’t buy . . .” He wanted to say love , but hesitated. It was too soppy.

“You can’t buy it, but it has a price,” said Oryx. “Everything has a price.”

“Not me,” said Jimmy, trying to joke. “I don’t have a price.”

Wrong, as usual.

Also he’s hungry. There’s something to be said for hunger: at least it lets you know you’re still alive.

“Oh, never mind,” said his mother. She often tried to explain things to him; then she got discouraged. These were the worst moments, for both of them. He resisted her, he pretended he didn’t understand even when he did, he acted stupid, but he didn’t want her to give up on him. He wanted her to be brave, to try her best with him, to hammer away at the wall he’d put up against her, to keep on going.

There are a lot of blank spaces in his stub of a brain, where memory used to be.

“It is the strict adherence to daily routine that tends towards the maintenance of good morale and the preservation of sanity,” he says out loud.

Одна из его слабостей - вечно он переживал, что о нем думают другие.

Берегись лидеров, говорил Коростель. Сначала просто ведущие и ведомые, потом тираны и рабы, а потом начинается кровопролитие.

Когда основная игра закончилась, можно взять шахматную доску и уйти играть куда-нибудь ещё.

So this was the rest of his life. It felt like a party to which he’d been invited, but at an address he couldn’t actually locate. Someone must be having fun at it, this life of his; only, right at the moment, it wasn’t him.

He should have been pleased by his success with these verbal fabrications, but instead he was depressed by it. The memos that came from above telling him he’d done a good job meant nothing to him because they’d been dictated by semi-literates; all they proved was that no one at AnooYoo was capable of appreciating how clever he had been. He came to understand why serial killers sent helpful clues to the police.

“What people want is perfection,” said the man. “In themselves.”

“But they need the steps to it to be pointed out,” said the woman.

“In a simple order,” said the man.

“With encouragement,” said the woman. “And a positive attitude.”

The artists, who were not sensitized to irony, said that correct analysis was one thing but correct solutions were another, and the lack of the latter did not invalidate the former.

He’d discovered that he projected a form of melancholy attractive to a certain kind of woman, the semi-artistic, wise-wound kind...

“When any civilization is dust and ashes,” he said, “art is all that’s left over. Images, words, music. Imaginative structures. Meaning – human meaning, that is – is defined by them. You have to admit that.”

“That’s not quite all that’s left over,” said Crake. “The archeologists are just as interested in gnawed bones and old bricks and ossified shit these days. Sometimes more interested. They think human meaning is defined by those things too.”