Цитаты из книги The Renovation

My father had an impossibly large vocabulary that came from years of reading and thinking about reading and taking great pride in the practice of circling words he did not know, looking them up, and using them ten times a day for a month. As a child, I thought that he was the man who invented the language, as no one ever said a word I had not heard my father say first. He was the administrator of words, appointed by the government. As I grew, I altered my theory slightly, imagining my father was instead the author of the dictionary.

It was the era of insurmountable information, where the problem was not insufficient language but far too much of it. Only the loudest are heard, and what is the fate of facts, then? What is the fate of reality when all manner of counterfeit narratives sweep over the people in ridiculous noise? What happens to the truth of things when those who whisper it can't be heard over the most grotesquely repeatable, the most engagingly idiotic, absurd, and outrageous lies? I didn't bother saying any of this to them.

I sometimes think about his soul. Not some poetic thing, but as close as one could get to a scientific description. I think whatever it is must be the thing dementia takes away. What remains is this vessel that is my father, that looks like him and smells like him, but is completely empty. He can’t interact with his surroundings anymore. He is digging and digging and digging through the mines of himself to find a fragment of meaning, and I convince myself that so long as this is happening, he still has his soul, but what will it mean when the mine is exhausted?