The Distance of the Moon

At one time, according to Sir George H. Darwin, the Moon was very close to Earth. Then the tides gradually pushed her far away: the tides that the Moon herself causes in the Earth’s waters, where the Earth slowly loses energy.

How well I know! — old Qfwfq cried — the rest of you can’t remember, but I can. We had her on top of us all the time, that enormous Moon: when she was full — nights as bright as day, but with a butter-coloured light — it looked as if she were going to crush us; when she was new, she rolled around the sky like a black umbrella blow by the wind; and when she was waxing, she came forwared with her horns so low she seemed about to stick into the peak of the promontory and get caught there. But the whole business of the Moon’s phases worked in a different way back then: because the distances from the Sun were difference, and the orbits, and the angle of something or other, I forget what; as for eclipses, with Earth and Moon stuck together the way they were, why, we had eclipses every minute: naturally, those two big monsters managed to put each other in the shade constantly, first one, then the other. Orbit? Oh elliptical, of course: for a while it would huddle against us and then it would take flight for a while. The tides, when the Moon swung closer, rose so high nobody could hold them back. There were nights when the Moon was full and very, very low, and the tide was so high that the Moon missed ducking in the sea by a hair’s-breadth; well, let’s say a few yards anyway. Climb up on the Moon? Of course we did. All you had to do was row out to it in a boat and, when you were underneath, prop a ladder against her and scramble up.

A Sign in Space

This was another good story.

t zero

p256 - “To sum up: to stay in t_0 I must establish an objective configuration of t_0; to establish an objective configuration of t_0 I must move to t_1; to move into t_1 I must adopt some kind of subjective viewpoint so I might as well keep my own. To sum up further: to stay still in time I must move with time, to become objective I must remain subjective.”

The Chase

p269 - This is water. “the countless others who surround me, and thus the situation in which so far I have lived subjectively, nailed to my solitary fear, is projected outside me, extended to the general system of which we are all parts.”

The Count of Monte Cristo

p283 - “I have come to understand one thing: the only way to escape the prisoner’s state is to know how the prison is built.”

p289 - “going deeper means decending into myself. You dig and dig and you do nothing but retrace the same path.”

World Memory

This was another good story.

p369 - “I confess, that I have often found myself cataloguing yawns, pimples, unhelpful associations of ideas, little tunes I’ve whistled, and then hiding them amount the mass of more useful information. … A mass of coldly objective and incontrovertible information would run the risk of presenting a far from truthful picture … we wouldn’t pay attention … break through the threshold of our consciousness … Just as I cancelled the existence of my wife’s lover from the punch cards, so I must cancel him from the world of the living. Which is why I am now pulling out my gun and pointing it at you, Muller, why I’m squeezing the trigger, killing you.”