McCarthy, C. (2022). The Passenger. Alfred A. Knopf.
Selected concepts and passages
- “What you write down becomes fixed. It takes on the constraints of any tangible entity. It collapses into a reality estranged from the realm of its creation. It’s a marker. A roadsign. You have stopped to get your bearings, but at a price. You’ll never know where it might have gone if you’d left it alone to go there” (297).
- “The idea is always struggling against its own realization. Ideas come with an innate skepticism, they don’t just go barreling ahead. And these doubts have their origin in the same world as the idea itself. And that’s not something you really have access to. So the reservations that you yourself in your world of struggle bring to the table may actually be alien to the path of these emerging structures. Their own intrinsic doubts that are steering-mechanisms while yours are more like brakes” (297).
- “Once a mathematical conjecture is formalized into a theory it may have a certain luster to it but with rare exceptions you can no longer entertain the illusion that it holds some deep insight into the core of reality. It has in fact begun to look like a tool” (297).
- “All physical history eventually turns out to be a chimera. She said that even if you place your hands on the stones of ancient buildings you’ll never really believe that the world which they’ve survived had at one time the same reality as the one you’re standing in. History is belief” (328).
- “Why can you not bury him? Are his hands so red? Fathers are always forgiven. In the end they are forgiven. Had it been women who dragged the world through these horrors there would be a bounty on them” (370).