Sea of tranquility

05 Dec 2024

This book took a little time for me to get into. It didn’t feel very good until half way in when things started taking shape and towards the end I think it became something really beautiful. It’s one of those books that grew on me several days after I finished reading it.

It felt a bit unique in that I don’t have a book that feel similar to this one. It’s perhaps something like a sci-fi for people who usually don’t read sci-fi.

It inspired me to start collecting quotes and sharing them.

Quotes

She found it beautiful — Colony Two was a city of white stone, spired towers, tree-lined streets and small parks, alternating neighborhoods of tall buildings and little houses with miniature lawns, a river running under pedestrian archways—but there’s something to be said for unplanned cities. Colony Two was soothing in its symmetry and its order. Sometimes order can be relentless.

A rapid ascent over the green-and-blue world, then the world was blotted out all at once by clouds. The atmosphere turned thin and blue, the blue shaded into indigo, and then—it was like slipping through the skin of a bubble—there was black space.

Edwin’s gaze drifted away from the man’s face, to the mild decrepitude of the September garden. The salvias were bare now, for the most part, brown stalks and dried leaves, a few last blooms wisping blue and violet in the failing light. He was struck by an understanding of what his life could be from this moment: he could live here quietly, and care for the garden, and that might eventually be enough.

I could see it when I looked at her, that quarter-century of living on this farm. Her skin was darkened by the sun and she had a peacefulness about her.

In those streets everyone moved faster than me, but what they didn’t know was that I had already moved too fast, too far, and wished to travel no further. I’ve been thinking a great deal about time and motion lately, about being a still point in the ceaseless rush.

Quotes with potential spoilers (click to expand)

This, I found myself thinking in the years that followed, on nights when my wife and I played the violin together, when we cooked together, when we walked in our fields watching the movements of the farm robots, when we sat on the porch watching the airships rise up like fireflies on the horizon over Oklahoma City, this is what the Time Institute never understood: if definitive proof emerges that we’re living in a simulation, the correct response to that news will be So what. A life lived in a simulation is still a life.