This was the paradox of Jay Baldwin: One of the most infectiously happy human beings I’ve ever been around, his every waking moment was a kind of prolonged existential debrief. He was never not working on how to outwit the horrific eventualities he was forever expecting to befall him, and he was never not just extremely cheerful about this. Jay was a Vermont kid, raised in a small town, and there was a mordant New England pluck in the way he gazed into the abyss and said, “I see what you’re trying to do there, abyss.”
There’s a stout, bearded race official going around in not only a heavy fur coat but also an astounding brutalist apartment block of a fur hat. The hat has a bobcat’s entire face on it. The face has teeth. I make a note to check whether it would be possible to gauge the hierarchy of race officials based on the food-chain status of the dead animals whose faces are on their hats, but though this feels like a searing reportorial lead at the moment, the results of my follow-up investigation will prove disappointing.
What overwhelms is not the meaninglessness of the universe but the coexistence of an apparent meaninglessness with the astonishing interconnectedness of everything.
The fascination Area 51 exerted, as the vanishing center of every rumored cover-up and labyrinthine conspiracy theory, was essentially the fascination of a vacancy.
This was something I noticed time and again in the inhabitants of remote Alaska, this total, helpless acuteness in the presence of a stranger. It was as if isolation had kept them from numbing themselves to the fact of other people. You walk down the sidewalk in Manhattan and maybe you know on some level that every single person you pass is a constellation of memory and perception as huge and unique as whatever’s inside you, but there’s no way to really appreciate that on a case-by-case basis; you’d lose your mind. You get anesthetized, living among crowds, to the implications of faces. The terra incognita of every gaze, Saul Bellow calls it. Whereas if you walk up to a remote Alaskan, I mean just buying a bag of chips in the village store, a lot of the time the response you get is this sort of HELLO, VAST AND TERRIFYING COSMOS OF PERSONHOOD. The apertures are wide open.
The way you remember things in a dream is not precisely like remembering, yet anything you’ve experienced can come back to you in a dream.
As for our late-breaking U.S. culture itself, you sometimes have the sense that we’re rolling up the historical carpet behind us as we go, that when we finally vanish, we’ll leave behind nothing but garbage dumps and videos whose codecs won’t play.
Paranoia is skepticism taken to the point where it becomes faith. In the same way, the UFO narrative takes twentieth-century scientism to the point where it becomes mystical. I mean that in all transparency: It takes the aesthetic paraphernalia of mid-century science (advanced aircraft, faster-than-light travel, gleaming labs, silvery fabrics, shiny implements) and uses them to clothe a story whose whole underlying structure is religious (superior beings watching from above, secret truths revealed only to a few, problems of faith and proof, and so on).
The irony is not lost on Yuri Norstein—how could it be, a great Russian artist failing to finish a masterwork adapted from a great Russian artist who died with his masterwork unfinished. Sometimes it seems the process is working in reverse: He set out to adapt Gogol, and instead, Gogol adapted him.
[Yuri Norstein] hates what Putin is doing to the city. The old Moscow had an organic order to it, like a beehive: church, square, shops, neighborhood, church, square, shops, neighborhood, and again, in simple, untroubled succession. Now everything is haphazard. Every rooftop suddenly needs a café. Skyscrapers shoot up, senseless clumps of them, as though rubles were drifting over the city like dandelion fuzz and apartment towers sprouted wherever they took root. Construction contracts make Putin’s cronies rich. Boutiques keep the populace docile. It makes him shake with rage.
Age-mauved cheeks achieved sunlessly, as if, by the same principle through which ice can be scalding, he had burned himself by spending too much time in the rain.