Misc

From "Smilla's Sense of Snow" by Peter Høeg:

‘Because the number system is like human life. First you have natural numbers.  The ones that are whole and positive.  The numbers of a small child.  But human consciousness expands.  The child discovers a sense of long, and do you know what the mathematical expression is for longing?’

He adds cream and several drops of orange juice to the soup.

‘The negative numbers. The formalization of the feeling that you are missing something.  And human consciousness expands and grows even more, and the child discovers the in between spaces.  Between stones, between pieces of moss on the stones, between people. And between numbers. And do you know what that leads to? It leads to fractions.  Whole numbers plus fractions produce rational numbers.  And human consciousness doesn’t stop there. It wants to go beyond reason. It adds an operation as absurd as the extraction of roots. And produces irrational numbers.’

He warms French bread in the over and fills the pepper mill.

‘It’s a form of madness. Because the irrational numbers are infinite. They can’t be written down. They force human consciousness out beyond the limits. And by adding irrational numbers to rational numbers, you get real numbers.’

I’ve stepped into the middle of the room to have more space. It’s rare that you have a chance to explain yourself to a fellow human being. Usually you have to fight for the floor. And this is important to me.

‘It doesn’t stop. It never stops. Because now, on the spot, we expand the real numbers with imaginary square roots of negative numbers. These are numbers we can’t picture, numbers that normal human consciousness cannot comprehend. And when we add the imaginary numbers to the real numbers, we have the complex number system. The first number system in which it’s possible to explain satisfactorily the crystal formation of ice. It’s like a vast, open landscape. The horizons. You head toward them, and they keep receding. That is Greenland, and that’s what I can’t be without! That’s why I don’t want to be locked up.’

I wind up standing in front of him.

‘Smilla,’ he says, ‘can I kiss you?'”

From "Smilla's Sense of Snow" by Peter Høeg:

"C-coffee?"

Coffee is poison. And yet I suddenly have the urge to roll in the mud and I say, "Yes, please."

I stand in the doorway and watch while he makes it. The kitchen is completely white. He takes up his position in the middle, the way a badminton player does on the court, so he has to move as little as possible. He has a small electric grinder. First he grinds a lot of light-coloured beans and then some which are tiny, almost black, and shiny as glass. He mixes them in a little metal funnel which he attaches to an espresso machine, which he places on a gas hob.

People acquire bad coffee habits in Greenland. I pour hot milk right on to the Nescafé. I’m not above dissolving the powder in water straight from the hot-water tap.

He pours one-part whipping cream and two-parts whole milk into two tall glasses with handles.

When he draws out the coffee from the machine, it’s thick and black like crude oil. Then he froths the milk with the steam nozzle and divides the coffee between the two glasses.

We take it to the sofa. I do appreciate it when someone serves me something good. In the tall glasses the drink is dark as an old oak tree and has an overwhelming, almost perfumed tropical scent.

"I was following you," he says.

The glass is scorching hot. The coffee is scalding. Normally hot drinks lose heat when they’re poured. But in this case the steam nozzle has heated up the glass to 100 °C along with the milk.

"The door’s open. So I go in. I had no idea that you’d be s-sitting in the d-dark waiting."

I cautiously sip at the rim. The drink is so strong that it makes my eyes water and I can suddenly feel my heart.

From "Dirk Gently Holistic Detective Agency":

Some people pick their noses, others habitually beat up old ladies on the streets. Reg's vice was a harmless if peculiar one - an addiction to childish conjuring tricks. Richard remembered the first time he had been to see Reg with a problem - it was only the normal Angst that periodically takes undergraduates into its grip, particularly when they have essays to write, but it had seemed a dark and savage weight at the time. Reg had sat and listened to his outpourings with a deep frown of concentration, and when at last Richard had finished, he pondered seriously, stroked his chin a lot, and at last leaned forward and looked him in the eye.

'I suspect that your problem,' he said, 'is that you have too many paper clips up your nose.'

Richard stared at him.

'Allow me to demonstrate,' said Reg, and leaning across the desk he pulled from Richard's nose a chain of eleven paper clips and a small rubber swan.

'Ah, the real culprit,' he said, holding up the swan. 'They come in cereal packets, you know, and cause no end of trouble. Well, I'm glad we've had this little chat, my dear fellow. Please feel free to disturb me again if you have any more such problems.'

Needless to say, Richard didn't.

From "Mostly Harmless":

Click, hum.

The huge grey Grebulon reconnaissance ship moved silently through the black void. It was traveling at fabulous, breathtaking speed, yet appeared against the glimmering background of a billion distant stars to be moving not at all. It was just one dark speck frozen against an infinite granularity of brilliant night.

On board the ship, everything was as it had been for millennia, deeply dark and silent.

Click, hum.

At least, almost everything.

Click, click, hum.

Click, hum, click, hum, click, hum.

Click, hum, click, hum, click, hum.

Hmmm.

A low-lever supervising program woke up a slightly higher-level supervising program deep in the ship’s semisomnolent 

cyberbrain and reported to it that whenever it went click all it got was a hum.

The higher-level supervising program asked it what it was supposed to get, and the low-level supervising program said that it couldn’t remember what it was meant to get, exactly, but thought it was probably more of a sort of distant satisfied sigh, wasn’t it? It didn’t know what this hum was. Click, hum, click, hum. That was all it was getting.

The higher-level supervising program considered this and didn’t like it. It asked the low-level supervising program what exactly it was supervising and the low-level supervising program said it couldn’t remember that either, just that it was something that was meant to go lick, sigh every ten years or so, which usually happened without fail It had tried to consult its error look-up table but couldn’t find it, which was why it had alerted the higher-level supervising program of the program.

The higher-level supervising program went to consult one of its own look-up tables to find out what the low-level supervising program was meant to be supervising.

It couldn’t find the look-up table.

Odd.

It looked again. All it for was an error message. It tried to look up the error message in its error message look-up table and couldn’t find that either. It allowed a couple of nano-seconds to go by while it went through all this again. Then it woke up its sector function supervisor.

The sector function supervisor hit immediate problems. It called its supervising agent, which hit problems too. Within a few millionths of a second virtual circuits that had lain dormant, some for years, some for centuries, were flaring into life throughout the ship. Something, somewhere, had gone terribly wrong, but none of the supervising programs could tell what it was. At every level, vital instructions were missing, and the instructions about what to do in the event of discovering that vital instructions were missing, were also missing.

Small modules of software-agents-surged through the logical pathways, grouping, consulting, regrouping. They quickly established that the ship’s memory, all the way back to its central mission module, was in tatters. No amount of interrogation could determine what it was that had happened. Even the central mission module itself seemed to be damaged.

This made the whole problem very simple to deal with, in fact. Replace the central mission module. There was another one, a backup, an exact supplicate of the original. It had to be physically replaced because, for safety reasons, there was no link whatsoever between the original and its backup. Once the central mission module was replaced it could itself supervise the reconstruction of the rest of the system in every detail, and all would be well.

Robots were instructed to bring the backup central mission module from the shielded strong room, where they guarded it, to the ship’s logic chamber for installation.

This involved the lengthy exchange of emergency codes and protocols as the robots interrogated the agents as to the authenticity of the instructions. At last the robots were satisfied that all procedures were correct. They unpacked the backup central mission module from its storage housing, carried it out of the storage chamber, fell out of the ship and went spinning off into the void.

This provided the first major clue as to what it was that was wrong.

Further investigation quickly established what it was that had happened. A meteorite had knocked a large hole in the ship. This ship had not previously detected this because the meteorite had neatly knocked out that part of the ship’s processing equipment which was supposed to detect if the ship had been hit by a meteorite.

The first thing to do was to try to seal up the hole. This turned out to be impossible, because the ship’s sensors couldn’t see that there was a hole, and the supervisors, which should have said that the sensors weren’t working properly, weren’t working properly and kept saying that the sensors were fine. The ship could only deduce the existence of the hole from the fact that the robots had clearly fallen out of it, taking its spare brain-which would have enabled it to see the hole-with them.

The ship tried to think intelligently about this, failed and then blanked out completely for a bit. It didn’t realize it had blanked out, of course, because it had blanked out. It was merely surprised to see the stars jump. After the third time the stars jumped, the ship finally realized that it must be blanking out, and that it was time to take some serious decisions.

It relaxed.

Then it realized it hadn’t actually taken the serious decisions yet and panicked. It blanked out again for a bit. When it awoke again it sealed all the bulkheads around it where it knew the unseen hole must be.

It clearly hadn’t got to its destination yet, it thought, fitfully, but since it no longer had the faintest idea where its destination was or how to reach it, there seemed to be little point in continuing. It consulted what tiny scraps of instructions it could reconstruct form the tatters of its central mission module.

“You !!!!! !!!!! !!!!! year mission is to !!!!! !!!!! !!!!!, !!!!!, !!!!! !!!!! !!!!! !!!!!, 

land !!!!! !!!!! !!!!! a safe distance !!!!! !!!!! monitor it. !!!!! !!!!! !!!!!...”

All the rest was complete garbage.

Before it blanked out for good, the ship would have to pass on those instructions, such as they were, to its more primitive subsidiary systems.

It must also revive all of its crew.

There was another problem. While the crew was in hibernation, the minds of all its members, their memories, their identities and their understanding of what they had come to, had all been transferred into the ship’s central mission module for safe keeping. The crew would not have the faintest idea of who they were or what they were doing there. Oh well.

Just before it blanked out for the final time, the ship realized that its engines were beginning to give out too.

The ship and its revived and confused crew coasted on under the control of its subsidiary automatic systems, which simply looked to land wherever they could find to land and monitor whatever they could find to monitor.

As far as finding something to land on was concerned, they didn’t do very well. The planet they found was desolately cold and lonely, so achingly far from the sun that should warm it, that it took all of the Envir-O-Form machinery and Life-Support-O-Systems they carried with them to render it-or at least parts of it-habitable. There were better planets nearer in, but the ship’s Strateej-O-Mat was obviously locked into Lurk mode and chose the mist distant and unobtrusive planet, and furthermore, would not be gainsaid by anybody other than the ship’s Chief Strategic Officer. Since everybody on the ship had lost their minds, no one know who the Chief Strategic Officer was or, even if he could have been identified, how he was suppose to go about gainsaying the ship’s Strateej-O-Mat.

As far as finding something to monitor was concerned, though, they hit solid gold.

From "The World According to Garp":

​

“If you are careful,' Garp wrote, 'if you use good ingredients, and you don't take any shortcuts, then you can usually cook something very good. Sometimes it is the only worthwhile product you can salvage from a day; what you make to eat. With writing, I find, you can have all the right ingredients, give plenty of time and care, and still get nothing. Also true of love. Cooking, therefore, can keep a person who tries hard sane.”

From "Good Omens":

It was a wet and blustery Saturday afternoon, and Madame Tracy was feeling very occult.

She had her flowing dress on, and a saucepan full of sprouts on the stove. The room was lit by candlelight, each candle carefully placed in a wax-encrusted wine bottle at the four corners of her sitting room.

There were three other people at her sitting. Mrs. Ormerod from Belsize Park, in a dark green hat that might have been a flowerpot in a previous life; Mr. Scroggie, thin and pallid, with bulging colorless eyes; and Julia Petley from Hair Today, [Formerly A Cut Above the Rest, formerly Mane Attraction, formerly Cur! Up And Dye, formerly A Snip At the Price, formerly Mister Brian's Art-de-Coiffeur, formerly Robinson the Barber's, formerly Fone-a-Car Taxis.] the hairdressers' on the High Street, fresh out of school and convinced that she herself had unplumbed occult depths. In order to enhance the occult aspects of herself, Julia had begun to wear far too much handbeaten silver jewelry and green eyeshadow. She felt she looked haunted and gaunt and romantic, and she would have, if she had lost another thirty pounds. She was convinced that she was anorexic, because every time she looked in the mirror she did indeed see a fat person.

"Can you link hands?" asked Madame Tracy. "And we must have complete silence. The spirit world is very sensitive to vibration."

"Ask if my Ron is there," said Mrs. Ormerod. She had a jaw like a brick.

"I will, love, but you've got to be quiet while I make contact."

There was silence, broken only by Mr. Scroggie's stomach rumbling. "Pardon, ladies," he mumbled.

Madame Tracy had found, through years of Drawing Aside the Veil and Exploring the Mysteries, that two minutes was the right length of time to sit in silence, waiting for the Spirit World to make contact. More than that and they got restive, less than that and they felt they weren't getting their money's worth.

She did her shopping list in her head.

Eggs. Lettuce. Ounce of cooking cheese. Four tomatoes. Butter. Roll of toilet paper. Mustn't forget that, we're nearly out. And a really nice piece of liver for Mr. Shadwell, poor old soul, it's a shame . . .

Time.

Madame Tracy threw back her head, let it loll on one shoulder, then slowly lifted it again. Her eyes were almost shut.

"She's going under now, dear," she heard Mrs. Ormerod whisper to Julia Petley. "Nothing to be alarmed about. She's just making herself a Bridge to the Other Side. Her spirit guide will be along soon."

Madame Tracy found herself rather irritated at being upstaged, and she let out a low moan. "Oooooooooh."

Then, in a high-pitched, quavery voice, "Are you there, my Spirit Guide?"

She waited a little, to build up the suspense. Washing-up liquid. Two cans of baked beans. Oh, and potatoes.

"How?" she said, in a dark brown voice.

"Is that you, Geronimo?" she asked herself.

"Is um me, how," she replied.

"We have a new member of the circle with us this afternoon," she said.

"How, Miss Petley?" she said, as Geronimo. She had always understood that Red Indian spirit guides were an essential prop, and she rather liked the name. She had explained this to Newt. She didn't know anything about Geronimo, he realized, and he didn't have the heart to tell her.

"Oh," squeaked Julia. "Charmed to make your acquaintance."

"Is my Ron there, Geronimo?" asked Mrs. Ormerod.

"How, squaw Beryl," said Madame Tracy. "Oh there are so many um of the poor lost souls um lined up against um door to my teepee. Perhaps your Ron is amongst them. How."

Madame Tracy had learned her lesson years earlier, and now never brought Ron through until near the end. If she didn't, Beryl Ormerod would occupy the rest of the seance telling the late Ron Ormerod everything that had happened to her since their last little chat. (". . . now Ron, you remember, our Eric's littlest, Sybilla, well you wouldn't recognize her now, she's taken up macrame, and our Letitia, you know, our Karen's oldest, she's become a lesbian but that's all right these days and is doing a dissertation on the films of Sergio Leone as seen from a feminist perspective, and our Stan, you know, our Sandra's twin, I told you about him last time, well, he won the darts tournament, which is nice because we all thought he was a bit of a mother's boy, while the guttering over the shed's come loose, but I spoke to our Cindi's latest, who's a jobbing builder, and he'll be over to see to it on Sunday, and ohh, that reminds me . . .")

No, Beryl Ormerod could wait. There was a flash of lightning, followed almost immediately by a rumble of distant thunder. Madame Tracy felt rather proud, as if she had done it herself. It was even better than the candles at creating ambulance. Ambulance was what mediuming was all about.

"Now," said Madame Tracy in her own voice. "Mr. Geronimo would like to know, is there anyone named Mr. Scroggie here?"

Scroggie's watery eyes gleamed. "Erm, actually that's my name," he said, hopefully.

"Right, well there's somebody here for you." Mr. Scroggie had been coming for a month now, and she hadn't been able to think of a message for him. His time had come. "Do you know anyone named, um, John?"

"No," said Mr. Scroggie.

"Well, there's some celestial interference here. The name could be Tom. Or Jim. Or, um, Dave."

"I knew a Dave when I was in Hemel Hempstead," said Mr. Scroggie, a trifle doubtfully.

"Yes, he's saying, Hemel Hempstead, that's what he's saying," said Madame Tracy.

"But I ran into him last week, walking his dog, and he looked perfectly healthy," said Mr. Scroggie, slightly puzzled.

"He says not to worry, and he's happier beyond the veil," soldiered on Madame Tracy, who felt it was always better to give her clients good news.

"Tell my Ron I've got to tell him about our Krystal's wedding," said Mrs. Ormerod.

"I will, love. Now, hold on a mo', there's something coming through . . ."

And then something came through. It sat in Madame Tracy's head and peered out.

"Sprechen sie Deutsch?" it said, using Madame Tracy's mouth. "Parlez-vous Franrais? Wo bu hui jiang zhongwen?"

"Is that you, Ron?" asked Mrs. Ormerod. The reply, when it came, was rather testy.

"No. Definitely not. However, a question so manifestly dim can only have been put in one country on this benighted planet—most of which, incidentally, I have seen during the last few hours. Dear lady, this is not Ron. "

"Well, I want to speak to Ron Ormerod," said Mrs. Ormerod, a little testily. "He's rather short, balding on top. Can you put him on, please?"

There was a pause. "Actually there does appear to be a spirit of that description hovering over here. Very well. I'll hand you over, but you must make it quick. I am attempting to avert the apocalypse."

Mrs. Ormerod and Mr. Scroggie gave each other looks. Nothing like this had happened at Madame Tracy's previous sittings. Julia Petley was rapt. This was more like it. She hoped Madame Tracy was going to start manifesting ectoplasm next.

"H-hello?" said Madame Tracy in another voice. Mrs. Ormerod started. It sounded exactly like Ron. On previous occasions Ron had sounded like Madame Tracy.

"Ron, is that you?"

"Yes, Buh-Beryl."

"Right. Now I've quite a bit to tell you. For a start I went to our Krystal's wedding, last Saturday, our Marilyn's eldest . . ."

"Buh-Beryl. You-you nuh-never let me guh-get a wuh-word in edgewise wuh-while I was alive. Nuh-now I'm duh-dead, there's juh just one thing to suh-say . . ."

Beryl Ormerod was a little disgruntled by all this. Previously when Ron had manifested, he had told her that he was happier beyond the veil, and living somewhere that sounded more than a little like a celestial bungalow. Now he sounded like Ron, and she wasn't sure that was what she wanted. And she said what she had always said to her husband when he began to speak to her in that tone of voice.

"Ron, remember your heart condition."

"I duh-don't have a huh-heart any longer. Remuhmember? Anyway, Buh-Beryl . . . ?"

"Yes, Ron."

"Shut up," and the spirit was gone. "Wasn't that touching? Right, now, thank you very much, ladies and gentleman, I'm afraid I shall have to be getting on. "

Madame Tracy stood up, went over to the door, and turned on the lights.

"Out!" she said.

Her sitters stood up, more than a little puzzled, and, in Mrs. Ormerod's case, outraged, and they walked out into the hall.

"You haven't heard the last of this, Marjorie Potts," hissed Mrs. Ormerod, clutching her handbag to her breast, and she slammed the door.

Then her muffled voice echoed from the hallway, "And you can tell our Ron that he hasn't heard the last of this either!"

Madame Tracy (and the name on her scooters-only driving license was indeed Marjorie Potts) went into the kitchen and turned off the sprouts.

She put on the kettle. She made herself a pot of tea. She sat down at the kitchen table, got out two cups, filled both of them. She added two sugars to one of them. Then she paused.

"No sugar for me, please, " said Madame Tracy.

She lined up the cups on the table in front of her, and took a long sip from the tea-with-sugar.

"Now," she said, in a voice that anyone who knew her would have recognized as her own, although they might not have recognized her tone of voice, which was cold with rage. "Suppose you tell me what this is about. And it had better be good."

From "Oh, the Places You'll Go!":

​

... 

You can get so confused

that you'll start in to race

down long wiggled roads at a break-necking pace

and grind on for miles cross weirdish wild space,

headed, I fear, toward a most useless place.

The Waiting Place...

...for people just waiting.

Waiting for a train to go

or a bus to come, or a plane to go

or the mail to come, or the rain to go

or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow

or the waiting around for a Yes or No

or waiting for their hair to grow.

Everyone is just waiting.

Waiting for the fish to bite

or waiting for the wind to fly a kite

or waiting around for Friday night

or waiting, perhaps, for their Uncle Jake

or a pot to boil, or a Better Break

or a string of pearls, or a pair of pants

or a wig with curls, or Another Chance.

Everyone is just waiting.

NO!

That's not for you!

Somehow you'll escape

all that waiting and staying

You'll find the bright places

where Boom Bands are playing.