Special Topics in Calamity Physics – Marisha Pessl

“Everyone is responsible for the page-turning tempo of his or her Life Story,” Dad said…. “Even if you have your Magnificent Reason, it could still be dull as Nebraska and that’s no one’s fault but your own.”
“But most critically, sweet, never try to change the narrative structure of someone else’s story, though you will certainly be tempted to, as you watch those poor souls in school, in life, heading unwittingly down dangerous tangents, fatal digressions from which they will unlikely be able to emerge. Resist the temptation.”

Obviously, being able to simply { } was a skill supremely underestimated in the Western world. As Dad was fond of pointing out, in America, apart from those who won the lottery, generally all Winners were in possession of a strident voice, which was successfully used to overpower the thrum of all the competing voices, thereby producing a country that was insanely loud, so loud, most of the time no actual meaning could be discerned—only “nationwide white noise.” And thus when you met someone who listened, omeone content to do nothing but { } , so overwhelming was the difference, you had the startling and quite lonely epiphany that everyone else, every person you’d encountered since the day you were born, who’d supposedly listened, had not really been listening to you at all.

His eyes circled over me like old flies. I suffered no hope, no daydreams, that he felt anything similar to the way I did, which wasn’t lust or love….but acute electricity.

It was one of those instances one feels as If one’s skin has abruptly become this as one layer of phyllo dough on a triangle of baklava, when one desperately doesn’t want the other person to go, but one doesn’t say anything in order to feel isolation in its purest form, as a periodic table element, one o the noble gases, Iso.

“’Justice wields an erratic sword / grants mercy to fortunate few / Yet if man doesn’t fight for her / ‘Tis chaos he’s left to.’”