The other day, almost three years later, I remembered I had wanted to read more of her so I looked her up at my public library and was surprised to see every copy of every book they have by her is checked out, and each with multiple holds. Oh, did she die?, I thought. On January 29, 2020, I wrote in a notebook:

Annie Ernaux, Exteriors

Chronicle of the social by someone who has (unknowingly?) rejected the social?

A trajectory from Steve's "Munro Doctrine" to this to [what I thought while reading] Tove Jansson Summer Book - presuming to present the interiors of others is imperialism -> is a mistake -> is authorized by empathy and social relations.

Author's preface, pp. 7-8: "I have done my best not to express or exploit the emotion that triggered each text. On the contrary, I have sought to describe reality as through the eyes of a photographer and to preserve the mystery and opacity of the lives I encountered. [...] In actual fact, I realize that I have put a lot of myself into these texts, far more than originally planned - memories and obsessions subconsciously dictating my choice of words and the scenes I wished to freeze. Moreover, I am sure that one can learn more about oneself by embracing the outside world than by taking refuge in the intimacy of a diary [...] It is other people - anonymous figures glimpsed in the subway or in waiting rooms - who revive our memory and reveal our true selves through the interest, the anger or the shame that they send rippling through us."

1. Why is this "on the contrary"? (my own emotions/mystery and opacity of others)

2. Why is it only about "myself" that one seeks to learn?

3. Why do these "figures" remain "anonymous"? (because you've ruled out speaking to them from the beginning)

But this is an accurate representation of the book - its attempt, its failure, its interest. Which, that last comes primarily from the failure - e.g. it's not the description of the girl with ribbon in her hair auditioning or even of the nervousness of the parents that interests but rather (p. 23) "It was an old-fashioned dream come true in the heart of the New Town, with the rituals and pomp of yesteryear's salons. But the parents were not speaking to one another; each family wanted their own child to be the best, to fulfill the hope that one day he or she would belong to the elite, of which tonight they had witnessed only the theatricality."

On which point - she sees everything as a performance - people at the butchershop buying meat, people talking on the train, people begging (here she's correct) but also homeless man thoughtlessly exposing himself (insanely she thinks this is an expression of power!) - a symptom of isolation and of her class. Social life is a put-on, a fake.

It's also baked in to her methodology, "preserving opacity" etc - back to Steve, it's easy to mistake this as respect for one's "objects" but it becomes clear that in effect it treats them as existing for me - to the extent they have their own reason for their behavior it's to put on a show for me.

As with people so with objects - p. 78 "Our relationship to things is so moving" - It's an extreme commodity fetishism both in the true sense & how it can be misunderstood due to contemporary usage of "fetish" - e.g. of a fancy underwear store, pp. 85-86: "Wanting to have some of this beauty on one's skin is as legitimate as wanting to breathe fresh air." (Do I trust the choice of "legitimate" here or is it a dishonest stand-in for "natural"? What is the difference? At any rate it is not so much the applicability of a concept, "legitimacy" - of course it is legitimate to want to have beauty on one's skin - as the choice of comparison itself that strikes me.)

For all the attention to class and to workers at work (though all [?] service workers) and even the presence in the book (even if by absence) of the producers of commodities - pp. 66-67 the black woman in a boubou "whom one suspects has come to the wrong store [or... the wrong book?], who doesn't realize she is out of place," or the now demolished housing for "the immigrant population of the sixties" (p. 83) - she treats commodities as an "opaque" part of the world, natural, not products of labor.

p. 41 "In the newspaper Libération, the historian Jacques Le Goff remarked: 'The subway is quite a curiosity.' Would the people who commute every day feel the same way about the Collège de France? There is no way of knowing." As sarcasm it's a decent line, in the style of a dunk, but again: Why is there no way of knowing? Class, access to media, sure, of course; but also once again because you've ruled out talking to people.

So ultimately though she's not treating people as commodities, she is essentially treating them the same way - opaque objects which function only in relation to me, and which are otherwise mute. Dramatic display of the fundamental problems with this type of approach!

The first sentence of that last paragraph was obviously mangled somehow en route from brain to paper, but the point is as clear as it's going to be, I suppose.

On February 12, 2020, I wrote in a notebook:

It's Wednesday now but some thoughts on the two concerts I went to Sunday-

[Redacted so as not to be cruel to amateurs] was like a caricature of what someone who thinks classical concerts are boring would expect. They ran through crowd pleasers (Chopin something-or-other, Rachmaninoff Vocalise) with high-end amateur technical competence but absolutely unengaging - of course the saving grace of a crowd pleaser should be that it pleases the crowd, and of an amateur, passion (not to be overly etymological), but there was none of that here. (Well, the crowd might have been pleased, I don't know - classical audiences are always a little difficult for me but this one, I've never felt more estranged from an audience I was in before - they somehow gave off malevolent vibes... Which I'd say might have been just me, my mood, but the earlier crowd didn't feel that way... Maybe I just felt an interloper in what is after all an insular little club. Anyway.)

And before that, a different kind of unengagement - "Cello Festival" at the RISD museum, which I left early to go to the other - saw two soloists. First did a very solid, respectable, and (yes) engaging run through the first Bach suite (another crowd pleaser), but the second, who was clearly a technically excellent and passionate cellist, played four contemporary works - one that was left off the program and I don't remember what it was, ägäische eisberge by Klaus Lang, Three High Places by John Luther Adams, and /hiə(r)/ by an "Inga" who was in the audience (I think a Brown student). The only of those composers I'd heard of before was Adams, and to be sure his was the most engaging of the set, but overall the impression left by all of them is what a cul de sac contemporary classical is in. I'm sure all of them had their reasons for moving through time the way they did, but they just came across as here's a sound... and here's a sound... and here's another sound. Or here's a thing cello can do, here's another... music as printer test page.

It's this whole world of contemporary classical that has completely turned its back on engaging. Yes it has its audience but that's not what I mean - even for those who appreciate I feel like the experience is still of being lectured at, not spoken with.

Engagement with people is what music should be, of course! But classical at least seems to have split into two worlds - refusing to engage, or engaging solely by means of banality. The only other tendency I'm aware of having any presence at all is minimalism (in all this I keep thinking about the other John Adams - the composer, not the president or the president - talking about being trained that tonality was an artificial structure that had run its course but eventually coming to the realization that tonality truly is a force of nature - which I read with relief! It gave me permission to feel the same way! You can understand a 12-tone series; you can feel tonality - which of course is not to say that it's the only feel-able system). But minimalism is its own cul de sac.

What I'm struggling hazily to link in here - I think it's obvious but I'm not quite finding the place to make it obvious - is that of course the "people" this music has always primarily been created for are not "the people" at all (watching Gosford Park thinking about how all these successive ruling classes have had all this beautiful work created on their behalf when no one is more philistine and less capable of appreciating it) - actually take that out of parentheses because here's more - thinking of the ruling classes having this glorious music as a private entertainment they actually disdain (but can't do without) which at some point transitions to what I saw at [the concert described first] - their lower echelons, at least, sitting in ritual silence as they respectfully and tastelessly attend to musicians capable of hitting all the notes but incapable of actually conveying anything about (or of) this music to anyone.

Of course maybe I just saw a bad concert. But what made me want to try to get these thoughts down (unsuccessfully) now days later is that I'm listening to Schnittke's first concerto grosso, and Wow! - Schnittke himself, as far as I can tell, was a grotesque anticommunist, your typical counterrevolutionary Artiste who loves then to whine about how oh even my Art has been commodified - well, whose fault is that? But for me his music sometimes seems to solve, or at least sidestep, the problem. This concerto grosso is not banal, and is nothing if not engaging! I had this giddy "This is how it can be done!" moment when it began. More soberly I realize a good deal of what creates that impression is how he recycles the past - "concerto grosso", after all, and that string quartet that quotes Orlando di Lasso and the big fugue of Beethoven - which does not bode well as a route out of any cul de sac... And yet. And yet!

More recently, having totally forgotten Schnittke (how things vanish), I had the precise same experience with, look at that, John (non-Luther) Adams, Absolute Jest with all its Beethoven quotation, which suggests to me that, oh no, maybe it's just that I get a kick out of pastiche, collage?

More recently I've found very inspiring on this - and smarter about class and its relation to music than I was in 2020 - the written words of Hans Werner Henze, whose music however I struggle to engage with.

At any rate back in 2020 I was both onto something and perhaps not onto anything. Only about a month after these concerts the organization that put on the cello festival ceased to do live performances at all, along with everyone else. When they returned half-assedly they demanded performers and audiences hide their faces, and as far as I know to this day they still require "proof of vaccination" to attend their concerts, the few of them that they actually still put on, with them having permanently embraced the ditigal, to my knowledge ("as far as I know" and "to my knowledge" because when I wrote them to object to the mandatory pharmaceutical policy they silently removed me from their mailing list and the feeling is mutual). I don't know what the other group did or is doing now.

The question, of course, is whether to delete everything or go through it all and hand-repudiate each post individually. Probably I will do neither. The next question is whether I should post anything new.

yet we are dogs nevertheless

Kafka did not write science fiction. He did not write speculative fiction. He did not write fantastic fiction, nor did he write fantasy, certainly not in the sense that people tend to mean these days. He did not write weird fiction, what he wrote is not The Weird. People — terrible, bad people — sometimes try to lump Kafka in with science fiction or speculative fiction or fantastic fiction or fantasy or weird fiction or The Weird. This is of course because terrible, bad people are often terribly, badly wrong.

It is in "Investigations of a Dog", I think, that Kafka, though he did not write science fiction, comes closest to writing science fiction. A-ha, you say, it's because here he writes about dogs who think and talk like humans do — an sfnal concept — and so surely by that logic a story about a man who wakes up one day transformed into an insect, or a story about a castle that does not exist in reality, or a story about a horse who becomes a lawyer: all of these are also sf! But no — I suggest that "Investigations of a Dog" is the closest Kafka — who did not write sf — comes to writing sf not because of the dogs in the story, but because of the dogs out of it. Kafka, who did not write science fiction, makes his closest approach to something recognizable as science fiction in five words in this story, five words that appear in the middle of a sentence in the middle of one of his famously long paragraphs. He writes:

They appeared from somewhere, I inwardly greeted them as dogs, and although I was profoundly confused by the sounds that accompanied them, yet they were dogs nevertheless, dogs like you and me...

(Or at least, this is how the Muirs translate him.)

Dogs like you and me — this invocation and fictionalization of the reader — accusing the reader of being something they are not, something they cannot be, something closer to the work than is possible, in more ways than one — but at the same time it's true, it's correct, it is neither a lie nor, for the moment at least, a metaphor. If Kafka has anything in common with sf — which is not to say that he is sf — it's not that he calls the narrator a dog, it's that he calls the reader a dog.

This / narrow sign between walls

I don't have any German, but I do have a bilingual edition of Paul Celan's selected poetry checked out from the library, and just now when I read, in "Anabasis", the lines that Michael Hamburger renders as

re-
leased, re-
deemed, ours.

my curious eye traveled across to the facing page and read, in whatever sense one can read a language one knows roughly how to pronounce but not how to decipher, the corresponding lines

aus-
gelöst, ein-
gelöst, unser.

and while I'm not saying anything new by saying that translation is a very peculiar thing, it's just a very peculiar thing that the way Hamburger renders the lines has the effect of making me feel the reness of these words, and of making me think about why it is that to re-lease means to release, why to re-deem means to redeem, where Celan's lines — presumably — would have the effect of making one feel the gelöstness of the words (neither of which (google suggests) possesses any reness)... which, intriguingly, I suspect also would make one feel the changing prefixes with a similar kind of newness and focus as Hamburger's version lends to the unchanging prefixes. (I would bet the German emphasizes the past tense of these verbs more as well, but I feel on even shakier ground there.)

These are, then, of course, as we all know already, different poems. The one in English strikes me as very fine, though (and as) it largely escapes me; I can't speak for the one in German.

precisely in the way it manages such rivalry

As I write this I've just started reading Claudia Rankine's very popular Citizen: An American Lyric, a few days after re-reading her Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric, powerful poetry about death and its effects on life, that earlier one. I'm on page 9 of Citizen: An American Lyric (though by the time I post this, if I post this, I will have read to the end), and already I love it (if that's a word for it), already I've typed up two passages to hold on to, already I feel like I'm starting to get a sense of what it's doing (among other things, treating the mental correlation that causes "you" to understand that these things (mainly white) people say and do are instances of everyday casual racism — that they are A Type Of Thing — that they are directly connected to both the grinding and the more spectacular and devastating violences of white supremacist racism — treating this correlation as being in itself poetic), already I'm thinking about passages like

An unsettled feeling keeps the body front and center. The wrong words enter your day like a bad egg in your mouth and puke runs down your blouse, a dampness drawing your stomach in toward your rib cage. When you look around only you remain. Your own disgust at what you smell, what you feel, doesn't bring you to your feet, not right away, because gathering energy has become its own task, needing its own argument. You are reminded of a conversation you had recently, comparing the merits of sentences constructed implicitly with "yes, and" rather than "yes, but." You and your friend decided that "yes, and" attested to a life with no turn-off, no alternative routes: you pull yourself to standing, soon enough the blouse is rinsed, it's another week, the blouse is beneath your sweater, against your skin, and you smell good.

(where just a page or two earlier "you smell good" was part of a recollection (narration?) from childhood of something casually racist a schoolmate had said) and

The rain this morning pours from the gutters and everywhere else it is lost in trees. You need your glasses to single out what you know is there because doubt is inexorable; you put on your glasses. The trees, their bark, their leaves, even the dead ones, are more vibrant wet. Yes, and it's raining. Each moment is like this -- before it can be known, categorized as similar to another thing and dismissed, it has to be seen. What did he just say? Did she really just say that? Did I hear what I think I heard? Did that just come out of my mouth, his mouth, your mouth? The moment stinks. Still you want to stop looking at the trees. You want to walk out and stand among them. And as light as the rain seems, it still rains down on you.

which take up two adjacent pages, in part via this note Anne Carson appends to her translation of Sappho's fragment 96, which I conveniently happen to have read and typed up yesterday:

"rosyfingered": an adjective used habitually by Homer to designate the red look of Dawn. I think Sappho means to be startling, but I don't know how startling, when she moves the epithet to a nocturnal sky. Also startling is the fecundity of sea, field and memory which appears to flow from this uncanny moon and fill the nightworld of the poem -- swung from a thread of "as sometimes" in verse 7. Homer too liked to extend a simile this way, creating a parallel surface of such tangibility it rivals the main story for a minute. Homer is more concerned than Sappho to keep the borders of the two surfaces intact; epic arguably differs from lyric precisely in the way it manages such rivalry.

which is not any kind of analysis (and certainly the remaining pages may make a fool of me), just a record of these early thoughts and this coincidence, the type of thing that maybe doesn't get recorded very often.

One Way Out

Two hours on the bus took Hodos to work, where as usual he would remain for ten hours, nine and three-quarters of them paid. He depressed many keys that day, an untallied number but one no doubt approximately equaling that of any other day. We cannot know what was in his thoughts, but let us speculate: that he was aware, with that awareness which had been acute when he had first started the job but had dimmed progressively with each day he worked, that every key he depressed affected in some small way the movement of objects scattered throughout the world, throughout the solar system, and in some rare cases even elsewhere, further still. During his training, as he learned about the relevance of the speed of light to the keys he must depress, he had tried to engage his supervisor in a kind of low-level philosophical talk about other implications of that universal constant, but the supervisor had been uninterested or uncomprehending — at any rate had not responded in kind. Before long, it appears, Hodos himself grew similarly uninterested. Certain types of substances moved away from the Earth; certain others moved toward the Earth; both types, and others, moved between other locations without reference to the Earth, with the financially significant exception that their movement was governed, to some extent, by the Earth-bound keys Hodos and his coworkers depressed. Perhaps he wondered, less and less each day, what would happen if he refused to depress the keys, or even just one of them. But surely he knew even from the beginning that it would make little difference except, perhaps, to him, and this only negatively, as most likely he would simply be fired and replaced. We feel that we can report these thoughts with some degree of certainty, as there is nothing at all out of the ordinary about them. We must however recall that this report is sure to be incomplete, not least because of the change in his behavior that would be seen the following day, after the preparations of this evening. We begin with this day and not the evening, during which the first out-of-the-ordinary actions took place, in order to establish, however quickly and roughly, the norm from which the subsequent action departs.

Though there are many things we may feel are lacking in our lives, chief among the things we truly lack is necessity. The various having-tos with which we are meant to be satisfied in its place are, of course, simply not the same thing. Hodos took his lunch break and ate. After lunch he resumed depressing keys until it was time to leave; he then caught the bus. His lover was not to be at home that night or for the next several. We feel there is nothing to suggest that this had any psychological impact on what was to follow, and put forward instead the hypothesis that the forthcoming actions' coinciding with the temporary absence is nothing more than a matter of opportunity; after all it is easier to lay the ground for one's own death in solitude than in company, if at any rate that death is self-selected. On the way home Hodos got off the bus at a different stop than usual, as one result of which the bus missed a momentary clearing in the traffic. All the other passengers would have to wait; whether they were resigned to the fact was something only each one of them, individually, could know. Hodos, for his part, took advantage of the vehicles' paralysis to run across the street to his goal, a BigBox. Sliding doors open at mere presence, independent and certainly unaware of intention to enter, but it is their opening that makes entrance possible. After pacing the aisles for half an hour in what a perspicacious eyewitness might have described as a frustrated agitation caused perhaps by an inability to find what he was looking for mingled with an unwillingness or indeed an inability to ask for assistance, Hodos located and purchased two items that under ordinary circumstances would have been, considering his income, unimaginable extravagances. We shall see later on that an unusual freedom from the restraint imposed by limited resources will recur: a characteristic aspect of Hodos's final actions. On leaving the store he removed one of his purchases, an automatic, from its package and strapped the other, a robot still in its package, to it. This accomplished, he stepped into the automatic and programmed it with his home address; and as it must it lifted and carried him through the streets, weaving between the cars when possible, stopping and waiting when not. In summer the last of the day's sunlight is never so harsh and intrusive as it is in winter. Hodos did not exit the automatic until it stopped just outside of his home, whereupon he stepped out of it, opened the front door to the house, and allowed the automatic to float inside ahead of him. Inside, he unstrapped the robot, removed it from its packaging, and began depressing the keys that would accomplish the elaborate reprogramming required. He did not at any point consult the manual, which suggests that his preparations began some time before we have been able to establish: for there is nothing known in his history that would account for an expertise in unorthodox robot programming. No doubt some of the keys he had depressed during previous work days had called relevant information onto his screen, but the records of this, if they exist, have not been made available to us. All told the task took many hours, most of this time spent running simulations: it had, of course, to be right; and far into the night, finally it was. He had consequently little time for sleep. He ate a small breakfast and wrote a long note which we of course have not read — for some things should remain private; and he allowed the automatic to carry him back to work, the robot left behind, plugged in, charging. During the paid hours of his last day at work he depressed many keys, keys that, this time, mattered. His awareness, which would normally have been diffuse, of the consequences of these keys' depression, today was surely focused. One presumes that he found himself thinking of time, and of work. Though he might never have articulated it, perhaps his attitude toward the work day had always been that it may be a lot of time, but that it is only time — that all time passes and all things, even the work day, end. That, although the well-known phenomena associated with subjective experience might have caused the time at work to seem always to pass more slowly than time spent, for example, in solitude, or with his lover inside of him, nevertheless the time at work was less real, mattered less. This less-real time, however, would seem also more obviously spatial, physical; we propose that he felt himself always to be stepping through it, or perhaps up it, not climbing exactly, and not struggling precisely, but ascending as though on a flight of stairs, the resistance of gravity an unremarked obstacle, tiring but ordinary. Though little of this would have risen to the level of consciousness, at some points during that day he may have become aware that the passage of time felt no different than it did on any other day; if so, he must have wondered why this was. From time to time someone he worked with made a comment; he smiled or nodded or made a comment in return as appropriate. He ate on his lunch break and depressed more keys afterwards, keys determined now not by the needs of the company or the whim of his supervisor but by his own needs. These keys, when depressed in these particular combinations, communicated with relays in far-off places, places far-off enough that the communications, though composed of a frequency of light and traveling therefore at light's usual speed, nevertheless took humanly significant amounts of time to reach them, a result also of the multiple relays through which he had sent them bouncing. And though the messages never stopped moving at their enormous velocity we can without too much inaccuracy picture them as frozen, or trapped, awaiting the preordained moment at which they would be released to do their work. His preparations complete shortly before the ten hours were up, Hodos passed the remainder depressing keys that would from his employer's perspective seem more appropriate; then, at the usual time, he left.

The automatic, obeying the exigencies of its programming, flew, Hodos inside, only one moment of decision remaining to him, the rest belonging to languages more determinant than Sapir or Whorf ever dreamed and after that to nothing but natural law. The windows of automatics are set to opacity by default, and this Hodos never changed, though whether this was according to preference or indifference we cannot know. We do propose that he felt neither fear nor (conversely) happiness as he made the last of his decisions and opened the door to his house. In the end he had not trusted himself to do it and so the robot, following its programming, killed him as he stepped inside. We need not divert ourselves with macabre description of methods. It will suffice for our purposes to say that, once it confirmed that Hodos was indeed dead beyond the reach of any hypothetical medical attention, the robot lifted the body, the weight of which was well within its tolerances, and placed it back inside the automatic. The robot then climbed inside as well and depressed a number of keys, in response to which the automatic lifted and began to fly, maneuvering down the roads connecting the house with the main road, at which it stopped and waited for traffic to pass. The wait was not too long, as by now a fair amount of time had passed (how much we need not divert ourselves calculating) and the worst of the traffic had subsided. Individual trees exhibit a remarkable ability to grow seemingly healthy in the inclement environment provided by mere breaks in the pavement of cities, though no doubt the epoch in which such apparent health is possible is coming swiftly to an end. The automatic, true to its name, needed no further guidance, and the robot entered sleep mode, awaiting the moment when the irrevocable instructions it carried within would goad it back into wakefulness. By plotting its course against a zoning map we can determine that the automatic passed by buildings intended for both commercial and residential purposes, including many which had been constructed for the one purpose and later converted to the other. The motion described in the present paragraph continued for several hours, during which time the frequency with which the automatic encountered other vehicles decreased markedly. When the buildings grew sparse enough that the automatic's algorithms determined that to leave the road and approach its destination in a straight line, with some deviations, would not be inappropriate and would indeed be preferable in terms of the efficient uses of time and energy (the latter of which, though it had not any longer concerned Hodos, was a default consideration in the automatic's programming which he had had no reason to alter), the automatic left the road and flew its cargo through the abandoned wreck of the countryside, heading toward an airport serving not the city in which Hodos had lived and worked, but rather a different, neighboring city.

By now the light from the origin city had dimmed enough, and that of the destination city had not yet increased enough, that the sun's reflected light began to filter down from space to such an extent that the moon could have been observed by any system possessing both a visual apparatus roughly equivalent to the human average and an interest in making such observations. Were such a system present (and we cannot be certain that one was not, though neither the body, nor the robot, nor the automatic, were one such at that time, and while once animals capable of observing the moon had lived in that area, it is fruitless to speculate what they might have thought of it, for by this time they had all been dead many long years), it would have detected what Hodos, for example, would no doubt have called a full moon. Had the robot been active and recording impressions, it would have been more precise: for there exists, overlaid over the older everyday meaning of the phrase, an exact, scientific sense in which the moon is full only for that fraction of a second during which its waxing has completely ceased and its waning has yet to begin (indeed some would insist, with perhaps even greater exactitude, that one should not speak of the moon's phases at all, the concept being an essentially meaningless byproduct of the limited viewpoint from which humanity has historically observed the moon). There are many such relatively recent scientific senses of older, traditionally less precisely deployed words and phrases, and the overlaying of these meanings, sometimes to the point of their total replacement, is ever an ongoing process — one of many by which languages change over time. In such fashion did the "foot," once a rough but usually sufficient unit of measure varying from person to person, come to coexist and eventually be superseded by the "foot," whose dogmatic definition of "just this long and never any longer or shorter" was enforced by systematic structures to which adherence was not elective; that more recent invention, the meter, is generally thought of as meaning "the length of a meter stick" though a specialist will insist that its more accurate and therefore truer meaning is the distance that light travels in a vacuum in one 299,792,458th of a second, and though we may scoff at the apparent arbitrariness of this figure surely we have no right to do so at the authority of the specialist. The opposite trajectory, from more to less precise, also occurs, as exemplified by the many meanings of the word "aspiration," trace evidences of a time in which the metaphorical association of breathing with hoping was clearer — and consequently less metaphorical — to the ordinary user of language than it is to us today, an association which in turn once brought explicitly to light the connections, now all but inaccessible to us, between breath, life, the present moment, and that elusive conceptual construct called "the future." Research suggests that, although at that moment the moon would have been visible had anyone capable been looking for it, the stars by and large would not, which was of course a normative situation. Hodos, in fact, never saw the stars during his life. Once, long ago, the stars were the only objects seen regularly which exhibited repetitive circular motion, the cyclical paths they drew across the sky contrasting markedly with, for example, the generally linear, haphazard, and/or pumping movements of animal life. In the span of human existence this has changed drastically, first with the celebrated invention of the wheel, whose first spinnings must have wreaked inconceivable changes upon the minds of its earliest witnesses, who would surely have connected this motion with the slower and more inexorable spinning of the heavens above them; then much later with the aforementioned light pollution, which ultimately severed the experiential link between the two rotations. It was only after the inability regularly to see the stars became a quotidian, if not yet all-pervasive, aspect of human life that humanity began to launch objects, and sometimes itself, into space, in which all motion is parabolic or elliptical — conic sections aspiring to the cyclical. From this the notion suggests itself that the source of humanity's relatively new urge to travel to the stars may be not, as is often assumed, the merely practical fact of the technological ability to do so, but rather this severing of the visual link connecting humans to the experience of this sort of motion, and perhaps too the absence of the simple daily fact of the stars themselves. Such speculation, however, is irresponsible. The automatic that Hodos had purchased when still living obeyed his programming and conveyed his body, already beginning to be overtaken by the fungal and bacterial populations which once had lived mostly in harmony with those cells we are more comfortable thinking of as his, through the night air. Of this much we can be certain. The automatic encountered no other mechanical devices and no living creatures during this part of its voyage. This is not surprising; indeed, as it was traveling through that region still referred to as "the countryside," though the associations called up by the term have changed radically in recent decades, it would have been more surprising had the automatic encountered any activity whatsoever. To attempt to draw some picture-in-words of the silent progress of the automatic through the moon-lit ruin that had once been an ecosystem, a way of life for countless members of countless species, is tempting; but such would be pathos. The reader who so desires is welcome to it, but we, on whom the facts press, shall note only that what had been Hodos, though we are accustomed to think of it as dead flesh, was itself more thriving an ecosystem than the dead countryside through which it was carried. To conceive this as irony is to remain locked to the anthropocentric perspective; to avoid such conceptions, we shall carry on. The conveyance flew on; and though we too must carry on there is scarcely a thing to do now that is not some form of looking away. Were Hodos still alive, we could perhaps occupy ourselves with reconstructions of his thoughts and feelings; but he was not alive; even had we had some fantastical access to his consciousness when he was alive, he was no longer, and so if we are to busy ourselves with anyone's thoughts, they can only be our own. But we have had too much of them already. We ourselves are not experiencing this flight; as such we have the luxury to say "several hours later..." should we give in to such temptation. Feeling, however, that this is an irresponsible distortion, we have tried thus far to stay with the automatic through the duration of its flight. Such a thing is of course impossible, as evidenced by our many divergences into equally irresponsible speculation and pontification: these, too, a looking away. There is no way for anyone who was not there, ourselves included and consequently our readers as well, to know truly what this journey was. Indeed even for someone who was there — had anyone been there — such direct knowledge would only be available at the moment itself, and even then only in limited form. At any experiential spacetime coordinate off of the journey itself, knowledge of the journey is indirect at best. And who can say, too, what experience, what knowledge is, to an automatic?

The automatic, with its cargo of robot and body, flew on through a land in which nothing of any consequence could live. Struggling enclaves of plant life began to crop up, one here, one there, painstakingly maintained, through robotic intervention, by scientists whose methods, it is safe to say, will have only temporary success. The automatic came upon a road, the use of which its algorithms judged desirable. The road soon became a canyon passing between buildings: first shallow and spaced out, then taller and closer, then taller still: the automatic had entered the next city. Other vehicles began to be present on the roadways. The buildings, like those in the previous city, crowded in so close that there was no horizon to speak of; it would therefore be inappropriate to refer to sunrise, but the ambient light, scattered by molecule after molecule, began to increase and change in quality in ways not attributable solely to the artificial lighting of the city (more than capable of drowning out any other star, but not our own). It was still too early for the first major rush hour and so the other vehicles, though numerous, were at first only minor obstacles in the automatic's course; equally it was only a minor obstacle in the other vehicles' various courses, which we have not had occasion to research. The average height of the buildings peaked, plateaued, and began to decline again, as the airport, like most such, was located not in the heart of the city but some distance outside of it. In the course of a single sentence, perhaps, the automatic traversed this distance. It approached one of the commercial gates to the airport, presented its credentials to the sensor, and, once the latter raised the barrier, entered the airport grounds. It took its place at the rear — soon to become the middle — of a queue of various automatic conveyances awaiting a spot on the next ascending car. The robot within, in accordance with its programming, resumed functioning. The line, being wholly automated, moved at a rate describable for our purposes as quick, and soon the automatic arrived at the elevator door. The robot took the body into its grasp. The doors to the automatic and to the elevator both opened and the robot exited the former, traversed the distance between, and entered the latter. The now-cargoless automatic departed, to be found somewhere else entirely, much later, quite by accident.

Meanwhile the elevator car began its long ascent, and here we really must apologize, for at this point both the time and the space traversed by our narrative begin to expand exponentially, to a degree which we simply cannot recreate in the form of our story. The problem, as we shall see, will quickly become wholly insurmountable. The time spanned by the just over thirty-five hundred words which precede those which, we presume, you are now reading, is approximately fifty hours; the space, perhaps five hundred kilometers. The elevator car in which the robot and the body now rose would continue rising, first in a greatly inclined manner taking it also roughly southward and then, when the tributary cable joined the so-called Quito Ascender (more accurately the ascender operated under the jurisdiction of the Quito Elevator Authority), very nearly straight up, for over a hundred times that distance before reaching its apex; the time, too, must be scaled upward in similar proportion. But as you will notice if you skip to the end of this narrative (as perhaps you have already), much less remains than has passed. Would the story be told, there seems no way around this distortion; by calling the reader's attention to it, we hope in some small way to correct for the fault. And indeed in this paragraph we have already given most of the significant events of this portion of the journey: the robot was once more deactivated; the body continued to decay, though slowly (for the elevator car, as Hodos had planned when alive, was refrigerated); and meanwhile up and over landmass, water, landmass, water they rose until, some perhaps ten days later, they paused momentarily high above Ecuador Territory, the elevator car awaiting its turn to attach itself to the cable tethered to Chimborazo's flattened peak so as to continue the ascent to the artificial satellite in geostationary orbit, nearly 37,000 kilometers above the mountaintop. An opening in the ascent schedules allowed the car to hook itself onto the ascender and, detaching itself from the tributary, it began the final, much longer leg of its climb into orbit. The air around it was distinctly thinner than it had been at the beginning of the journey, and colder — altogether inhospitable to human life, which surely could not have lasted long if exposed at that elevation. This is however irrelevant, for no living human was so exposed, and the only death we shall encounter within this narrative has already occurred. In fact, our even mentioning the possibility is a clear symptom of the sickness diagnosed earlier in this paragraph. For what remains to say of this portion of the journey? The car ascended. The body's decay, though greatly arrested and not effecting during this period any changes detectable by any but the most sensitive of instruments, continued nevertheless. The robot remained deactivated. Time and space passed, the former lending some of its irrevocability to the latter. Eventually (a word indicating not, as its construction might suggest and as it in fact did at an earlier point in its history, an action occurring in the manner of an event — a redundant, yet somehow curiously suggestive notion — but rather a failure, on the part of whoever may have resort to it, to face the reality of time as it passes) the car reached its destination: the anchor satellite, referred to by the serial number 983AEQ 55197-39. The car hooked itself to this 983AEQ 55197-39 and unhooked itself from the cable, then stowed itself in one of the satellite's bays, awaiting processing. Almost a day passed. The Earth indulged in nearly a full rotation on its axis; people lived and died; species continued along their paths to extinction; and the body, decay still slowed, and the robot, still deactivated, awaited, with neither patience nor impatience, their turn. Many sentences would have to fill this space, were we to be faithful to the event.

But we are very close now; and perhaps we are right after all to leave behind us the strictures of time as humans merely experience it — for what is human time to a celestial body? And so we shall attempt to convey in one final paragraph what happened to the matter that had been Hodos, and what, we suggest, Hodos himself had been up to in ensuring that it would in fact happen to him although — in some senses precisely because — he was no longer he. Divergences now are a luxury we cannot afford; and time: time has slipped, finally, out of our control. The vessel Hodos's final labors had conjured forth arrived and parked itself within the satellite, in the same bay in which the car awaited it; and the robot, as programmed, awoke. It took the body into its manipulators, approached the doors of the car, and opened them, revealing the vessel simultaneously opening its own doors. The moment the robot was fully out of the car the latter withdrew from the bay and joined a swiftly-moving queue with other cars waiting to be filled with various cargoes and begin the descent back to Earth; though what cargo and destination this particular car took on, we may never know, as record-keeping in this decadent age is unreliable at best. The robot conveyed the body to the vessel, a small one with just enough room for one human-sized body and a great deal of compressed fuel, then withdrew and deposited itself in one of 983AEQ 55197-39's waste-processing facilities, from which only a small portion of its data log would, some time later, be retrieved. In the meantime, the vessel positioned itself on one of the pads on the exterior of the satellite. What is still sometimes called the "vacuum" of space, we now know, is a frothing effervescence of subatomic particles continually passing from potentiality to actuality and back again. When the time came, the vessel released its docking clamps, fired maneuvering thrusters until it was far enough from the satellite to engage its primary engine, and then, at precisely the moment Hodos had calculated, added its full burn to the momentum its orbit around the Earth already imparted. The course and speed of most interplanetary voyages is plotted according to a complex cost/benefit analysis factoring in the locations and movements of the various bodies in the solar system, the cost of fuel, and the cost of time, among other considerations; but as we have already noted, the uniquely final nature of Hodos's journey allowed him to escape many of these merely practical concerns; and he had planned things so that this early, vulgar stage of the journey would be over as quickly as possible; in a word, he had ordained that the vessel burn all its considerable fuel resources immediately, at the highest possible rate, propelling itself and its cargo at what would not have interested him to learn was a record-breaking rate of acceleration. The vessel escaped the Earth's gravity well and continued adding energy to its own orbit so as to break from the path the Earth traces around the sun and enter into a new parabolic course. By the time it exhausted its fuel it was irrevocably set upon a new trajectory; and here we have reached what we believe to have been Hodos's goal. The vessel crossed the orbit of Mars, which was at that moment quite elsewhere; it passed through the asteroid belt, coming near no object of consequence. By now, what had been Hodos was under the sway of no influence other than that of gravity. In its vessel, it traveled in an unfathomably long curve across the orbit of Jupiter, which planet was in fact rather nearby, close enough that the curve along which the vessel traveled bent considerably, as had been Hodos's plan. The eternal storm bands slid across the visible surface of that vast globe, engaged in no one knows what business; there is no reason to suspect that whatever lives under the icy crust of its startlingly hospitable moon Europa was in any sense aware of the vessel's passage, or, if these inhabitants are capable of such observation, that they regarded it with any particular feeling. We have, with the assistance of several experts, projected the course the vessel will be traversing; barring any unforeseen encounter with some object not on our charts — which, extensive as they may be, can never be complete — it appears that Jupiter and its moons were the last objects it will come close to in any foreseeable amount of time or distance. And though the body that had been Hodos and the vessel that carries it are still, these years later, quite firmly within our solar system — the experts assure us that they have not yet crossed the orbit of Saturn, which planet they will miss by a large margin — it is nevertheless appropriate to call it an interstellar object, one subject no longer to the everyday requirements of life, business, personal whim, but only to the higher order of gravity and the pure necessity it enforces. For as the vessel travels through the universe, it will do so not in some Earthly straight line, nor in some distracted zig-zagging from point to point, but rather in a great parabola, most noble of figures, wending its way according to the dictates only of that force which has given structure to the universe itself, bending here under the influence of a distant star, there under that of some globular cluster, elsewhere, far later still, should it make it so far (and we believe that it will), perhaps answering, in its magisterial way, only to the call of distant galaxies. Considered thus, we find, contrary to prevailing opinion, that there is no mystery to Hodos's final actions; and we feel that even now, were he still able to regret, he surely would regret only that in order truly to submit to the call of necessity, to eliminate the arbitrary, his death was required so soon; that were he still able, he would regret only that he could not have delayed the time of this death even just a little, that he could not have allowed himself to experience this wonder, if only for an hour, a day, a month, a year!

—North Providence
December 2013 - March 2014