Цитаты из книги «Люди и я», страница 25

The point of love was to help you survive.

The point was also to forget meaning. To stop looking and start living. The meaning was to hold the hand of someone you cared about and to live inside the present. Past and future were myths. The past was just the present that had died and the future would never exist anyway, because by the time we got to it the future would have turned into the present. The present was all there was. The ever-moving, ever-changing present. And the present was fickle. It could only be caught by letting go.

Love is what the humans are all about but they don’t understand it. If they understood it, then it would disappear.

All I know is that it’s a frightening thing. And humans are very frightened of it, which is why they have quiz shows. To take their mind off it and think of something else.

Love is scary because it pulls you in with an intense force, a supermassive black hole which looks like nothing from the outside but from the inside challenges every reasonable thing you know. You lose yourself, like I lost myself, in the warmest of annihilations.

It makes you do stupid things – things that defy all logic. The opting for anguish over calm, for mortality over eternity, and for Earth over home.

Kissing is what humans do when words have reached a place they can’t escape from. It is a switch to another language. The kiss was an act of defiance, maybe of war.

however much they would beg to disagree, humans don’t actually like to win. Or rather, they like winning for ten seconds but if they keep on winning they end up actually having to think about other things, like life and death. The only thing humans like less than winning is losing, but at least something can be done about that. With absolute winning, there is nothing to be done. They just have to deal with it.

Humans are one of the few intelligent beings in the galaxy who haven’t quite solved the problem of death. And yet they don’t spend their whole lives screeching and howling in terror, clawing at their own bodies, or rolling around on the floor. Some humans do that – I saw them in the hospital – but those humans are considered the mad ones.

They have been wearing clothes for so long. Metaphorical clothes. That is what I am talking about. That was the price of human civilisation – to create it they had to close the door on their true selves. And so they are lost, that is how I understand it. And that is why they invented art: books, music, films, plays, painting, sculpture. They invented them as bridges back to themselves, back to who they are. But however close they get they are for ever removed.

The humans are scared of nature, and are greatly reassured when they can prove to themselves they have mastery over it. This is why lawns exist, and why wolves evolved into dogs, and why their architecture is based on unnatural shapes. But, really, nature, pure nature is just a symbol to them.

There was moonlight, starlight, airglow, streetlamps, and sunlight backscattered by interplanetary dust, but the humans still spent half their time in deep shadow. This, I was sure, was one of the chief reasons for personal and sexual relationships here. The need to find comfort in the dark

Human life, I realised, got progressively worse as you got older, by the sound of things. You arrived, with baby feet and hands and infinite happiness, and then the happiness slowly evaporated as your feet and hands grew bigger. And then, from the teenage years onwards, happiness was something you could lose your grip of, and once it started to slip it gained mass. It was as if the knowledge that it could slip was the thing that made it more difficult to hold, no matter how big your feet and hands were.

the Language of Words was only one of the human languages. There were many others, as I have pointed out. The Language of Sighs, the Language of Silent Moments and, most significantly, the Language of Frowns.