“At times like this curiously, you begin to think of the things you regret… Or the things you might miss… I would like in general to treat people with much more care, and respect. I would like to climb a tall hill – not too tall -, sit in the cool grass – but not too cool -, and feel the sun on my face. I wish I could have cracked the Lindbergh kidnapping case. I would very much like to make love to a beautiful woman who I had genuine affection for. And of course it goes without saying that I would like to visit Tibet. I wish they could get their country back and the Dalai Lama could return. Oh I would like that very much.”

Dale Cooper

You might wake up in the middle of it.

‘Heaven is democratic these days’, she said. Then added, ‘Or at least if you want it to be.’
‘What do you mean, democratic?’
‘We don’t impose Heaven on people any more,’ she said. ‘We listen to their needs. If they want it, they can have it; if not, not. And then of course they get the sort of Heaven they want.’
‘And what do they want on the whole?’ (…)
‘It varies. But if I were being honest, I’d say that it doesn’t vary all that much. (…) Everyone has the option to die off if they want to.’ (…)
‘And who asks for death the soonest?’ (…)
‘Well, I’m afraid – to answer your question – that the people who ask for death the earliest are a bit like you. People who want an eternity of sex, beer, drugs, fast cars – that sort of thing. They can’t believe their luck at first, and then, a few hundred years later, they can’t believe their bad luck. That’s the sort of people they are, they realize. They’re stuck with being themselves. Millennia after millennia of being themselves. They tend to die off soonest.’

Julian Barnes, A History Of The World in 10½ Chapters

Now I will tell how Octavia, the spider web city, is made. There is a precipice between two steep mountains: the city is over the void, bound to the two crests with ropes and chains and catwalks. You walk on the little wooden ties, careful not to set your foot in the open spaces, or you cling to the hempen strands. Below there is nothing for hundreds and hundreds of feet: a few clouds glide past; farther down you can glimpse the chasm’s bed.
This is the foundation of the city: a net which serves as a passage and as a support. All the rest, instead of rising up, is hung below: rope ladders, hammocks, houses made like sacks, clothes hangers, terraces like gondolas, skins of water, gas jets, spits, baskets on strings, dumbwaiters, showers, trapezes and rings for children’s games, cable cars, chandeliers, pots with trailing plants.
Suspended over the abyss, the life of Octavia’s inhabitants is less uncertain than in other cities. They know the net will last only so long…

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Govinda no longer saw the face of his friend Siddhartha. Instead he saw other faces, many faces, a long series, a continuous stream of faces – hundreds, thousands, which all came and disappeared and yet all seemed to be there at the same time (…). He saw the face of a fish, of a carp, with tremendous painfully opened mouth, a dying fish with dimmed eyes. He saw the face of a newly born child, red and full of wrinkles, ready to cry. He saw the face of a murderer, saw him plunge a knife into the body of a man; at the same moment he saw this criminal kneeling down, bound, and his head cut off by an executioner. He saw the naked bodies of men and women in the postures and transports of passionate love. (…) He saw all these forms and faces in a thousand relationships to each other, all helping each other, loving, hating and destroying each other (…)…

Herman Hesse, Siddhartha

“It’s very difficult, in fact nearly impossible, to escape the human world entirely and live in another. A very few people can do a Thoreau or a Ted Kaczynski – but even they still live in a fairly human world, only a few miles from town, able to walk or bike to the grocery store and to have their laundry done. There are a few hunters and trappers, prospectors and miners; a few lighthouse keepers, fire watchers, anchorites, disappearers. But even they usually rely on human artifacts, and in any case they don’t always last long. Chris McCandless set off to try it in Alaska and starved to death in a matter of weeks, a few miles from a highway. And the vast majority of us can’t even do that much, or anything like it – not with six billion people on the planet…”

Ophelia Benson

PennyWebb, 6 Word Story

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