ARCHITECT: When you're happy, what's it like?
EMPEROR: I'll tell you later. Such impatience! Such impatience! Ah! Youth!
ARCHITECT: You know how I imagine it? I think that when you're happy, your're with someone who has a very fine skin and then you kiss her on the lips and everything is veiled in a rose-colored smoke and her body changes into a multitude of small mirrors and when you look at her you're reflected a million times, and you ride with her on zebras and on panthers around a lake and she keeps you attached by a cord and when you look at her it begins to rain dove's feathers which fall to the ground neighing like young colts, and then you enter a room and you walk with her hand in hand on the ceiling (he speaks hurriedly) and the heads become covered with snakes who caress you and the snakes become covered with sea urchins who tickle them, and the sea urchins become covered with golden scarabs full of gifts, and the golden scarabs…
EMPEROR: Enough!

When the caterpillar emerges from the egg, almost all that was inside the egg has become caterpillar; the shell is nearly empty, and cannot move; therefore we do not count it, and call the caterpillar a continuation of the egg’s existence, and personally identical with the egg. So with the chrysalis and the moth; but after the moth has laid her eggs she can still move her wings about, and she looks nearly as large as she did before she laid them; besides, she may yet lay a few more, therefore we do not consider the moth’s life as continued in the life of her eggs, but rather in their husk, which we still call the moth, and which we say dies in a day or two, and there is an end of it. Moreover, if we hold the moth’s life to be continued in that of her eggs, we shall be forced to admit her to be personally identical with each single egg, and, hence, each egg to be identical with every other egg, as far as the past, and community of memories, are concerned; and it is not easy at first to break the spell which words have cast around us, and to feel that one person may become many persons, and that many different persons may be practically one and the same person, as far as their past experience is concerned; and again, that two or more persons may unite and become one person, with the memories and experiences of both, though this has been actually the case with every one of us.

It's a dishonest phrase for a dishonest time, “faith-based,” a cheap huckster's phony term of art. It sounds like an additive, an artificial flavoring to make crude biases taste of bread and wine. It's a word for people without the courage to say they are religious, and it is beloved not only by politicians too cowardly to debate something as substantial as faith but also by Idiot America, which is too lazy to do it.

About a decade ago, at the request of Psychology Today magazine, I had an amusing debate with Richard Dawkins about testicles. Dawkins had famously proposed the metaphor of the “selfish gene” to explain how traits in organisms can be understood from the imagined point of view of a gene wishing to propagate itself. The underlying logic of the metaphor is compelling, yet it doesn't always seem to work gracefully—as in the case of human male genitalia.

The site of human testicles seems a bizarre anomaly from an evolutionary point of view, like positioning the driver of an armored vehicle in a sack strapped to the bumper. If the whole point of the human organism is to pass on genes, why put the repository of those precious genes out front, in harm's way?

The role that so-called quants play in the financial world is analogous to the role batfish play in keeping coral reefs tidy. Just as batfish do not construct the reef but are essential to its health, quants do not create the structure financial markets depend on but do preserve the conditions that make markets function.

It was as if I had only just been able to see colors and shapes for the first time. I was so enthralled with the buttons on Lestat's black coat that I looked at nothing else for a long time. Then Lestat began to laugh, and I heard his laughter as I had never heard anything before. His heart I still heard like the beating of a drum, and now came this metallic laughter. It was confusing, each sound running into the next sound, like the mingling reverberations of bells, until I learned to separate the sounds, and then they overlapped, each soft but distinct, increasing but discrete, peals of laughter.

The teletype was exactly the same sort of machine that had been used, for decades, to send and receive telegrams. It was basically a loud typewriter that could only produce UPPERCASE LETTERS. Mounted to one side of it was a smaller machine with a long reel of paper tape on it, and a clear plastic hopper underneath.

In order to connect this device (which was not a computer at all) to the Iowa State University mainframe across town, you would pick up the phone, dial the computer's number, listen for strange noises, and then slam the handset down into the rubber cups. If your aim was true, one would wrap its neoprene lips around the earpiece and the other around the mouthpiece, consummating a kind of informational soixante-neuf. The teletype would shudder as it was possessed by the spirit of the distant mainframe, and begin to hammer out cryptic messages.

[Perolat:]“But you haven't given Gaia a chance, Golan. —Look, old chap, let me admit something. When Bliss and I are intimate, she sometimes lets me share her mind for a minute or so. Not for more than that because she says I'm too old to adapt to it. —Oh, don't grin, Golan, you would be too old for it, too. If an Isolate, such as you or I, were to remain part of Gaia for more, than a minute or two, there might be brain damage and if it's as much as five or ten minutes, it would be irreversible. —If you could only experience it, Golan.”

[Golan:]“What? Irreversible brain damage? No, thanks.”

[Perolat:]“Golan, you're deliberately misunderstanding me. I mean, just that small moment of union. You don't know what you're missing. It's indescribable. Bliss says there's a sense of joy. That's like saying there's a sense of joy when you finally drink a bit of water after you have all but died of thirst. I couldn't even begin to tell you what it's like. You share all the pleasures that a billion people separately experience. It isn't a steady joy; if it were you would quickly stop feeling it. It vibrates—twinkles—has a strange pulsing rhythm that doesn't let you go. It's more joy—no, not more—it's a better joy than you could ever experience separately. I could weep when she shuts the door on me—”

Pantagruel plucked up his heart, took a fresh courage to him, and was inflamed with a desire to profit in his studies more than ever, so that if you had seen him, how he took pains, and how he advanced in learning, you would have said that the vivacity of his spirit amidst the books was like a great fire amongst dry wood, so active it was, vigorous and indefatigable.

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