It might help if we knew where we lived. Each of us, after all, has the same address. Every child has memorized it. It goes something like.
This or That Number,
This or That Street,
This or That Conurbation,
This or That Country,
This or That Continent,
This or That Hemisphere,
The Earth,
The Superior Planets,
The Solar System,
Nr. Alpha Centauri,
The Orion Spur,
The Milky Way,
The Local Cluster,
The Local Supercluster,
The Universe,
This Universe. The One Containing:
The Local Supercluster,
The Local Cluster,
And So On. All the Way Back To:
This or That Street,
And This or That Number.
It might help if we knew where we were going and how fast.
The Earth revolves at half a kilometer per second.
He Earth orbits the Sun at thirty kilometers per second.
The Sun orbits the center of the Milky Way at 300 kilometers per seconds.
The Milky Way is traveling in the general direction of Virgo at 300 kilometers per second.
Astronomically, everything is always getting further away from everything else.
It might help if we knew what we were made of, how we keep going and what we return to.
Everything before your eyes-the paper and the ink, these words, and your eyes themselves –was made in stars that explode when they die.
More proximately we are warmed and hatched and raised by a steady-state H-Bomb, our yellow dwarf: a second-generation star on the main sequence.
When we die, our bodies will eventually go back where they came from: to a dying star, our own, five billion years from now, sometime around the year 5,000,001,995.
It might help, if we knew all this. It might help if we felt all this.
Absolutely unquestionably, the universe is high style.
And what are we?
The Man in the Moon is getting younger every year. Your watch knows exactly what time is doing to you: tsk,tsk, it says, every second of every day. Every morning we leave more in the bed, more of ourselves, as our bodies make their own preparations for reunion with the cosmos. Beware the aged critic with his hair of winebar sawdust. Beware the nun and the witchy buckles of her shoes. Beware the man at the callbox, with the suitcase. This man is you. The planesaw whines, whining for its planesaw mummy. And then there is the information, which is nothing, and comes at night.
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Put together two different passages from the book, The Information written by Martin Amis. The aim was a pretend Cut-up. The “The Man in…” is the last paragraph of the book while the rest of the passage starting “It might help…” and ending “…what are we?” occurs somewhere in the first part of the book.
It might help the Man in what are we?
--------------------------------------*88*--------------------------------------
This or That Number,
This or That Street,
This or That Conurbation,
This or That Country,
This or That Continent,
This or That Hemisphere,
The Earth,
The Superior Planets,
The Solar System,
Nr. Alpha Centauri,
The Orion Spur,
The Milky Way,
The Local Cluster,
The Local Supercluster,
The Universe,
This Universe. The One Containing:
The Local Supercluster,
The Local Cluster,
And So On. All the Way Back To:
This or That Street,
And This or That Number.
It might help if we knew where we were going and how fast.
The Earth revolves at half a kilometer per second.
He Earth orbits the Sun at thirty kilometers per second.
The Sun orbits the center of the Milky Way at 300 kilometers per seconds.
The Milky Way is traveling in the general direction of Virgo at 300 kilometers per second.
Astronomically, everything is always getting further away from everything else.
It might help if we knew what we were made of, how we keep going and what we return to.
Everything before your eyes-the paper and the ink, these words, and your eyes themselves –was made in stars that explode when they die.
More proximately we are warmed and hatched and raised by a steady-state H-Bomb, our yellow dwarf: a second-generation star on the main sequence.
When we die, our bodies will eventually go back where they came from: to a dying star, our own, five billion years from now, sometime around the year 5,000,001,995.
It might help, if we knew all this. It might help if we felt all this.
Absolutely unquestionably, the universe is high style.
And what are we?
The Man in the Moon is getting younger every year. Your watch knows exactly what time is doing to you: tsk,tsk, it says, every second of every day. Every morning we leave more in the bed, more of ourselves, as our bodies make their own preparations for reunion with the cosmos. Beware the aged critic with his hair of winebar sawdust. Beware the nun and the witchy buckles of her shoes. Beware the man at the callbox, with the suitcase. This man is you. The planesaw whines, whining for its planesaw mummy. And then there is the information, which is nothing, and comes at night.
--------------------------------------*88*-------------------------------------
Put together two different passages from the book, The Information written by Martin Amis. The aim was a pretend Cut-up. The “The Man in…” is the last paragraph of the book while the rest of the passage starting “It might help…” and ending “…what are we?” occurs somewhere in the first part of the book.
It might help the Man in what are we?
--------------------------------------*88*--------------------------------------
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