A Clockwork Orange for the 21st Century, where privacy has been surrendered to social networking, Bipartisan Homeland Security is the law of the USA, and the notions of wealth that people grew up with have been blown up into irrelevance. A glimpse of what the world could look like in 10 years.
Of course, the more things change, the more they stay the same, and old Death is still the last enduring certainty - despite what Indefinite Life Extension tells their high net worth clients. But nevermind... one day we will be able to fix the human body and live forever.
All this and also a super sad love story written with a Russian accent.
A lovely book, funny and engrossing. I felt sad when i was done with it. I realized that this is above all a story of growing up, of going from childish negation of death to mature acceptance. That accepting the reality of our death is essential for embracing life and eventually making some sense of it.
Quotes:
Why is it so hard to be a grown-up man in this world?
There’s a special terminal for flights to the United States and SecurityState Israel, the most dilapidated terminal at the Roman airport, where everyone who is not a passenger is basically carrying a gun or pointing some sort of scanning gizmo at you.
I guess parents can be really disappointing but their the only parents we have.
The truth is, we may think of ourselves as the future, but we are not. We are servants and apprentices, not immortal clients. We hoard our yuan, we take our nutritionals, we prick ourselves and bleed and measure that dark-purple liquid a thousand different ways, we do everything but pray, but in the end we are still marked for death.
The scale of wealth we grew up with no longer applies.
Forget the dollar. It’s just a symptom. This country makes nothing. Our assets are worthless. The northern Europeans are figuring out how to decouple from our economy, and once the Asians turn off the cash spigot we’re through.
There’ll be plenty of time to ponder and write and act out later. Right now you’ve got to sell to live.
And that’s what immortality means to me, Joshie. It means selfishness. My generation’s belief that each one of us matters more than you or anyone else would think.
I wanted to confront her, to make her see the folly of her religion, to change her diet, to help her spend less on makeup and other nonessentials, to make her worship every biological moment she was offered instead of some badly punctured deity.
An American Restoration Authority sign warned us that “IT IS FORBIDDEN TO ACKNOWLEDGE THE EXISTENCE OF THIS CHECKPOINT (‘THE OBJECT’). BY READING THIS SIGN YOU HAVE DENIED EXISTENCE OF THE OBJECT AND IMPLIED CONSENT.”
The world they needed was right around them, flickering and bleeping, and it demanded every bit of strength and attention they could spare.
He filmed my äppärät with his äppärät, while I swallowed another mug of triglycerides.
Thirty-nine years of age, lifespan estimated at eighty-three (47 percent lifespan elapsed; 53 percent remaining).
“Lenny Abramov, last reader on earth!”
Back at the synagogue, I gave Barry the willingness-to-live test. The H-scan test to measure the subject’s biological age. The willingness-to-persevere-in-difficult-conditions test. The Infinite Sadness Endurance Test. The response-to-loss-of-child test. ... I knew already that this perfectly reasonable, preternaturally kind fifty-two-year-old would not make the cut. He was doomed, like me. And so I smiled at him, congratulated him on his candor and patience, his intellect and maturity, and with a tap of my finger against my digital desk threw him onto the blazing funeral pyre of history.
I thought of Lenny and this elephant we saw in the zoo and how I kissed his big nose and the look on his face. The look on his face, Pony! I don’t know about temperance or faith, but what about charity and hope? Don’t we all need that?
I realized, with a quiet gnawing pain, that when you took away my 239,000 yuan-pegged dollars, when you took away the complicated love of my parents and the mercurial comforts of my friends, when you took away my smelly books, I had nothing but the woman in the next room.
“Safety first,” as they say around Post-Human Services. Our lives are worth more than the lives of others.
Unlike others of her generation, she was not completely steeped in pornography, and so the instinct for sex came from somewhere else inside her; it spoke of the need for warmth instead of debasement.
I wanted to get up and address the audience. “You have nothing to be ashamed of,” I would say. “You are decent people. You are trying. Life is very difficult. If there is a burden on your heart, it will not be lifted here. Do not throw away the good. Take pride in the good. You are better than this angry man. You are better than Jesus Christ.”
“I have nothing to wear. And my butt is fat.” “You weight eighty-three pounds. Everyone on Grand Street stares at your ass in wonder. You have three closets’ worth of shoes and dresses.” “Eighty-six. And I have nothing for the summer, Lenny. Are you even listening to me?”
The Indians tell me that in the next two years I’m going to have my heart removed completely. Useless muscle. Idiotically designed. (Joshie)
Today I’ve made a major decision: I am going to die. (Lenny)
I suppose I could have started telling her about all the different ways in which she needed to change in order for us to be happy together, but it would be pointless. I had either to accept the girl cradled in my arms, or to spend the rest of my time searching for something else.
“What happens but once … might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.” (Milan Kundera)
Did you know that each peaceful, natural death at age eighty-one is a tragedy without compare? Every day people, individuals—Americans, if that makes it more urgent for you—fall facedown on the battlefield, never to get up again. Never to exist again. These are complex personalities, their cerebral cortexes shimmering with floating worlds, universes that would have floored our sheep-herding, fig-eating, analog ancestors. These folks are minor deities, vessels of love, life-givers, unsung geniuses, gods of the forge getting up at six-fifteen in the morning to fire up the coffeemaker, mouthing silent prayers that they will live to see the next day and the one after that and then Sarah’s graduation and then … Nullified.
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