The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

"The map said that if you drove X miles you would arrive at place Y, whereupon he would start up the car and drive X miles knowing that Y would be there; it said so on the map. The man who doubted every article of Christian doctrine believed everything he saw written down. "

"One of the strangest and most perplexing accounts I ever read concerning my husband's suicide was that he, Jeff Archer, Bishop Timothy Archer's son, killed himself because he was afraid he was a homosexual. Some book written a number of years after his death-after all three of them had died-mangled the facts so thoroughly that, when you had finished reading it (I don't even remember the title or who wrote it) you knew less about Jeff and Bishop Archer and Kirsten Lundborg than before you started. It is like information theory; it is noise driving out signal. But it is noise posing as signal so you do not even recognize it as noise. The intelligence agencies call it disinformation, something the Soviet Bloc relies on heavily. If you can float enough disinformation into circulation you will totally abolish everyone's contact with reality, probably your own included."

"I would not want to make you unhappy by detailing pain, but there is a crucial sort of difference between pain and the narration of pain. I am telling you what happened. If there is vicarious pain in knowing, there is actual peril in not knowing. In aversion lies a colossal risk."

"Somewhere Plato says that if you are going to shoot at a king you must be sure you kill him. The conservative bishops, in failing to destroy Tim, left him as a result even stronger than ever, which is the way with defeat; we say about such a turn of events that it has backfired."

"He pondered and then said, half to himself, “She was going to ram an ongoing car on the Bay Bridge. So I saved him, too; the other car. It might have been like a station wagon full of kids.” “My God,” I said faintly. “It was a decision I had to make in a hurry.” Bill said.” “Once I knew she had that key, I had to do something. It was a big Merc. Silver-colored. Almost new. She had a lot of money. In a situation like that if you don't act, it's the same as helping them.” I said, “It might have been better to tell the doctor.” “No.” He shook his head. “Then she would have-well, it's hard to explain. She knew that I did it to save her life, not to get her in trouble. If I had told the staff-especially if I had told Dr. Gutman-she would have interpreted that as me just trying to get her kept there another couple of months. But this way they never knew, so they didn't hold her any longer than they originally intended to. When I got out-she got out before I did-one time she came by my apartment.""

"The fixed idea kind of madness is fascinating, if you are inclined toward viewing with interest something that is palpably impossible and yet nonetheless exists. Over-valence is a notion about possibilities in the human mind, possibilities of something going wrong, that did it not exist it could not be supposed. I mean by this simply that you have to see an over-valent idea at work fully to appreciate it. The older term is idee fire. Over-valent idea expresses it better, because this is a term derived from mechanics and chemistry and biology; it is a graphic term and it involves the notion of power. The essence of valence is power and that is what I am talking about; I speak of an idea that once it comes into the human mind, the mind, I mean, of a given human being, it not only never goes away, it also consumes everything else in the mind so that, finally, the person is gone, the mind as such is gone, and only the over-valent idea remains."

"How could she do it to him? I asked myself. What malice. What abysmal cruelty, toward us all. She really hated us. This is our punishment. I'll always think I'm responsible; Tim will always think he's responsible; Bill likewise. And of course none of us is, and yet in a sense all of us are, but anyhow it is beside the point, after the fact, null and moot and void, totally void, as in “the infinite void,” the sublime non-Being of God."

"There is a line somewhere in Wozzeck that translates out to, roughly, “The world is awful.” Yes, I said to myself as I shot across the Bay Bridge not giving a fuck how fast I drove, that sums it up. That is high art: “The world is awful.” That says it all. This is what we pay composers and painters and the great writers to do: tell us this; from figuring this out, they earn a living. What masterful, incisive insight. What penetrating intelligence. A rat in a drain ditch could tell you the same thing, were it able to talk. If rats could talk, I'd do anything they said."

"“You get to tell the truth,” I said, “when you're schizophrenic.” “Then more people should be schizophrenic.”"

"The cobwebs departed Bishop Archer's mind when Kirsten killed herself, so, it would seem, her death had served a useful purpose, although a purpose unequal to our loss. It amazes me: the sobering power of human death. It outweighs all words, all arguments; it is the ultimate force. It coerces your attention and your time. And it leaves you changed."

"From my years at Cal in the English Department, I had learned to make up metaphors, play around with them, mix them, serve them up; I am a metaphor junkie, overeducated and smart. I think too much, read too much, worry about those I love too much. Those I loved had begun to die. Not many remained here; most had gone."

"A spectator to the destruction of my friends, I said to myself; one who records on a notepad the names of those who die, and did not manage to save any of them, not even one."

"I loved him the most of all of them. I knew it when I heard the news, knew it in a different way than I had known it before; before it had been a feeling, an emotion. But when I realized he was dead, that knowledge made me into a sick person that limped and cringed, but drove to work and filled the register and answered the phone and asked customers if I could help them; I wasn't sick as a human is sick or an animal is sick; I became ill like a machine. I still moved but my soul died, my soul that, Tim had said, had never been fully born; that soul, not yet born, but born a little and wishing to be born more, born fully, that soul died and my body mechanically continued on. The soul I lost during that week did not ever return; I am a machine now, years later; a machine heard the news of John Lennon's death and a machine grieved and pondered and drove to Sausalito to sit in on Edgar Barefoot's seminar, because that is what a machine does: that is a machine's way of greeting the horrible. A machine doesn't know any better; it simply grinds along, and maybe whirrs. That is all it can do. You cannot expect more than that from a machine. That is all it has to offer. That is why we speak of it as a machine; it understands, intellectually, but there is no understanding in its heart because its heart is a mechanical one, designed to act as a pump. And so it pumps, and so the machine limps and coasts on, and knows but does not know. And keeps up its routine. It lives out what it supposes to be life: it maintains its schedule and obeys the laws. It does not drive its car over the speed limit on the Richardson Bridge and it says to itself: I never liked the Beatles: I found them insipid. Jeff brought home Rubber Soul and if I hear ... it repeats to itself what it has thought and heard, the simulation of life. Life it once possessed and now has lost; a life now gone. It knows it knows not what, as the philosophy books say about a confused philosopher; I forget which one. Locke, maybe. “And Locke believes he knows not what.” That impressed me, that turn of phrase. I look for that; I am attracted to clever phrases, which are to be regarded as good English prose style. I am a professional student and will remain one; I will not change. My opportunity to change was offered to me and I turned it down; I am stuck, now, and, as I say, know but know not what.”"