Banach-Tarski Paradox…”

Bong Cha

Duane Hanson “Tourists,”

Mary Lou Retton?”

maneki neko,

Takashi Murakami

Tsuguharu Foujita.

We are all living, at most, half of a life, she thought. There was the life that you lived, which consisted of the choices you made.

!

“Because we never say anything real to each other. We play games, and we talk about games, and we talk about making games, and we don’t know each other at all.” He was about to tell her that that was bullshit,

Sam looked at her outstretched hand, which he knew as well as any hand except his own—

she had decided she preferred being his creative partner to being his lover. There were so many people who could be your lover, but, if she was honest with herself, there were relatively few people who could move you creatively.

Sadie and Marx’s whole future was revealed to him. Sadie would probably marry Marx, and the wedding would be in Northern California, Carmel-by-the-Sea or Monterey. And at the wedding, Sadie’s grandmother would shoot sympathetic looks at Sam, because she had always been nice to him, and she would know he was brokenhearted. Freda would grab his hand with her soft, old hand, and pat it gently, and say, “Life is long” or some other unhelpful, old-lady wisdom. Sadie and Marx would buy a house together, somewhere in Laurel Canyon or maybe Palisades. And they’d get a dog—a big, rangy, mixed-breed thing, or if not

greatest pleasures of his life had been when he was by her side, playing or inventing.

“Your cousin Albert told me that, in business, they call this a pivot.

Sadie and Marx were in love, though they were still keeping this a secret from Sam. “Were you mad when he told you he was getting divorced?” Sam asked. “Mad?” Sadie said. “I was terrified

before she’d seen Sam for who he really was.

“I might have loved you once,” Sam said. “And I’ll always care for you in my way, but we wouldn’t work together. I’ve known that for years.”

isn’t a fact. And sometimes, it is cruel to state a fact.”

“Yes,” Sadie said. “Our room was hot as well, though we both woke up with the hair we started with

Christopher Marlowe.

“I’m so bored of having this discussion with you.” “I’m bored of having it with you.” “You’re pretentious, Sadie.” “You’re a pandering asshole.”

“We’re barely speaking,” Sadie said.

Sadie took a bite of the fruit. It was mildly sweet, its flesh somewhere between a peach and a cantaloupe. Maybe it was her favorite fruit, too?

“So, you don’t think Master of the Revels is the worst idea ever, and it’s going to single-handedly destroy our company?” Sam shook his head, no.

Surrender to the air, enjoy the view.

had many lives.

Memory, you realized long ago, is a game that a healthy-brained person can play all the time, and the game of memory is won or lost on one criterion:

Do you leave the formation of memories to happenstance, or do you decide to remember?

She is wearing a dress printed with strawberries and birds.

Video games don’t make people violent, but maybe they falsely give you the idea that you can be a hero.

Titian

The way to turn an ex-lover into a friend is to never stop loving them, to know that when one phase of a relationship ends it can transform into something else. It is to acknowledge that love is both a constant and a variable at the same time.

TAMER OF HORSES

The first time he had called you that, it was meant to be an insult, but over the years, the name had transformed into something loving, a joke between friends.

The farm has been owned by the family since 1948, since just after internment.

“It’s like recovering from dysentery.”

You are flying more slowly than last time,

because you don’t want to miss any of it.

This time, you keep flying.

disability,

Unlike Sam, Sadie had had no significant experience with loss or grief.

Do you honestly think you suffer more than everyone else? Do you think you suffer more than I do? Do you think you’re the first person to ever have a baby? Or lose someone? Do you think you’re some goddamned pioneer when it comes to grief?” Sadie shifted forward, and he could feel the momentum of their argument. He could feel the cruel thing she was about to say in response to the cruel thing he had said. But the cruel thing did not arrive. Disturbingly, she slumped forward, and started to weep.

was grateful to not have to be in this world.”

“We made it!”

famous soliloquy from the play, the “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” speech.

And all our yesterdays

“What is a game?” Marx said. “It’s tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It’s the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever.”

The Oregon Trail.

In certain seasons, We may be nourished by The idea of the carrot More than the carrot itself.

we drink and we smoke for the same reasons it is done elsewhere. We must fill our infinite days with something.”

She named the store Friendship Books.

“Madame, this simulacrum bears an uncanny resemblance to my horse, Pixel,” Emily said. “She is the precise shade of azure.”

To depict her, Emily thought, I would require a great many circles. “Your eyes remind me of someone I used to know,” Emily observed.

“There are no perfect trades,”

O crystal heart, Unbeating lovely: Such Beauty Must have Consequence.

“A programmer is a diviner of possible outcomes, and a seer of unseen worlds.”

But my partner died, and now I detest my work, and I have been blue.

“What is meant by ‘partner’? Like a husband or a wife?” “Yes, of a sort.” “A helpmate?” “Yes.”

know I am an imperfect substitute for whoever you have lost. But we are both alone, and I think we could help each other. Sorrows can be shared, as easily as games of Go.” She reached for Emily’s hand, and she got down on one knee. “I would like to propose to you. Leave Foglands. Come to Verdant Valley.” “Do you mean marriage?” “It doesn’t have to have a name,” Daedalus said. “It can have a name if you want it to have a name.”

“It means a very long game of Go, played without stops.”

The most important thing is finding someone you wish to play with.

“And what is love, in the end?” Alabaster said. “Except the irrational desire to put evolutionary competitiveness aside in order to ease someone else’s journey through life?”

“The boredom you speak of,” Alabaster said. “It is what most of us call happiness.”

EMILY MARKS DAEDALUS 1875–1909 SHE HATH DIED OF DYSENTERY.

Only the young have such high standards.

get back to the deadly serious business of making and playing games together.”

To build a world for someone seems a romantic thing from where I stand.” Dov shook his head. “Sam Masur, that fucked-up, romantic kid.”

dervish of selfishness, resentment, and insecurity?

art doesn’t typically get made by happy people.

She began to feel a tenderness toward Sam and even an empathy for him. He had built that game for her, but he must have built it for himself as well. How alone he must have felt after Marx’s death. How much of the business of running Unfair had she dropped in Sam’s lap? Sadie had never gone back to that office, and she had never thanked Sam either.

Sadie knew that she herself had not become a person until recently.

Once you loved someone, you repeated it until they were tired of hearing it. You said it until it ceased to have meaning. Why not? Of course, you goddamn did.

“Because I loved working with you better than I liked the idea of making love to you. Because true collaborators in this life are rare.”

elegant endgame.

You couldn’t be old and still be wrong about as many things as she’d been wrong about,

love you, Sadie,”

Ludo Sextus.

Game six (th)

He would know her handwriting anywhere.