quotations


Excerpts from The Memory of Whiteness by Kim Stanley Robinson

the exemplar of contemplation

Dear Reader, two whitsuns orbit the planet Uranus; one is called Puck, the other, Bottom. They burn just above the swirling clouds of that giant planet, and with the help of the planet's soft green light they illuminate all that dark corner of the solar system. Basking in the green glow of this trio are a host of worlds -- little worlds, to be sure, worlds no bigger (and many smaller) than the asteriod Vesta -- but worlds, nevertheless, each of them encased in a clear sphere of air like little villages in glass paperweights, and each of them a culture and society unto itself. These worlds orbit in ellipses just outside the narrow white bands of Uranus's rings; you might say that the band of worlds forms a new ring in the planet's old girdle: the first dozen made of ice chunks held in smooth planes, the newest made of an irregular string of soap bubbles, filled with life. And what holds all these various worlds together, what is their lingua franca? Music.

Our story, then, has its beginning -- one of its beginnings -- on one of these worlds, the one called Holland. Holland is a somewhat irregular moonlet, verdant in its lowlands, bare and moorish on its hilltops, which the locals call tors. And in a heather-floored dell, near a pebble-bottomed stream, under one of the tallest of these tors, there stands a lone cottage, sheltered by a single yew tree. Over this cottage, in the spring of the year 3229, a clear dawn pulsed with a pure light; a shaft of this dawn, a Puckish gleam, peered in the cottage window, and inside Dent Ios awoke.


grimaldi

How does music mean? Not, you can be sure, in words. Music is a language untranslatable, it is too direct, too subtle, too ... other for words. Music moves directly from the inner ear to the lower brain stem, where our emotional lives are generated; and nothing can stimulate the complex response that music does, except music itself.

So Dent sat on his knoll above the amphitheater and listened to Johannes Wright play, as the late afternoon shaded into evening; he listened with all his mind focused, his flesh quivering slightly in the cooling air. But you, dear Reader, cannot be told what Dent heard. Words cannot describe this music.

Still, be not annoyed with me. All is not lost. The mind is always singing, and somewhere inside each one of us pure music always flows. It flows from our bodies, the biologic symphony -- heart pumping, blood pushing, breath filling and then leaving us; it flows from the wave motion of the brain's electrochemical activity, as thoughts fire synapses and engender their own pitch, timbre, duration, motion; it flows from the spirit's transcendent reach, for the world beyond the world. The lush chords as you fall out of dream, the chants you hum to get you through work, the melodies spinning you off to sleep, they are greater than you know; listen to the embryo De Bruik within you, Reader, listen at last! Hear your muisc -- hear it singing, in unforced creation -- and know then that the music vibrating the twilight air on Grimaldi was somewhat like that interior majesty.



-- The Memory of Whiteness, Kim Stanley Robinson