Keith Laumer

I know it’s hard to grasp at first. I seem to recall I was a bit difficult to convince once. We are accustomed to thinking we know everything. There’s a powerful tendency to just disbelieve anything that doesn’t fit the preconception.

Yours is not to reason why, eh? I guess you’re lucky at that. It’s not dying that hurts—it’s living.

Foster shook his head. “The inherent inertia of the human mind,” he said. “How it fights to resist new ideas.”

“All right. Let’s begin with the world situation.”

“I’d prefer a more cheerful subject—like cancer.”

I’m arguing with myself and I can’t tell who’s winning.

“I say, old man, you’re developing something of a persecution complex, I’m afraid—”

“That’s easy, when you’re persecuted.”

“It’s a failing of your culture,” Foster said, “that hypothesis becomes dogma almost overnight. You’re too close to your Neolithic, when the blind acceptance of tribal lore had survival value. Having learned to evoke the fire god from sticks, by rote, you tend to extend the principal to all ‘established facts.’”

I wanted to tell him that all lives are the same length when viewed from the foreshortened perspective of death, and that life, like music, requires no meaning but only a certain symmetry.

It was easy to see the mechanics of schizophrenia at work here. From wishing, it was an easy jump to believe.

There’s nothing like a little slavery to make a man appreciate even a modest portion of freedom.

I was still alive, but that was a mere detail, subject to change. (p. 13)

Adventure has been defined as somebody else having a difficult time, a long way away. (p. 17)