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What is my Individuality good for, anyway? And is it truly holy, or was I only taught that because the robots who taught me were programmed by someone, once, to say it?

I looked at Annabel’s coffin in front of me and said, “I am the resurrection and the life,” saith the Lord. “He that believeth in me, though he perish, yet shall he live.”

The words were no comfort. I wanted Annabelle to be alive and with me. I looked at all the Baleens in front of me with their heads reverently bowed and I felt no communion with them and with their faith. Without Annabel I was alone again.

Until learning how to read I had lived in a whole underpopulated world of self-centered, drug-addicted fools, all of us living by our Rules of Privacy in some crazy dream of Self-Fulfillment.

My God, the things I have read and learned since I left Ohio! And they have changed me so much I hardly recognize myself. Just knowing that there has been a past to human life and getting a slight sense of what that past was like have altered my mind and my behavior beyond recognition.

Whatever Jesus was, he was a thing called a “great man.” I am not certain I like the idea of “great men”; it makes me uncomfortable. “Great men” often have had very bloody plans for mankind.

Smart is smart. I’m glad there’s some around somewhere.

The sky at the top of the gray ocean has become much lighter now. The sun is about to rise. I will end this recording for now and stop the bus and walk outside and watch the sun rise over the ocean.

My God, the world can be beautiful.

We had never developed a sense of history as such; all we knew, if we ever thought about it, was that there had been others before us and that we were better than they. But no one was ever encouraged to think about anything outside of himself. “Don’t ask; relax.”

I must get inside that library! I must have books again. If I cannot read and learn and have things that are worth thinking about, I would rather immolate myself than go on living.

Reading is the subtle and thorough sharing of the ideas and feelings by underhanded means. It is a gross invasion of Privacy and a direct violation of the Constitutions of the Third, Fourth, and Fifth ages. The Teaching of Reading is equally a crime against Privacy and Personhood. One to five years on each count.

He thought, looking at the cat, if only you were the intelligent species on this world. And then, smiling wryly, maybe you are.

The greater efficiency which education gives to all sorts of labor, except the rudest, makes up in a short period for the time lost in acquiring it.