ANDREW'S BRAIN - E.L. DOCTOROW

Andrew's Brain - Pg 197

   Tell me, Doc, am I a computer?
   What?
   Am I the first computer invested with consciousness? With terrible dreams, with feelings, with grief, with longing?
   No, Andrew, you're a human being.
   Well, you would say that.

Andrew's Brain - Pg 191

   As I was led to the door, I turned and said what a Holy Fool would say: You are only the worst so far, there is far worse to come. Perhaps not tomorrow. Perhaps not next year, but you have shown us the path into the Dark Wood. I suppose that was Dante I was doing right there. My roommate didn't like to hear it. Oh, come on, Android, he called, lighten up. Was he asking me to retract? Was he expecting my blessing? But how could I? What makes a fool holy is that he mourns for his country.

Andrew's Brain - Pg 186

   I thought how contention makes us human. How every form of it is practiced religiously, from gentlemanly debate to rape and pillage, from dirty political attacks to assassinations. Our nighttime street fights outside of bars, our slapping arguments in plush bedrooms, our murderous mutterings in the divorce courts. We had parents who beat their children, schoolyard bullies, career-climbing killers in ties and suits, drivers cutting one another off, people pushing one another through the subway doors, nations making war, dropping bombs, swarming onto beaches, the daily military coups, the endless disappearances, the dispossessed dying in their tent camps, the ethnic cleansing crusades, drug wars, terrorist murders, and all violence in every form countenanced somewhere by some religion or other... and for its entertainment politicidal, genocidal, suicidal humanity attending its beloved kick-boxing matches, and cock-fights, or losing its paychecks on the blackjack felt and then going back to work undercutting the competition, scamming, ponzi-ing, poisoning... and the impassioned lovers of their rimes contending in their own little universe of sex, one turgidly wanting it, the other wincingly refusing it.

Andrew's Brain - Pg 182

   You knew all this from looking at her?
   Thoughts of Briony gave me all sorts of perceptive advantages. It was as if something of her mind was still alive in me.
   Is that cognitive science?
   Not really. It's more like suffering.

Andrew's Brain - Pg 177

   Just follow your star. Live in the presumptions of the socially constructed life. Abhor science. Sort of believe in God. Put your failings behind you. Present your self-justifications to the bathroom mirror.

Andrew's Brain - Pg 140

   I also have a tin mirror over the sink and I look into it so that someone is there beside me. I have done this because Wittgenstein did it. He who understood so well the deceptions of the thinking brain. But it is dangerous to stare into yourself. You pass through endless mirrors of self-estrangement. This too is the brain's cunning, that you are not to know yourself.

Andrew's Brain - Pg 108

   I harked back to Whitman, who knew better than anybody what we are and sang of "the body electric."

Andrew's Brain - Pg 104

   For a person congenitally unable to be happy, I was, with Briony, happy. Happiness consists of living in the dailyness of life and not knowing how happy you are. True happiness comes of not knowing you're happy, it's an animal serenity, something between contentment and joy, a steadiness of the belonged self in the world.

Andrew's Brain - Pg 84

   Maybe that was when I began thinking once more about something besides myself.
   Like what?
   Like this country of eternal sun and midget populations and sky police.

Andrew's Brain - Pg 78

   Briony had of course seen me in the nude, but one's structure in a bedroom at night when the predominant light is one's intellectual presence is not the vulnerable thing that a pale white professor of cognitive science, bony and slightly potbellied, conveys to the world on a public beach.

Andrew's Brain - Pg 77

   This was a pure, unreflective, unselfconscious emotion. It had taken me by surprise and was almost too much to bear--happiness. I felt it as something expressed from my heart and squeezing out of my eyes. And I think as we all laughed and applauded at the end of the soft-shoe number I may have sobbed with joy. And I was made fearless in that feeling, it was not tainted by anxiety.

Andrew's Brain - Pg 37

   I could not luxuriate in contemplation of her legs and the glory of her tight white shorts as she hoisted herself over rocks, sometimes touching the ground for support, or gripping an outcrop, and so climbing higher and higher, the path more like a series of cryptic Tibetan steps into a Buddhist acceptance of the way things really were when you didn't talk about them.

Andrew's Brain - Pg 36

   They don't tell you in movies where people grew up unless the movies are about people growing up. They never tell you where your heroes come from, to whom they were related, you just find them as they are, in the present moment. You're called to worry about them as they live on the screen and all you know about them is the time they're there. No history, no past, just them.

Andrew's Brain - Pg 28

   Consciousness--not what that heavy-lidded lout slumped in the chair next to you confronts the world with, but what is left when you erase all presumptions, forgo your affections, white out the family, school, church, and nation in which you have couched your being... cast off the techno clutter of civilization, cut the wires of all circuits, including connections to your internal mechanisms, your bowel conditions, your hungers, what itches, what bleeds or produces tears, or the cracklings in the joints when you rise from a sitting position, abandon, however reluctantly, your breathless lips-apart contemplation of me, how my voice resonates in you, how my glance lases your netherness, and float free and unconnected in your own virtual black and starless space. And thus you have nothing to fix on, nothing for your thought to adhere to, no image, no sound, no smell, no physical sensation of any kind. You are not in a place, you are the place. You are not here, you are everywhere. You are not in relation to anything else. There is no anything else. There is nothing you can think of except of yourself thinking. You are in the depthless dingledom of your own soul.
   O lovely acrobat, it is true we may be immaterial presences in our beings, mere currents in the ocean of our molecules. But take heart! Let your wild desires bring you back to earth, to culture, to citizenship, to your bodily needs. To me. I have so much to teach you! And love is the blunt concussion that renders us insensible to despair.

Andrew's Brain - Pg 21

   Oh, God, you have no idea, do you, of the obliteration of social reality in the aftermath of something like this. The brain all lit up with the realization that what you did is unchangeable. To sue someone? Was there redemption in that?

Andrew's Brain - Pg 8

   In a high wind they do their dance of despair, the trees in heavy leaf swaying this way and that, throwing their arms up in their helpless fury of being what they are... Well, it's a short step from anthropomorphism to hearing voices.

Andrew's Brain - Pg 8

   I think also of how we decay in our rotting coffins, and how we reincarnate, the little microgenetic fragments of us sucked into the gut of a blind worm that rises it knows not why to wiggle in the rain-soaked soil only to die on the sharp beak of a house wren. Hey, that's my living genome-fragged ID shat from the sky and landing with a plop on the branch of a tree and dripping over the branch like a wet bandage. And lo! I am become a nutrient of a tree fighting for its life.

Andrew's Brain - Pg 5

   It happened to have been snowing that night, and Martha was transfixed by the soft creature-like snowflakes alighting on Andrew's NY Yankees hat brim. Martha was like that, enrapt by the peripheral things as if setting them to music. Even in ordinary times, she was slow to respond, looking at you with her large dark rolling protuberant eyes. Then the smile would come, or the nod, or the shake of the head.