On May 16, I finished Pure Colour! I did start December 26, which means it took me only 141 days to get through 216 pages, which means I read at the blistering pace of 1.53 pages per day. Damn… that’s sobering. Well, all that matters is that I finished a book, right? Right?

Anyways, in keeping with tradition, as I did with Part I and Part II, I will dutifully share my favorite quotes from Parts III through IX.

On God.

For something to act, it has to have a physical being. But cells act and you can’t see cells, and atoms act and you can’t see atoms. Yes you can, you can see them through a microscope. But without a microscope we couldn’t see them. I know, so what? So all I’m saying is that maybe we don’t have the technology yet to see God. No! Well, we once didn’t have the technology to see cells or atoms. But humans had an inkling, even before we could see them, that such things were there, that small things made up big things. But they couldn’t prove it, and humans have always had an inkling of God, too.

As a child, I was very attached to Catholicism. Then I became an atheist, turning to such lovely and pleasant figures like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens to help me articulate my opposition to anything religious, and so I came to view religion as an ancient folly that, for no other reason than the plague of mass irrationality, had managed to retain persuasive force in the Age of Science. Eventually, my faith was shaken again when I spontaneously developed deep, deep respect for the longevity of belief in God. It must mean something that for millennia, and across hundreds of cultures, humans have believed God or gods to exist. How much trust ought we to place in this longstanding intuition that there’s something else out there, something more, a first cause, a creator, an Almighty power? For much of history, as Heti points out, the existence of atoms couldn’t be witnessed. Yet as early as Democritus, their existence had already been intuited. It wouldn’t be until we gained tools like electron microscopes that we finally and conclusively transcended our human blindness to the atomic world. Could it be the same with God? Simply a matter of perspective?

Mira knew that humans made art because we were made in God’s image — which doesn’t mean we look like God; it means we like doing the same thing God likes. Both making life and making art are pouring spirit into form.

Quite clever, I would say. Often, in God’s image refers to form, but as Heti suggests, the likeness might actually reside in action.

On life.

What is lovable is not humans, but life. […] We are the tragic ones who think it’s a tragedy that the human animal will be gone. We can’t even accept that our own fathers will be gone! But that doesn’t mean it’s a tragedy on a worldwide scale. Except for all the suffering. Except for all the suffering, but then the earth will start doing what it’s already doing, which is making itself well again. We are part of its flu. That means we will all be somewhere else, at least the part of us that loves. The part of the earth that is pure love, that exists in humans and animals, will still be here after the humans are gone, and evolution repopulates the earth with twice the number of birds, or whatever comes to replace birds.

As the consequences of climate change transition from the predicted to the actual, and the sense of futily increases, this view has come to be rather common. I rather struggle with it. Perhaps it’s equanimity, yet I can’t shake a feeling that generously poisonous servings of misanthropy and nihilism are also mixed in. The knowledge that life will continue regardless of whether humans survive is of comfort to some. That indifference, I think, exalts the wonder of life at the expense of discrediting the wonder of human life.

That was why she needed that ugly old seashell; because it was the contour and shape of her insides. It was a reminder of what a human self was, and what a human life was: not a beautiful glass lamp just this side of being broken, or a lovely gold ring with a single dent in it. But a battered old seashell, formed over millions of years, made to endure.

All of us are composed of the old, old materials of this utterly mysterious universe, and this passage is a beautiful reminder of that.

On attachment.

The person who the gods are watching through you often develops a certain attachment to you. That person may find themselves thinking about you a lot, and you may find yourself thinking about them a lot, too. It often happens between two such people that they will feel fated to be in each other’s lives. They might like or dislike the other one, or have no clear feelings between them at all, yet there they are, for minutes or hours or weeks or years, mysteriously in each other’s orbit, as though something of significance is going on.

We will all encounter people who shall arouse within us the sense they’re set to play an important role in our lives. I’m not sure where this comes from. Little is known of the person who causes such feeling, for it’s triggered by a stranger, yet it seems to be patently certain this stranger will cease to be a stranger, and that this stranger will come to be entwined with your life in a manner of significant consequence. If there even is such a thing, can we call this a premonition?

Even if a daughter accepts the lessons of her father, she will turn into a creature he didn’t expect. But that is entirely necessary. That is how the world changes, how values and criticisms evolve and change. A child must follow the rules of her own being. A parent can never truly understand what those values or rules are. A child is an alien to the parent, which hurts the parent a little. The child’s whole life can feel like a betrayal. But life is not a betrayal of life. […] The parent should not feel betrayed, but in the smallness of time, a parent does.

No child will turn out to be exactly or much like what a parent imagined. A child is a whole universe unto themselves, with their own senses, their own experiences, their own perceptions. Thus, to become your own person isn’t a betrayal of your parents, but instead loyalty to living life as you’re meant to live it.