James Graham Ballard

The Drowned World

里森

A giant Anopheles mosquito, the size of a dragon-fly, spat through the air past his face,

This growing isolation and self-containment, exhibited by the other members of the unit and from which only the buoyant Riggs seemed immune, reminded Kerans of the slackening metabolism and biological withdrawal of all animal forms about to undergo a major metamorphosis. Sometimes he wondered what zone of transit he himself was entering, sure that his own withdrawal was symptomatic not of a dormant schizophrenia, but of a careful preparation for a radically new environment, with its own internal landscape and logic, where old categories of thought would merely be an encumbrance.

As Kerans sometimes reminded himself, the genealogical tree of mankind was systematically pruning itself, apparently moving backwards in time, and a point might ultimately be reached where a second Adam and Eve found themselves alone in a new Eden.

The automatic player in the radiogram switched from Beethoven’s Pastoral to the Seventh, Toscanini giving way to Bruno Walter.

https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/8943

On another wall one of Max Ernst’s self-devouring phantasmagoric jungles screamed silently to itself, like the sump of some insane unconscious.

However selective the conscious mind may be, most biological memories are unpleasant ones, echoes of danger and terror. Nothing endures for so long as fear.

how else can you explain the universal but completely groundless loathing of the spider, only one species of which has ever been known to sting? Or the equally surprising—in view of their comparative rarity—hatred of snakes and reptiles? Simply because we all carry within us a submerged memory of the time when the giant spiders were lethal, and when the reptiles were the planet’s dominant life form.

Each one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory.

The slower a clock, the nearer it approximated to the infinitely gradual and majestic progression of cosmic time—in fact, by reversing a clock’s direction and running it backwards one could devise a timepiece that in a sense was moving even more slowly than the universe, and consequently part of an even greater spatiotemporal system.

Acknowledging his escape, the intensity of the sunlight diminished fractionally.

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