The second volume of The PassengerStella Maris is an intimate portrait of grief and longing, as a young woman in a psychiatric facility seeks to understand her own existence.
1972, BLACK RIVER FALLS, Alicia Western, twenty years old, with forty thousand dollars in a plastic bag, admits herself to the hospital.I didn’t like The Passenger very much and liked this book even less. McCarthy was a trustee for the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), a multidisciplinary research center devoted to the study of complex adaptive systems. Unlike most members of the SFI, McCarthy did not have a scientific background. However, he apparently let the research center thinking influence his writing and these last two books were the result. A doctoral candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago, Alicia has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and she does not want to talk about her brother, Bobby. Instead, she contemplates the nature of madness, the human insistence on one common experience of the world; she recalls a childhood where, by the age of seven, her own grandmother feared for her; she surveys the intersection of physics and philosophy; and she introduces her cohorts, her chimeras, the hallucinations that only she can see. All the while, she grieves for Bobby, not quite dead, not quite hers. Told entirely through the transcripts of Alicia’s psychiatric sessions, Stella Maris is a searching, rigorous, intellectually challenging coda to The Passenger, a philosophical inquiry that questions our notions of God, truth, and existence. — Book promo @ goodreads.com
70. Nasruddin and the Wind
Nasruddin was raiding a garden when the garden’s owner caught him in the act.
“What are you doing?” shouted the owner.
“Well, you see,” said Nasruddin, trying to think of an explanation, “I was blown here by the wind.”
“What about all those vegetables lying here that someone has pulled up out of the ground?”
“I grabbed hold of those vegetables to stop my flight,” Nasruddin replied.
“And what about that big bag full of vegetables you are holding in your hand?”
“This is ballast,” said Nasruddin, “in case the wind starts blowing and tries to carry me off again!”
