Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,11

learn during his extremely colorful late teens and early twenties, Corvallis Kawasaki was Virgil to his Dante, Mr. Peabody to his Sherman.

As an example, when Richard had remarked, a few years ago, on the fact that nearly all of his dreams were set in the landscape of the same small town in Iowa, C-plus had told him that this was related to a well-known insight by a German philosopher named Kant, who had posited that the mind simply was not capable of thinking about anything at all without mapping it onto space and time. The brain was just hooked up that way, nothing you could do about it. Young Richard had learned the basic properties of space-time by pedaling around a particular street grid on his bicycle, trick-or-treating on particular blocks, fleeing from big kids and vice principals through convenient backyards. It was burned into his neural “connectome” now; it was the Kantian substrate of all mental activity relating to space and movement. Perhaps worrying that Richard wasn’t following his argument, C-plus had then wrapped it all up by likening it to the hexagonal graph paper that nerds used to plot out the landscapes on which war games were prosecuted. This final detail had planted a suspicion in Richard’s mind that C-plus was just fucking with him. This had all happened, for no particular reason, minutes before a board meeting: the most important board meeting in the history of Corporation 9592, during which they announced that the company’s annual revenues now exceeded those of the Roman Empire at the height of the Augustan Age. Richard had fobbed the task off on the CFO, who would revel in that kind of thing. While the CFO was running through his PowerPoint deck, Richard had pulled out his phone and, in a merely pro forma attempt to conceal what he was doing, had, under the conference table, Googled Kant. The results looked formidably hard to read but sufficed to prove that there had actually been a guy named Kant and that he had indeed concerned himself with such topics.

The music of Pompitus Bombasticus made Richard’s fifteen-minute bus ride seem as inspiring and yet tragic as the Battle of Stalingrad. As the vehicle swung around a corner downtown, it was halted by a man holding up a stop sign as a long truck full of dirt pulled out into the street, bound for wherever excess dirt was dumped. The soundtrack in Richard’s headphones made this labored but basically simple operation seem as much a technological miracle as the departure of a massive yet graceful starship from its orbiting dry dock. It was taking Dodge a few moments to get his bearings. He realized that an older skyscraper—a building that had helped to define the city’s skyline since the 1960s—had been obliterated while Richard’s attention had been elsewhere. A rendering on a sign depicted a much taller building that was going to replace it. Fogeyish as this was, he felt somehow let down and scandalized. You take your eye off the ball for a minute and a building’s gone.

But in the very next block was a building that had been a celebrated architectural happening when it had gone up, what, five, no, ten years ago. Now it was just part of the landscape. It occurred to him to wonder whether he would still be alive when it was torn down. For that matter, he had been known to wonder whether his current car was going to be the last car he would ever buy, whether the leather jacket he was wearing now was going to outlive him. He was not being morbid. He was not depressed, not thinking about death overmuch. He just assumed that he was on a very long glide path leading to death in perhaps another thirty to fifty years and that he had plenty of leisure in the meantime to ponder it. He saw life as a trench in the First World War sense of that term, dug very deep at one end but becoming more shallow as you marched along, gradually ramping up to surface level. Early in your life you were so deep down in it that you didn’t even know that shells were bursting and bullets zipping over its top. As time went on these became noticeable but not directly relevant. At a certain point you began to see people around you getting injured or even killed by stray bits of shrapnel, but even if they were good