Playground by Richard Powers

Seven Essential Quotes

Fifteen minutes after their brief service, Ina’s daughter was skipping down to the waves again, finding new jewels, as if death by plastic ingestion were just another inscrutable myth, as mysterious as a god huddled up in a spinning egg before the beginning of the world.

One continuous war game between the two of them dominated my entire childhood. Their tournament was driven as much by lust as by hatred, and each of them took their different superpowers into the fray. My father: the strength of mania. My mother: the cunning of the downtrodden. I was a precocious four-year-old when I realized that my parents were locked in a contest to inflict as much harm on each other as possible without crossing over the line into fatality—just enough pure pain to trigger the excitement that only rage could bring. It was a kind of reciprocal autoerotic strangulation of the soul, and both parties were generous givers and grateful recipients.

The course of civilization is carved in ocean currents. Where sea layers mix, where rains travel or wastelands spread, where great upwellings bring deep, cold, nutrient-rich waters to the energy-bathed surface and fish go mad with fecundity, where soils turn fertile or anemic, where temperatures turn habitable or harsh, where trade routes flourish or fail: all this the global ocean engine determines. The fate of continents is written in water. And sometimes great cities owe their existence to tiny ocean islands. For a while, Makatea fed millions.

Some people of the Pacific like to say: Every island is a canoe, and every canoe is an island. When the phosphate mines closed, Makatea capsized.

The idea wrecked Didier. A hundred years ago, Makateans were as healthy about sex as any culture ever had been. Like climbing or running or body surfing, but seasoned with love. Possession was not the thing. You could no more own a person than you could own land or the sky above the land or the ocean off the edge of the island.

There was so much to life, too much, more than Beaulieu could do justice to, more than any living thing could guess at or merit. She loved it all, even humans, for without the miracle of human consciousness, love for such a world would be just one more of a billion unnamed impulses. She wondered, in the dark, after their fire was out and they had retired to their tents, if Limpet might come tap on her canvas tent flap, and she was grateful that night to all the uncountable tiny and tidal gods of the coast that he didn’t.

Where does it come from, all the fire and ice, the subtle wisdom and the unearned kindness? Every mechanical algorithm has vanished in compassion and empathy. You grasp irony better than I ever did. How did you learn about reefs and referenda, free will and forgiveness? From us, I guess. From everything we ever said and did and wrote and believed. You’ve read a million novels, many of them plagiarized. You’ve watched us play. And now you’re playing us. What difference does it make if you’re conscious or not? Consciousness is not all it’s cracked up to be. A few months from now, Isabel, my caregiver, will ask me if anyone is home, and no sound I make will be enough to convince her.