Slowly evening takes on the garments
held for it by a line of ancient trees.
You look, and the world recedes from you.
Part of it moves heavenward, the rest falls away.

And you are left, belonging to neither fully,
not quite so dark as the silent house,
not quite so sure of eternity
as that shining now in the night sky, a point of light.

You are left, for reasons you can’t explain,
with a life that is anxious and huge,
so that, at times confined, at times expanding,
it becomes in you now stone, now star.

— Rilke, Book of Images

I have hymns you haven’t heard.

There is an upward soaring
in which I bend close.
You can barely distinguish me
from the things that kneel before me.

They are like sheep, they are grazing.
I am the shepherd on the brow of the hill.
When evening draws them home
I follow after, the dark bridge thudding,

and the vapor rising from their backs
hides my own homecoming.

— Rilke, The Book of Hours I, 40

My room and the vastness around it,
awake in the oncoming night,
are one. I am a string
stretched taut
across resonating distances.

All things are the body of the violin,
filled with murmuring darkness.
There, grieving women lie down to dream.
There the resentments of generations
surrender to sleep . . .
A silver thread,
I reverberate:
then all that’s underneath me
comes to life.

And what has lost its way
will, by my vibrant sounds,
be at last brought home
and allowed to fall endlessly
into the depthless source. . . .

— Rilke, Book of Images

And having heard, or more probably read somewhere, in the days when I thought I would be well advised to educate myself, or amuse myself, or stupefy myself, or kill time, that when a man in a forest thinks he is going forward in a straight line, in reality he is going in a circle, I did my best to go in a circle, hoping in this way to go in a straight line. For I stopped being half-witted and became sly, whenever I took the trouble. And my head was a storehouse of useful knowledge. And if I did not go in a vigorously straight line, with my system of going in a circle, at least I did not go in a circle, and that was something.

— Samuel Beckett, Molloy

Logic is a carpet laid over an abyss.

— O. B. Hardison Jr.

It can be put this way. If I allow all things to vanish, then according to Newton the Galilean inertial space remains; following my interpretation, however, nothing remains.

— Albert Einstein

Quite undeservedly, the ether has acquired a bad name.

— Frank Wilczek

The universe is made mostly of dark matter and dark energy, and we don’t know what either of them is.

— Saul Perlmutter

Time comes to an end in a black hole.

— Stephen Hawking

If there were not void, things could not move at all; for that which is the property of body, to let and hinder, would be present to all things at all times; nothing therefore could go on, since no other thing would be the first to give way.

— Lucretius

So Einstein was wrong when he said, “God does not play dice.” Consideration of black holes suggests, not only that God does play dice, but that he sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they can’t be seen.

— Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose

The vacuum of modern particle theory is a strange place indeed. From an unchanging “void” it has become an active arena out of which particles might be created or into which they might be destroyed . . . The vacuum might even be the “source” of all matter in the universe.

— Lawrence M. Krauss

The vacuum is truly a ‘living Form Void,’ pulsating in endless rhythms of creation and destruction.

— Fritjof Capra

In the quantum realm, even nothing never sleeps. Nothing is always up to something. Even when there is absolutely nothing going on, and nothing there to do it.

— K. C. Cole

If you were to travel at the speed of light, it would take you several years to get to the nearest stars in our own Milky Way galaxy; but if you were to go to this hole and enter one side, you’d have to travel for a billion years before you would get to the other side.

— Lawrence Rudnick

True talk of Nothing always remains unfamiliar. It does not allow itself to be made common. It dissolves, to be sure, if one places it in the cheap acid of a merely logical cleverness.

— Martin Heidegger

Although atoms are way more than 99.99 percent empty space, I have a real problem in walking through a wall.

— Leon Lederman and Dick Teresi

The truth is that emptiness is the norm of the universe. It is almost void of matter.

— John Stewart Collis

The vacuum is a garbage dump. Einstein freed us from it, now we’ve got to get rid of it again. Some kid now in junior high school will tell us how.

— Leon Lederman

Whenever it looks like there is ‘nothing,’ there is never ‘nothing’ there; it’s just the beginning of something else about to happen.

— Jose Rodriguez, junior high school student

From “You Don’t Have to Be Buddhist to Know Nothing: an illustrious collection of thoughts on nought,” conceived and edited by Joan Konner

All the things you would do gladly, oh without enthusiasm, but gladly, all the things there seems no reason for your not doing, and that you do not do! Can it be we are not free? It might be worth looking into.

The fact is, it seems, that the most you can hope is to be a little less, in the end, the creature you were in the beginning, and the middle.

— Samuel Beckett, Molloy

Whenever people in love act out of an imagined fusion of their beings, their every action is dictated by convention. Every relation colored by such confusion is conventional, however exotic (that is, immoral) it might appear. Even separating would be a conventional step, an automatic alternative lacking in skill and creativity.

Whoever takes it seriously, discovers that, as with death which is real, so with real love, there are no easy recipes. For both these undertakings, there are no universally agreed-upon rules. But in the same measure that we begin as individuals to explore life’s meaning for us, these great things come toward us to be met and known. The claims made upon us by the hard work of love are bigger than life and essential to our unfolding, and we are seldom up to them at the outset. But if we hold steady and take this love upon us as a task and a teaching, instead of losing ourselves in an easy and frivolous game behind which to hide the most honest questions of our existence — this may be felt as a small illumination and step forward by those who come long after us. That in itself would be a lot.

— Rilke, Rome, May 14, 1904
Letters to a Young Poet

Then, in the mist, I saw a big man walking up the street. He was wearing one shoe. He had a familiar look, so I got out of my chair and went partway down the driveway, and I waved at him. It’s not unusual, really, for people to walk up and down my street without two shoes on at midnight. He stopped. He put his hand on the telephone poll that’s there. He looked down. And then he looked over to me. He was a big guy. Big strong bald head. Wide nose. Kind of a defiant, wild, defeated look. I said, “Ted? Ted Roethke? Is that you?” And he nodded slightly. I said, “Wow, Ted, how’s it going? You look like you just got hit with a couple hundred million volts of electricity.”

“No, it’s hydrotherapy,” he said. ” ‘I do not laugh, I do not cry; / I’m sweating out the will to die.’ ”

“Whoa, Ted,” I said. “Sounds a little like Dr. Seuss, except dark. You want to come in and maybe make a phone call to a loved one?”

He shook his head no. I went back to my chair and sat down. The mist came and went. In ten minutes, a car pulled up behind him, and a man got out and led him into the car, and they drove away.

I went inside, and I got in bed next to some anthologies and W. S. Merwin’s The Vixen and slept quite well.

— Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist

It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else. Here we are now.

— John Cage

For it was not so bad being in the forest, I could imagine worse, and I could have stayed there till I died, unrepining, yes, without pining for the light and the plain and the other amenities of my region. For I knew them well, the amenities of my region, and I considered that the forest was no worse. And it was not only no worse, to my mind, but it was better, in this sense, that I was there. That is a strange way, is it not, of looking at things. Perhaps less strange than it seems. For being in the forest, a place neither worse nor better than the others, and being free to stay there, was it not natural I should think highly of it, not because of what it was, but because I was there. For I was there. And being there I did not have to go there, and that was not to be despised . . . .

I longed to go back into the forest. Oh not a real longing. Molloy could stay, where he happened to be.

— Samuel Beckett, Molloy

Sometimes a man rises from the supper table
and goes outside. And he keeps going
because somewhere to the east there’s a church.
His children bless his name as if he were dead.

Another man stays at home until he dies,
stays with plates and glasses.
So then it is his children who go out
into the world, seeking the church that he forgot.

— Rilke, The Book of Hours II, 19

By GARY SHTEYNGART
Published: July 9, 2010
nyt.com

Since fiscal year 2008, I have been permanently attached to my iTelephone. As of two weeks ago, I am a Facebooking twit. With each post, each tap of the screen, each drag and click, I am becoming a different person — solitary where I was once gregarious; a content provider where I at least once imagined myself an artist; nervous and constantly updated where I once knew the world through sleepy, half-shut eyes; detail-oriented and productive where I once saw life float by like a gorgeously made documentary film. And, increasingly, irrevocably, I am a stranger to books, to the long-form text, to the pleasures of leaving myself and inhabiting the free-floating consciousness of another. With each passing year, scientists estimate that I lose between 6 and 8 percent of my humanity, so that by the close of this decade you will be able to quantify my personality. By the first quarter of 2020 you will be able to understand who I am through a set of metrics as simple as those used to measure the torque of the latest-model Audi or the spring of some brave new toaster.

“This right here,” said the curly-haired, 20-something Apple Store glam-nerd who sold me my latest iPhone, “is the most important purchase you will ever make in your life.” He looked at me, trying to gauge whether the holiness of this moment had registered as he passed me the Eucharist with two firm, unblemished hands. “For real?” I said, trying to sound like a teenager, trying to mimic what all these devices and social media are trying to do, which is to restore in us the feelings of youth and control.

“For real,” he said. And he was right. The device came out of the box and my world was transformed. I walked outside my book-ridden apartment. The first thing that happened was that New York fell away around me. It disappeared. Poof. The city I had tried to set to the page in three novels and counting, the hideously outmoded boulevardier aspect of noticing societal change in the gray asphalt prism of Manhattan’s eye, noticing how the clothes are draping the leg this season, how backsides are getting smaller above 59th Street and larger east of the Bowery, how the singsong of the city is turning slightly less Albanian on this corner and slightly more Fujianese on this one — all of it, finished. Now, an arrow threads its way up my colorful screen. The taco I hunger for is 1.3 miles away, 32 minutes of walking or 14 minutes if I manage to catch the F train. I follow the arrow taco-ward, staring at my iPhone the way I once glanced at humanity, with interest and anticipation. In my techno-fugue state I nearly knock down toddlers and the elderly, even as the strange fiction and even stranger reality of New York, from the world of Bartleby forward, tries to reassert itself in the form of an old man in a soiled guayabera proudly, openly defecating on Grand Street. But sorry, viejo, you’re not global enough to hold my attention. “Thousands of Uzbeks Flee Violence in Kyrgyzstan.” “Gary, what do we want to do about Turkish rights?” “G did u see the articl about M.I.A. + truffle fries = totes messed up.” I still have to eat, and when I finally get to my destination that taco tastes as good as my iPhone said it would. But I am not dining alone. The smartphone, my secret sharer, is in my other hand. Even as the pico de gallo is dribbling down my chin I am lost to the restaurant, the people, the commerce around me, my thumb pressing down the correct quadrants of the screen to tell the world just how awesome this taco is, even as “Kyrgyz Authorities Order Uzbeks to Remove Barriers,” while “A Third Filipino Journalist Is Killed,” and, over “In Eritrea, the Young Dream of Leaving.”

I dream of leaving, too. Heading upstate in the summer­time with a trunk full of books, watching Roose­velt Island sweep by in a rainstorm, I wake up from the techno-fugue state and remember who I am, the 37 analog years that went into creating this particular human being. Upstate I will train for my vocation, ­novel-writing, by tearing through the Russian classics that gave me my start, reading up on those frigid lovelorn Moscow and Petersburg winters while summer ants crawl up my shins. In the meantime, I will start conjuring my next book, one that with any luck may still be read on paper by live human beings five years from now. In my quest for calm, I have a surprising ally. As far as I’m concerned, American Telephone & Telegraph has done more for the art of reading and introspection than all the Kindles and Nooks ever invented. Because up in the exalted summer greenery of the mid-Hudson Valley, completing an AT&T call is like driving a Trabant from New York to Los Angeles: technically feasible but not really going to happen.

I am sitting underneath a tree beside a sturdy summer cottage rebuilt by an ingenious Swedish woman. The birds are twittering, but in a slightly different way than my New York friends. I open a novel, “A Short History of Women,” by Kate Walbert, a book I will grow to love over the coming week, but at first my data-addled brain is puzzled by the density and length of it (256 pages? how many screens will that fill?), the onrush of feeling and fact, the surprise that someone has let me not into her Facebook account but into the way other minds work. I read and reread the first two pages understanding nothing. Big things are happening. World War I. The suffragist movement. Out of instinct I almost try to press the text of the deckle-edged pages, hoping something will pop up, a link to something trivial and fast. But nothing does. Slowly, and surely, just as the sun begins to swoon over the Hudson River and another Amtrak honks its way past Rhinebeck, delivering its digital refugees upstream, I begin to sense the world between the covers, much as I sense the world around me, a world corporeal and complete, a world that doesn’t need the press of my thumb, because here beneath the weeping willow tree my input is meaningless.

Soon my friends will get off that Amtrak, they will help me roast an animal and some veggies, even as they point their iTelephones at the sky, praying for rain. Their prayers will not be answered. Connecting. . . . will flash impotently on the screen, but they will not connect. In the meantime, something “white nights” will be happening out there; the sun has set and yet it has not. With the animal safely in our stomachs, with single malts and beers before us, we can read or talk softly about what we’re reading, about the glory and sadness of finding ourselves this close to the middle of our existence (cue the Chekhov, cue the Roth) and as we do so the most important purchases we have ever made in our lives are snugly holstered in the pockets of our shorts, useless, as we commune in some ancient way, laughing and groaning, passing around lighted objects and containers of booze while thoroughly facebooking one another for real in the fading summer light.

Gary Shteyngart’s latest novel, “Super Sad True Love Story,” will be published later this month.

It’s not goodbye, and what magic in those dim things to which it will be time enough, when next they pass, to say goodbye. For you must say goodbye, it would be madness not to say goodbye, when the time comes. If you think of the form and light of other days it is without regret.

— Samuel Beckett, Molloy

Nature, and the things we live with and use, precede us and come after us. But they are, so long as we are here, our possession and our friendship. They know with us our needs and our pleasures, as they did those of our ancestors, whose trusted companions they were.

So it follows that all that is here is not to be despised and put down, but, precisely because it did precede us, to be taken by us with the innermost understanding that these appearances and things must be seen and transformed.

Transformed? Yes. For our task is to take this earth so deeply and wholly into ourselves that it will resurrect within our being. We are bees of the invisible. Passionately we plunder the honey of the visible in order to gather it in the great golden hive of the invisible.

— Rilke, Letter to Witold Hulewicz
November 13, 1925

And once again I am, I will not say alone, no, that’s not like me, but, how shall I say, I don’t know, restored to myself, no, I never left myself, free, yes, I don’t know what that means, but it’s the word I mean to use, free to do what, to do nothing, to know, but what, the laws of the mind perhaps, of my mind, that for example water rises in proportion as it drowns you and that you would do better, at least no worse, to obliterate texts than to blacken margins, to fill in the holes of words till all is blank and flat and the whole ghastly business looks like what it is, senseless, speechless, issueless misery.

— Samuel Beckett, Molloy

It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.

— Gertrude Stein