Sometimes it isn't the complete story but just a paragraph,
maybe a sentence or two, that sticks in your head.
I found that with this particular story. I didn't see one overall idea or message that
I could readily pull from it (of course one could always surface later) but a
nice passage below as well as part of the Contributor’s Notes will do for this
entry.
“Nobody knows jack-shit,” Voss is saying to Lamar. “If you are going to stay in this business,
you’ve got to remember that. Something
else, something besides men and machines gets all this fancy work done.”
…
“I see what you mean,” Lamar says.
“No you don’t. You really don’t,” Voss says. “What I am telling you is that there is a
great dark…consensus…that sweeps things along to their inevitable
conclusion. There is an intelligence
behind it, but, believe me, it’s not human.
It is the intelligence of soil, the thing that lifts trees and flowers
out of the ground. I am too astonished
and thrilled to be frightened by it.”
And then in the Contributor’s notes section
Demarinis writes:
“I believe thought processes are primitive. Logic and reason mask a dark topography
rutted by glaciers of superstition. We
prefer intuition over analysis. Reason
tells me smart men with blueprints and serious purpose create ICBMs. My limited experience and my intuition tell
me something else. One of the results of
this conviction is “The Flowers of Boredom.” All this happened decades
ago. It still astonishes me.”
And thinking further on this, I can take the above
personally as I work in my life and in the life of my family to move away from
the “dark consensus”.
I think about it quite a bit actually and I believe
that it is even more prevalent and powerful in our lives than it was when this
story was written in the late 80s.
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