When I take my old copies of the phenomenologies of religion down from the shelf and thumb through their pages, I feel as if I were walking through the halls of abandoned buildings. My graduate school notes lie heavy in the margins, like scrawls of graffiti on the walls, attesting to the fact that human once contested these spaces. I wonder, each time I close one of these volumes and put it back on the shelf, whether the puff of dust that arises from its binding is not a reminder that systems are built to crumble, and the grander the system, the more spectacular the fall.

The overriding sense of Tokyo...is that it is a city devoted to the new, sped up in a subtle but profound way: a postmodern science-fiction story set ten minutes in the future.

Someone who had authority, or should have had authority and did not exercise authority. I do not know. But someone sometime let you forget how to choose, and what. Someone let your peoples forget it was the only thing of importance, choosing. So completely forgetting that when I say choose to you you make expressions with your face such as “Herrrrrre we are going.” Someone taught that temples are for fanatics only and took away the temples and promised there was no need for temples. And now there is no shelter. And no map for finding the shelter of a temple. And you all stumble about in the dark, this confusion of permissions.

—Now please please no please don’t tell me now Crow Books, too…?  I loved that place, the paperbacks shoved behind the other paperbacks on the metal racks because there wasn’t space, the mostly sense that they just want to have all those nice books in there for you, waiting for you if you want - need - to discover something, and the bad lighting, and the rumply chair with its bottom rupturing stuff, and Mr. Shelling and his rectangular mustache and no employee recommendations and discovering Denis Johnson and Virgin Suicides and I just can’t, I can’t—

Quinn froze. There was nothing he could do now that would not be a mistake. Whatever choice he made--and he had to make a choice--would be arbitrary, a submission to chance. Uncertainty would haunt him to the end. At that moment, the two Stillmans started on their way again. The first turned right, the second turned left. Quin craved an amoeba's body, wanting to cut himself in half and run off in two directions at once. (Chapter 7)

For official record, announce instructor, the state requires no epic hero. No strive achieve personal celebrity of spotlight and applause. Lectures instructor, the state desires best ideal perform as mediocre. No gain attention showboat. No buffoon. Best effort so occur average. Suppress climbing ego. Become ordinary. Invisible.