The End of the World Book: A Novel

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Q < 201 = Q Between the years 1946 and 1952, my mother lived in Brisbane, the capital of the Australian state of Queensland, where, she told me, all the houses were on stilts, so all the furniture in the houses—sofas, curtains, etc.—wouldn’t get ruined when there were floods, which there often were, floods of a tropical nature, as well as big flying cockroaches, big as angels, angels that make you shiver and must be exterminated. During her stay in Queensland, on Saturday nights my mother frequently went out dancing to a place called Cloudland, and like all the other girls she would adjust her skirt, so the lacy edge of her petticoat would show, just slightly. And, she told me, she was constantly adjusting her hair, because the humidity virtually destroyed her curls, both in the southern part of the state, which was semitropical, but even more in the northern part, which was tropical, meaning there were mangrove thickets, and where my mother once rode on a glass-bottom boat, over and along the coral ridge that is known as the Great Barrier Reef, and she looked down at all the different colors, and she became overwhelmed by all the colors, and, glad to be back on land, she wrote postcards. <=  Throughout the history of philosophy, every philosopher has sat down to work in the morning in relatively good spirits. Lurking in each philosopher’s mind is the thought that perhaps this will be the book he has dreamt of all his life, the book that will destroy all questions and explain everything so thoroughly that there’ll no longer be any need for the world. By the evening, in whatever century, the philosopher is always stiff: philosophy has had a profound effect upon the spine. Even more so, he is depressed. The questions follow him everywhere , panting, snapping at his heels, questions such as what is the relationship between philosophy and bad breath, philosophy and lost love, philosophy and crow’s feet, philosophy and erections , philosophy and yawning, and one question in particular: why does all thought end in failure?   I like question marks. I think it was sexier, though, when we called them interrogation marks. It’s always quite touching when you look up someone in the encyclopedia, someone who lived a long time ago and has since dripped into obscurity, and their dates of birth and death are each followed by a question mark, as if there’s a question as to whether they were ever really born at all, or ever truly died. Every direct question should end with a question mark, for example, Do you fully understand that one day you are going to die? But life and even more so death are more like indirect questions, which do not require question marks, for example , I asked you whether you really understood that eventually you are going to die. Q Quintilian was a Roman rhetorician who wrote a twelve-volume work called the Institutio Oratoria, which examined the training < 202 = < 203 = of the would-be orator from infancy to death. Beneath all of Quintilian’s highly elaborate rhetorical systems one senses the presence of things decidedly non-rhetorical: things like babble, prattle, puke, baby rattles, death rattles, last gasps, and spittle. Throughout the book he gives some strange and contradictory advice. For example, commenting on the fire that swept through Rome in AD 64, the one during which Nero was said to have played the lyre, and afterwards blamed the Christians for, putting many to death, Quintilian blames rhetoric, and advises the reader to burn it. Another practical piece of advice the Roman instructor offers involves keeping a suitcase under one’s bed, in preparation for death, a suitcase packed with the subtlest rhetoric, which, he assures us, will be of the utmost necessity when dealing with the nuances of the afterlife.  We didn’t have a family photo album per se. Our photographs were scattered all over the house, as if our house itself were a kind of photo album. I would come across old snapshots slipped inside books, in envelopes, in shoeboxes and drawers. One afternoon I found a black-and-white photograph of two teenage boys, by the sea, playing a game of quoits. The boys were wearing strange ruched black underwear that looked very glossy against their white skin. I took the photo to my mother; she tried to remember who the boys were but eventually admitted that she didn’t recognize them. When I looked up quoits I discovered that this game, which involved throwing iron rings at a peg stuck in the ground, had originated in ancient Rome, and, back then when young men played quoits, they didn’t wear anything. Over 2,000 years it seemed nothing had really changed, except, at some point, young men put on strange underwear.   Wittgenstein later rejected his Sad Investigations, claiming they just weren’t sad enough: to write such a book one would require sentences composed of black tears. Yet the book contains lasting insights , for example: the o of the glory hole and the o of my mouth mirror the two o’s in philosophy. During such extra-philosophical activities one’s mouth begins to taste like a goldmine. One’s knees begin to ache terribly, waiting for the boys to arrive, waiting for quotation marks to flee the scene. QUO WARRANTO Quo warranto is a Latin phrase that means by what authority do I describe the world? Today the term is used in courts of law to determine whether an individual has the authority to describe anyone or talk about anything. Inevitably, the courts decide that the individual has no authority. So what to do with the tongue? In the early days of the twenty-first century the tongue poses a problem ; the individual as we formerly understood it is dead, but still describing, and still warm, like a brand new corpse. < 204 = ...