Strings Remain Forever Quotes

Love is like a violin. The music may stop now and then, but the strings remain forever.

And then I realized that love is like a helium balloon. You know the one which flies away into the sky if you don’t hold it by its strings? No matter how much I tried to break my string, the balloon always remained there. Know why? Because maybe unknown to yourself, you were holding a couple of strings as well

[...]a man and a boy, side by side on a yellow Swedish sofa from the 1950s that the man had bought because it somehow reminded him of a zoot suit, watching the A’s play Baltimore, Rich Harden on the mound working that devious ghost pitch, two pairs of stocking feet, size 11 and size 15, rising from the deck of the coffee table at either end like towers of the Bay Bridge, between the feet the remains in an open pizza box of a bad, cheap, and formerly enormous XL meat lover’s special, sausage, pepperoni, bacon, ground beef, and ham, all of it gone but crumbs and parentheses of crusts left by the boy, brackets for the blankness of his conversation and, for all the man knew, of his thoughts, Titus having said nothing to Archy since Gwen’s departure apart from monosyllables doled out in response to direct yes-or-nos, Do you like baseball? you like pizza? eat meat? pork?, the boy limiting himself whenever possible to a tight little nod, guarding himself at his end of the sofa as if riding on a crowded train with something breakable on his lap, nobody saying anything in the room, the city, or the world except Bill King and Ken Korach calling the plays, the game eventless and yet blessedly slow, player substitutions and deep pitch counts eating up swaths of time during which no one was required to say or to decide anything, to feel what might conceivably be felt, to dread what might be dreaded, the game standing tied at 1 and in theory capable of going on that way forever, or at least until there was not a live arm left in the bullpen, the third-string catcher sent in to pitch the thirty-second inning, batters catnapping slumped against one another on the bench, dead on their feet in the on-deck circle, the stands emptied and echoing, hot dog wrappers rolling like tumbleweeds past the diehards asleep in their seats, inning giving way to inning as the dawn sky glowed blue as the burner on a stove, and busloads of farmhands were brought in under emergency rules to fill out the weary roster, from Sacramento and Stockton and Norfolk, Virginia, entire villages in the Dominican ransacked for the flower of their youth who were loaded into the bellies of C-130s and flown to Oakland to feed the unassuageable appetite of this one game for batsmen and fielders and set-up men, threat after threat giving way to the third out, weak pop flies, called third strikes, inning after inning, week after week, beards growing long, Christmas coming, summer looping back around on itself, wars ending, babies graduating from college, and there’s ball four to load the bases for the 3,211th time, followed by a routine can of corn to left, the commissioner calling in varsity teams and the stars of girls’ softball squads and Little Leaguers, Archy and Titus sustained all that time in their equally infinite silence, nothing between them at all but three feet of sofa;

The key point is that these patterns, while mostly stable, are not permanent: certain environmental experiences can add or subtract methyls and acetyls, changing those patterns. In effect this etches a memory of what the organism was doing or experiencing into its cells—a crucial first step for any Lamarck-like inheritance. Unfortunately, bad experiences can be etched into cells as easily as good experiences. Intense emotional pain can sometimes flood the mammal brain with neurochemicals that tack methyl groups where they shouldn’t be. Mice that are (however contradictory this sounds) bullied by other mice when they’re pups often have these funny methyl patterns in their brains. As do baby mice (both foster and biological) raised by neglectful mothers, mothers who refuse to lick and cuddle and nurse. These neglected mice fall apart in stressful situations as adults, and their meltdowns can’t be the result of poor genes, since biological and foster children end up equally histrionic. Instead the aberrant methyl patterns were imprinted early on, and as neurons kept dividing and the brain kept growing, these patterns perpetuated themselves. The events of September 11, 2001, might have scarred the brains of unborn humans in similar ways. Some pregnant women in Manhattan developed post-traumatic stress disorder, which can epigenetically activate and deactivate at least a dozen genes, including brain genes. These women, especially the ones affected during the third trimester, ended up having children who felt more anxiety and acute distress than other children when confronted with strange stimuli. Notice that these DNA changes aren’t genetic, because the A-C-G-T string remains the same throughout. But epigenetic changes are de facto mutations; genes might as well not function. And just like mutations, epigenetic changes live on in cells and their descendants. Indeed, each of us accumulates more and more unique epigenetic changes as we age. This explains why the personalities and even physiognomies of identical twins, despite identical DNA, grow more distinct each year. It also means that that detective-story trope of one twin committing a murder and both getting away with it—because DNA tests can’t tell them apart—might not hold up forever. Their epigenomes could condemn them. Of course, all this evidence proves only that body cells can record environmental cues and pass them on to other body cells, a limited form of inheritance. Normally when sperm and egg unite, embryos erase this epigenetic information—allowing you to become you, unencumbered by what your parents did. But other evidence suggests that some epigenetic changes, through mistakes or subterfuge, sometimes get smuggled along to new generations of pups, cubs, chicks, or children—close enough to bona fide Lamarckism to make Cuvier and Darwin grind their molars.

In the land of my girlhood, there were many kites. There was one for each of us. We flew them to our heart’s delight. We flew them till they bound our feet, till they bound our hearts with kite strings. The kites are forever tethered to our hearts though we can no longer see them. Wherever we go, they remain in our sky. No knife, no scissors can ever sever our hearts from our kites.

That’s it!” Charlie said, pausing the audiobook. “I knew there was something in this book I needed to remember. Billy Pilgrim is saying that the most important thing he learned is that it only appears that we’re dead at the time of our death and that all moments—past, present, and future—have always existed. He says that it’s only an illusion ‘that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string.’ What he’s saying is that even though the moments in our lives pass, they still exist and always will.” Charlie continued, “It reminds me of what Robert Lanza said in Biocentrism—that death is an illusion, and there are an infinite number of ‘now’ moments in a person’s life that are not arranged in a linear fashion. What if those ‘now’ moments are like the still frames of a stop-motion picture—they only appear to be moving because they’re played rapidly in sequence, but the individual frames are inanimate? Then, the individual frames—the ‘now’ moments in someone’s life— are like the individual beads on a string, separated only by the smallest unit of length, the Planck length. If you removed the string, the individual beads—all the ‘now’ moments in a person’s life—would float around the person like bubbles in the air but remain connected to that person through quantum entanglement.” Chris listened intently. “If that were the case,” Charlie said, “then one of our bubbles—one of our ‘now’ moments—would be us driving in this car right now, and another bubble would be when you, Isaac, and I were hiking to the teahouse in Canada, and still another bubble would be the moment Isaac died. If you remember, Robert Lanza said that our bodies die at the moment we call death, but our consciousness only moves from one ‘now’ moment to another. What Kurt Vonnegut is saying is similar . . . that a person is in bad shape at the time of death, but he’s perfectly fine in so many other moments. They’re both saying death is not the end— that there are an infinite number of ‘now’ moments in a person’s life.” “I remember you telling me that Allison said time was different on the other side,” Chris added. “I wonder if our bubbles that surround us, our ‘now’ moments—the past, present, and future—which all exist simultaneously and forever, would explain why mediums can see into the past and future. Those ‘now’ moments would be no further away from us than the present.” “Good point!” Charlie said. “I didn’t think of that. Apparently, Robert Lanza, Allison, and Kurt Vonnegut are saying similar things, but from very different angles.

That’s it!” Charlie said, pausing the audiobook. “I knew there was something in this book I needed to remember. Billy Pilgrim is saying that the most important thing he learned is that it only appears that we’re dead at the time of our death and that all moments—past, present, and future—have always existed. He says that it’s only an illusion ‘that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string.’ What he’s saying is that even though the moments in our lives pass, they still exist and always will.” Charlie continued, “It reminds me of what Robert Lanza said in Biocentrism—that death is an illusion, and there are an infinite number of ‘now’ moments in a person’s life that are not arranged in a linear fashion. What if those ‘now’ moments are like the still frames of a stop-motion picture—they only appear to be moving because they’re played rapidly in sequence, but the individual frames are inanimate? Then, the individual frames—the ‘now’ moments in someone’s life— are like the individual beads on a string, separated only by the smallest unit of length, the Planck length. If you removed the string, the individual beads—all the ‘now’ moments in a person’s life—would float around the person like bubbles in the air but remain connected to that person through quantum entanglement.” Chris listened intently. “If that were the case,” Charlie said, “then one of our bubbles—one of our ‘now’ moments—would be us driving in this car right now, and another bubble would be when you, Isaac, and I were hiking to the teahouse in Canada, and still another bubble would be the moment Isaac died. If you remember, Robert Lanza said that our bodies die at the moment we call death, but our consciousness only moves from one ‘now’ moment to another. What Kurt Vonnegut is saying is similar . . . that a person is in bad shape at the time of death, but he’s perfectly fine in so many other moments. They’re both saying death is not the end— that there are an infinite number of ‘now’ moments in a person’s life.” “I remember you telling me that Allison said time was different on the other side,” Chris added. “I wonder if our bubbles that surround us, our ‘now’ moments—the past, present, and future—which all exist simultaneously and forever, would explain why mediums can see into the past and future. Those ‘now’ moments would be no further away from us than the present.” “Good point!” Charlie said. “I didn’t think of that. Apparently, Robert Lanza, Allison, and Kurt Vonnegut are saying similar things, but from very different angles.