Alone with You in the Ether by Olivie Blake EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors: Olivie Blake
- Language: English
- Genre: Literary Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
a hypothesis
THERE WOULD BE TIMES, particularly at first, when Regan would
attempt to identify the moment things had set themselves on a path to
inevitable collision. Moments had become intensely important to Regan,
more so than they had ever been. Considering it was Aldo who had altered
the shapes and paths of her thinking, it was probably his fault that she now
considered everything in terms of time.
Her own hypothesis was fairly elementary: There was a single moment
responsible for every sequence thereafter. Regan wasn’t the science
enthusiast Aldo was—and certainly not the genius he was, either—but her
view of causality was methodical enough. Everything was a consequence
that rippled out from some fixed point of entry, and it had become a game
of hers (probably stolen from him) to expose the genesis from which
everything else had sprung.
Had it begun the moment Aldo met her eye? Was it when he said her
name, or when he told her his? Had it been the moment she’d told him Get
up, you can’t sit there, or did it have nothing to do with him at all? Could
even that moment have been the product of something begun days, weeks,
even lifetimes prior?
With Regan, everything came down to sacredness. She liked, in the
time between docent tours, to wander her favorite parts of the Art Institute,
which she typically selected to match the religiosity of her moods. Which
was not to say she gravitated to religious art specifically; more often she
aimed to match her private longings with the god (who was sometimes God,
but not always) being worshipped through a polished frame. In early
Catholic paintings, she looked for awe. In modern work, for sleekness. In
contemporary, the vibrancy of dislocation. Deities themselves had changed
over time, but the act of devotion had not. That was the torment of it, of art,
and the perpetual idolatry of its creation. For every sensation Regan could
conjure, there was an artist who had beautifully suffered the same.
The wandering was a foregone conclusion—a constant, as Aldo would
say—but the armory, that day, was not. When Regan had chosen to visit the
armory in the past it had been because it stood for the sacredness of
purpose: there was no frivolity here. Instead there was the irony of peace;
empty shells of weaponry, garish red walls, fossils of conquest. It reminded
her of a time when people still committed their violence eye to eye, which
gave her a paradoxical sense of gratification. It was intimate because it was
not. It was religious because it was not. It was beautiful because, at the
heart of it, it was twisted and soulless and ugly, and therefore it mirrored
something masochistic in Regan herself.
Her choice of the armory that day implied Significance; it had the ripple
effect of Consequence, cosmically so. But then what had been the cause?
Had she met Aldo there because fate had willfully intervened, or because
they already possessed such similar forms of rumination? Was it inevitable,
god descending from machine, or was it because she had been vacant where
he was vacant, and therefore both would inevitably seek to be filled?
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