Words&Dirt

“He and Jones were now no more than four feet apart, separated only by the log wall of the cabin.

Richard could squat there and wait and hope that Jones would move into just the right position so that Richard could fire through a gap between logs.  Or he could go out the way he had come in, move around the side of the cabin, and try to shoot around the corner.  Or he could present himself in the window again and just fire from point-blank range.

He was cocking the revolver again when Jones opened fire with his Kalashnikov.  Richard’s whole body flinched, and he very nearly let the hammer slip.  But no rounds seemed to be passing through the cabin.  Nor could they, really, given Jones’s location.  So what the hell was Jones shooting at?

It came to him that he was overthinking this.

This was a shoot-out.  Nothing could be simpler.  But he was making it too complicated by trying to use his wits to work the angles, figure out some clever way to dodge around the essential nature of what was happening, to get through to the other side without getting hurt.  His opponent, of course, simply didn’t give a shit what happened to him and was probably a dead man anyway––which gave Jones an advantage that Richard could match only by adopting the same attitude.  It was an attitude that had come naturally to him as a young man, taking down the grizzly bear with the slug gun and doing any number of other things that later seemed ill-advised.  Wealth and success had changed him; he now looked back on all such adventures with fastidious horror.  But he had to revert to that mind-set now or else Jones would simply kill him.

All of this came simply and immediately into his head, as though the Furious Muses had chosen this moment to give up on being furious for once––perhaps forever––and were now singing in his ears like angels.”

––Reamde, by Neil Stephenson, pg. 1035-6

“We all behave like Maxwell’s demon.  Organisms organize.  In everyday experience lies the reason sober physicists across two centuries kept this cartoon fantasy alive.  We sort the mail, build sand castles, solve jigsaw puzzles, separate wheat from chaff, rearrange chess pieces, collect stamps, alphabetize books, create symmetry, compose sonnets and sonatas, put our rooms in order, and to do all this requires no great energy, as long as we can apply intelligence.  We propagate structure (not just we humans but we who are alive).  We disturb the tendency toward equilibrium.  It would be absurd to attempt a thermodynamic accounting for such processes, but it is not absurd to say we are reducing entropy, piece by piece.  Bit by bit.  This original demon, discerning one molecule at a time, distinguishing fast from slow, and operating his little gateway, is sometimes described as ‘superintelligent,’ but compared to a real organism it is an idiot savant.  Not only do living things lessen the disorder in their environments; they are in themselves, their skeletons and their flesh, vesicles and membranes, shells and carapaces, leaves and blossoms, circulatory systems and metabolic pathways––miracles of pattern and structure.  It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in this universe.”

––The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood, by James Gleick, pg. 281-2