In the deep dark, in the thousand-fathom black waters of ancestral memory and instinctive unconscious, where old gods and primitive responses float invisible and gigantic, something moves. The dust debris on the ocean floor, sediment a million years still, lifts and swirls in its wake.

All I can think to say is that if you can imagine Samuel Beckett and Philip K. Dick collaborating to write a novelization of Jaws, you’ll have a decent idea of what you’re getting into with Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts. The world he creates is astounding; even more so is the fact that a story like this can be so damn gripping.

The point is that although love may die, what is said on its behalf cannot be consumed by the passage of time, and forgiveness is everything.

From The Soul Thief, Charles Baxter. One of those books that in its final act gets you to rethink it, you, it and you, and you and yours.

I felt like a wild thing, ready to mess up
the party, scarf the hors d’oeuvres.
But the dogs said, No, don’t do that,
calm down, after a while they open the door
and let you out, they pet your head, and everything
you might have held against them is gone

You have to read the whole thing. And here’s the poet, Stephen Dunn.

A good bicycle, well applied, will cure most ills this flesh is heir to.

That’s Dr. K.K. Doty, of New York, providing his learned medical opinion in The Bicycle: Its Selection, Riding and Care, published by L.F. Korns in 1892. You can find this quote and a bunch of others at Quickrelease, where you can also click through to a flippable copy of the whole book. A couple people had sent me the link, but it was Ray Spooner’s latest email that got me to reread it all on a day when I was in a state to appreciate it fully.

I also especially like this selection: “As a means of pleasure, cycling stands in the foremost rank, but in common with all the great pleasures, it may easily stand in the foremost in abuse. The desire to ride at an unreasonably high speed may become morbid…The ever lasting scorcher, bent like a hoop, and with sunken cheeks, ought to be quite sufficient warning against this abuse.”

I wish, I told Ray, we were still called scorchers.

I wish we were everlasting. I’m glad we can at least feel that way, some days, some rides.

“Molly Grietje”

A name scribbled in my notebook at the Giro d’Italia. Why was it that I had to come to Italy to read a novel written by an Irishman about a Dutchman whose love of the English sport of cricket helps him survive America . . . to find out that Santa Claus’s wife has a name? This is one of the reasons I could never be in a book club; I have to be free to go where the strange currents of reading by chance take me.

Road cycling is about three or four things, near as I can tell. It’s about riding like a lazy dog most of the time, then riding like the very hounds of hell are chasing you, and you are dripping au jus. It’s about having a basically psychotic relationship with food, saying, “Hello, Clarice…” to pizza and hating it and wanting to kill it while simultaneously having a sick nearly sexual obsession with it. It’s about acting in ways that would make bitchy supermodels recoil and think you indecent and uncivil, not to mention depressingly skinny. But most of all, it’s about upgrading your shit.

The Unholy Roleur nails it. The only thing I disagree with there, and only in my personal context, is the “most” in that last sentence.

“May I tell you about something I discovered?” I could hardly believe the words had come out of my mouth, but the Professor’s hand fell still. Overcome by the beauty of his delicate patterns, perhaps I’d wanted to take part; and I was absolutely sure he would show great respect, even for the humblest discovery.

“The sum of the divisors of 28 is 28.”

“Indeed . . . ” he said. And there, next to his outline of the Artin conjecture, he wrote 28=1+2+4+7+14. “A perfect number.”

“Perfect number?” I murmured, savoring the sound of the words.

“The smallest perfect number is 6: 6=1+2+3.”

“Oh! Then they’re not so special after all.”

“On the contrary, a number with this kind of perfection is rare indeed. After 28, the next one is 496: 496=1+2+4+8+16+31+62+124+248. After that, you have 8,128, and the next one after that is 33,550,336. The farther you go, the more difficult they are to find” — though he had easily followed the trail into the billions!

“Naturally, the sums of the divisors of numbers other than perfect numbers are either greater or less than the numbers themselves. When the sum is greater, it’s called an ‘abundant number,’ and when it’s less, it’s a ‘deficient number.’ Marvelous names, don’t you think? The divisors of 18 — 1+2+3+6+9 — equal 21, so it’s an abundant number. But 14 is deficient: 1+2+7=10.”

I tried picturing 18 and 14, but now that I’d heard the Professor’s explanation, they were no longer simply numbers. Eighteen secretly carried a heavy burden, while 14 fell mute in the face of its terrible lack.

“There are lots of deficient numbers that are just one larger than the sum of their divisors, but there are no abundant numbers that are just one smaller than the sum of theirs. Or rather, no one has ever found one.”

“Why is that?”

“The answer is written in God’s notebook,” said the Professor.

If I’d had any math teacher in my life who had lectured on any of the numerical marvels I read about in Yoko Ogawa’s The Housekeeper and the Professor (including amicable numbers and Euler’s Formula, the most beautiful equation, I think), maybe I wouldn’t regard numbers as, at best, something I must coexist with. 

Diarrhea — nearly 90 percent of which is caused by fecally contamined food or water — kills a child every fifteen seconds. The number of children who have died from diarrhea in the last decade exceeds the total number of people killed by armed conflict since the Second World War. . . In poorly sewered nineteenth-century London, one child in two died early. After toilets, sewers and hand-washing with soap became normal, child mortality dropped by a fifth . . . Harvard University geneticist Gary Ruvkun believes the toilet is the single biggest variable in increasing human life span.

Stats from The Big Necessity, Rose George’s book about toilets, sewers, sanitation and life. I simultaneously want a $5,000 Neorest for joy, and a Biogas Digester latrine for utility — to use my family’s poo to power our house.

Vinay was unhappy with his beat. He believed he ought to have been writing about the great chefs in the great restaurants, or educating the public about vintage wines or — his obession — single malt whiskeys. . . . Vinay found it distasteful to deal with the owners and cooks and the cheap places, immigrants who generally spoke little English and saw no particular reason to spend time talking to him. Also, the sheer variety of foodstuffs bothered him. “One night it’s Cantonese, then it’s Georgian, then it’s Indonesian, then Syrian. I mean, I think this shit is good baklava, but what the fuck do I know, really? How can I be sure?” Yet when he wrote, Vinay exuded bright certainty and expertise. As I repeatedly went forth with him and began to understand the ignorance and contradiction and language difficulties with which he contended, and the doubtful sources of his information and the seemingly bottomless history and darkness out of which the dishes of New York emerge, the deeper grew my suspicion that his work finally consisted of minting or perpetuating and in any event circulating misconceptions about his subject and in this way adding to the endless perplexity of the world.

That just knocked me out. Cold. I mean, goddamn. I need to deal with this idea in the book I’m trying to do, struggling to get right. This is from Netherland, by Joseph O’Neill, a brilliant book, probably to be judged a classic, a book that somehow uses cricket to explain what America became post 9-11. And O’Neill — that boy can just plain write. I’m marking up page after page, phrase after phrase:

“But by the fall of 2002, even my work, the largest of the pots and pans I’d placed under my life’s leaking ceiling, had become too small to contain my misery.”

“The brown river, now very still, was glossed in places, as if immense silver tires had skidded there.”

“Always one saw evidence of the tiny brick houses that the incontinent local municipalities, Voorschoten and Leidschendam and Rijswijk and Zoetermeer, pooped over the rural spaces surrounding The Hague.

“Perhaps the relevant truth — and it’s one whose existence was apparent to my wife, and I’m sure to much of the world, long before it became apparent to me — is that we all find ourselves in temporal currents and that unless you’re paying attention you’ll discover, often too late, that an undertow of weeks or of years has pulled you deep into trouble.”

And on and on and on.

Time trials are about maintaining a constant pace, like a continuous hum. But they are also about pain, an agonising heat you feel in the stomach, a burning that affects your breathing. You get into a rhythm, and when the pain comes, you tunnel into it, exploring it to the bitter end. Even the downward movement with my hand to reach my water bottle is going to upset the rhythm, so I often don’t take on any water in a time trial. I remember the time trial I won at the Giro d’Italia in 2000. I felt that heat in the stomach, a pain like gastritis, and I said to myself, Go with it to the end, to the very end. That’s what makes a time trial specialist — you feel that stinging in your legs, here, and you convert it into forward motion. You know it’s linked to the fact that you’re doing well. There have been times when I’ve wanted to ride a fast time trial, but I haven’t been able to cross the threshold into pain.

I don’t know about TTs, but that’s racing. For me, anyway: Riding into the pain as far as you can, farther than you can see or imagine, off the map of your sentience then, once you’re lost, drilling straight down deep into it. I miss making the trip. That’s Victor Hugo Pena talking, in the book A Significant Other, written by Matt Rendell. It can be a slog at times, but lights up when Victor Hugo gets on the page. Worth reading.