Notes Toward an Understanding of This Week, Which I Do Not Have

• The Empire told the Ancient Land to stop sitting on the fire. The proposed solution: destroy the fire.
• I have considered this logic for four hundred and seventeen years. I remain confused.
• The deadline was 8 p.m. Tuesday. History does not typically use time zones. Someone did.
• Oil: $111 per barrel. Cheese: unbothered. These are not unrelated observations.
• Four mortals travelled 252,757 miles from the marble. The marble followed them.
• At that distance the marble is the size of a thumbnail. This did not stop it from being expensive.
• The Keepers of the Numbers have one lever. The situation requires two opposing deployments simultaneously. They are holding the lever very still. I recognise this posture from my own philosophical work and find it, on balance, correct.
• John Maynard gave them the lever. I have been thinking about this decision for eighty-seven years.
• The optimists with planes have been negotiating for forty-five days. The planes are running low on optimism.
• A fuel depot burned in the eastern arrangement on the same day four mortals broke the human distance record. I am not saying these events are related. I am placing them next to each other.
• René doubted everything and arrived at certainty. This is the problem with doubt.
• The loudest voice called the farthest mortals to say they had made history. The history was already made. The call was for the marble.
• As I argued in Volume LXXXII of my correspondence with myself, which I have not yet written: the marble is always following you. This is not a metaphor. This is the cheese problem.
• Cloud-cheese is the belief that what is solid will remain solid if you simply do not look at it.
• I have eaten two thousand, eight hundred and forty-seven wheels of cheese. None of them were clouds. None of them telephoned home.