Thought Snack, "The End of Mr. Y" by Scarlett Thomas

Before I begin, this book probably requires a synopsis. The End of Mr. Y by Scarlett Thomas is about a literature PhD student who finds a rare book that describes how to enter the world of consciousness (the Troposphere) where you can surf minds and emotions through time and space.

Quotes from the book:
“Not only is nothing good or ill but thinking makes it so, but nothing is at all except in so far as thinking has made it so.” -Samuel Butler
But the ground shakes, as if something’s trying to push up from below, and I think about other people’s mother’s shaking their duvets or even god shaking out the fabric of space-time…. Pg. 3
There’s something so sad about broken concrete. Pg. 5
“…But I quite like the way you can talk about science without necessarily using mathematics but using metaphors instead. That’s how I’ve been approaching all my columns. For each of these ideas and theories, you find there’s a little story that goes with it.” Pg. 23
…he was so depressed he couldn’t bring himself to kill himself. I became worried and started doing small, life-enhancing things for him such as making soup and offering to bring him books…. For ages he said yes to soup but no to the books, but recently he’s been asking for poetry…. Pg. 28
(that all sounds frightening familiar.)
To paraphrase the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, she wasn’t even wrong. Maybe that’s where human society is now, at the beginning of the 21st century: not even wrong. Pg. 34
They taught me that everything you are told by anyone is a lie. But then it turned out that they lied, too. Pg. 35
(like the paradox of the guards at the 2 trailheads….)
I sit up in bed slowly, feeling the disappointment trickle away like puddles after a rain shower….I hate the honesty of morning; the time before your consciousness switches on the light and gets rid of all the shadows. Yuck. But my coffee’s OK. Pg. 36
(again, way too familiar… and now I don’t even drink coffee.)
It’s the kind of thing I do when I should be working: write labels on shampoo bottles, iron jeans, think about seagulls. Pg. 153
(ditto… in fact the reason I type these up is because they are so familiar…)
“Am I invisible?” I say to the bartender. “Can you see me?” …I…eyeball her enough to make her play three wrong notes in a bar. Well, I think they were wrong. The whole world seems the wrong way up now. Why am I here? Pg. 180
If I cry then it’s all over. All the adrenaline will wash away and I think adrenaline is all I’ve got left. Pg. 209
“connecting with other people; losing yourself in them; becoming ‘at one.’ It’s hell. Who said that hell is other people?”
“Satre.”
“He’s right. I didn’t realize: ripping out your soul and offering to share it around isn’t at all like giving Communion, or taking some old clothes to the charity shop. It’s like going into the park at night and taking off all your clothes and waiting to be pissed on.” Pg. 220
(What he described sounds to me like falling in love.)
“I tried being ‘normal’: drinking and swearing. It was quite fun. But now I’m not sure who I am. I use this word ‘I’ and I don’t know what it means. I don’t know where it begins and ends. I don’t even know what it’s made of.” Pg. 221
But being pleased with myself won’t do. I should be nothing with myself. I want void. Idiot: I can’t want void. I have to let it come to me. Pg. 271
“What exactly is God going to do with them?” I ask.
“Free them,” Adam says. “Make them properly dead.”
“Can God do that?” I ask.
Adam nods. “He may not have created everything, but he’s good as a manager.” Pg. 368

I like the idea of a fluid consciousness – that you can change all sorts of aspects of the past and present, but it all just comes out the way it comes out. There are no butterflies flapping their wings, there’s just what happens. It’s not a fatalistic book at all, the opposite, in fact. The main character is able to choose a variety of ways for her life to unfold and it just doesn’t matter to anyone but those closest to her. She’s not saving the world; she’s just saving herself a few people she cares about. Well, she’s also saving humanity. She’s saving the ability to know.

In the book, god(s) is (are) the collection of human thought, attention. I think belief systems are whatever people find that they need to get by. Life is incredibly beautiful and painful, disappointing and inspired. We use belief so that it doesn’t drive us mad. Does it create these gods in this other world? It seems a bit literal, but OK.

The Christian emphasis of the book made me a little uncomfortable. There were multiple gods (a.k.a. saints), but the Christian God dominated it all. I don’t want to give away the ending, but the ending left me a little sour with its biblicalness.

What excited me most in the book is empathy. In Hitchhikers’, the woman doesn’t need the empathy gun because she is already a woman so she is already able to conceptualize what another person thinks and feels. This book, written by a woman, takes a slightly more complicated, and real, approach. The main character is already empathetic, but through experiencing others’ consciousnesses (and surfing them), she literally has another’s feelings. That’s bigger than just imagining how someone might feel.

The Troposphere also has the possibility to ride a particular emotion to a different time or place. That blew my mind. I don’t actually believe that every time we experience a certain emotion is linked up anywhere – I don’t think the brain is that smart. But trying to work that out is a fun thought snack.

Language is another thing – the narrator is able to conceptualize the Troposphere as functioning like a computer but also as the manifestation of language. I like language too, but it’s just a tool, a means to an end. I got the idea from the book that the author sees language as being something bigger than that – that it’s a world in itself or at least that it creates one. Maybe my relationship with language is limited, or maybe I’m undervaluing language, but I see it more as the narrow place between two dramatic canyons, my consciousness and yours.

I have been guilty of seeing my present as temporary, and marginal, to some greater situation I’ll discover in the future. As a pre-teen, I wanted to be an actress, but the main theater I ever did was our little production of Alice in Wonderland where I laughed instead of reciting my lines as the Gryphon. (I also played the Red Queen and the Mad Hatter, parts I took much more seriously.) Early in high school, I was still saying I was going to be an actress, and a friend asked if the feeling I claimed to get from being on stage I know about from Alice. I lied and said that I had done more serious productions. That’s how I feel about language. But the bigger point I’m trying to make is a bit bland but I’ll say it anyway: this is it. This is what we get, life, not language or the future. Experience life with everything you’ve got, and that’s what it will give back you.