The Drowned World

Quotes

We conclude that Ballard is quite unstimulated by human interaction—unless it takes the form of something inherently weird, like mob atavism or mass hysteria. What excites him is human isolation.

- The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 13 - Loc. 100-101 - Added on Wednesday, September 11, 2013, 06:08 PM

This growing isolation and self-containment, exhibited by the other members of the unit and from which only the buoyant Riggs seemed immune, reminded Kerans of the slackening metabolism and biological withdrawal of all animal forms about to undergo a major metamorphosis. Sometimes he wondered what zone of transit he himself was entering, sure that his own withdrawal was symptomatic not of a dormant schizophrenia, but of a careful preparation for a radically new environment, with its own internal landscape and logic, where old categories of thought would merely be an encumbrance.

- The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 24 - Loc. 227-31 - Added on Wednesday, September 11, 2013, 06:21 PM

Kerans reached the bar and filled his glass, collecting himself. He had only managed to survive the monotony and boredom of the previous year by deliberately suspending himself outside the normal world of time and space, and the abrupt return to earth had momentarily disconcerted him. In addition, he knew, there were other motives and responsibilities.

- The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 26 - Loc. 244-46 - Added on Wednesday, September 11, 2013, 06:22 PM

Without the reptiles, the lagoons and the creeks of office blocks half-submerged in the immense heat would have had a strange dream-like beauty, but the iguanas and basilisks brought the fantasy down to earth. As their seats in the one-time boardrooms indicated, the reptiles had taken over the city. Once again they were the dominant form of life.

- The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 29 - Loc. 288-90 - Added on Sunday, September 15, 2013, 02:44 PM

Looking up at the ancient impassive faces, Kerans could understand the curious fear they roused, re-kindling archaic memories of the terrifying jungles of the Paleocene, when the reptiles had gone down before the emergent mammals, and sense the implacable hatred one zoological class feels towards another that usurps it.

- The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 30 - Loc. 290-93 - Added on Sunday, September 15, 2013, 02:45 PM

Free of vegetation, apart from a few drifting clumps of Sargasso weed, the streets and shops had been preserved almost intact, like a reflection in a lake that has somehow lost its original.

- The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 30 - Loc. 299-301 - Added on Sunday, September 15, 2013, 02:48 PM

The brick houses and single-storey factories of the suburbs had disappeared completely below the drifting tides of silt.

- The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 30 - Loc. 302-3 - Added on Sunday, September 15, 2013, 02:48 PM

The brick houses and single-storey factories of the suburbs had disappeared completely below the drifting tides of silt. Where these broke surface giant forests reared up into the burning dull-green sky, smothering the former wheatfields of temperate Europe and North America.

- The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 30 - Loc. 302-4 - Added on Sunday, September 15, 2013, 02:48 PM

Impenetrable Mato Grossos sometimes three hundred feet high, they were a nightmare world of competing organic forms returning rapidly to their Paleozoic past, and the only avenues of transit for the United Nations military units were through the lagoon systems that had superimposed themselves on the former cities.

- The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 31 - Loc. 304-6 - Added on Sunday, September 15, 2013, 02:49 PM

PERHAPS IT WAS this absence of personal memories that made Kerans indifferent to the spectacle of these sinking civilizations. He had been born and brought up entirely within what had once been known as the Arctic Circle—now a sub-tropical zone with an annual mean temperature of eighty-five

- The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 32 - Loc. 324-26 - Added on Sunday, September 15, 2013, 02:51 PM

junction of two extremes of nature, like a discarded crown overgrown by wild orchids.

- The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 32 - Loc. 330-31 - Added on Sunday, September 15, 2013, 02:52 PM

The birth of a child had become a comparative rarity, and only one marriage in ten yielded any offspring. As Kerans sometimes reminded himself, the genealogical tree of mankind was systematically pruning itself, apparently moving backwards in time, and a point might ultimately be reached where a second Adam and Eve found themselves alone in a new Eden.

- The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 35 - Loc. 363-66 - Added on Sunday, September 15, 2013, 02:55 PM

He was plucking the orange-sized berries from the ferns overhanging the station and tossing them up at the chittering marmosets dangling from the branches above his head, egging them on with playful shouts and whistles. Fifty feet away, on a projecting cornice, a trio of iguanas watched with stony disapproval, whipping their tails slowly from side to side in a gesture of impatience.

- The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 35 - Loc. 372-75 - Added on Sunday, September 15, 2013, 02:56 PM

Perhaps these sunken lagoons simply remind me of the drowned world of my uterine childhood—if

- The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 40 - Loc. 441-42 - Added on Monday, September 16, 2013, 08:52 AM

Kerans had still not made up his mind—once away from Beatrice his indecision returned (ruefully he wondered if she was deliberately trying to confuse him, Pandora with her killing mouth and witch’s box of desires and frustrations, unpredictably opening and shutting the lid)—but rather than stumble about in a state of tortured uncertainty, which Riggs and Bodkin would soon diagnose, he decided to postpone a final reckoning until the last moment possible.

- The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 43 - Loc. 480-83 - Added on Monday, September 16, 2013, 08:56 AM

Suddenly, as he visualised himself throwing his weight on to the handles of a plunger box and catapulting Riggs, the base and the testing station into the next lagoon, he stopped and steadied himself against the rail. Smiling ruefully at the absurdity of the fantasy, he wondered why he had indulged it. Then he noticed the heavy cylinder of the compass dragging at his jacket. For a moment he peered down at it thoughtfully. ‘Look out, Kerans,’ he murmured to himself. ‘You’re living on two levels.’

- The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 45 - Loc. 524-28 - Added on Monday, September 16, 2013, 09:01 AM

A burly, intelligent but somewhat phlegmatic man of about 30, he had quietly kept himself apart from the other members of the unit. Something of an amateur naturalist, he made his own descriptive notes of the changing flora and fauna, employing a taxonomic system of his own devising. In one of his few unguarded moments he had shown the notebooks to Kerans, then abruptly withdrawn into himself when Kerans tactfully pointed out that the classifications were confused.

- The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 46 - Loc. 535-39 - Added on Monday, September 16, 2013, 09:02 AM

The loose fragmentary relationships aboard the base, where a replacement was accepted as a fully paid up member of the crew within five minutes and no one cared whether he had been there two days or two years, was largely a reflection of Hardman’s temperament. When he organised a basket-ball match or a regatta out on the lagoon there was no self-conscious boisterousness, but a laconic indifference to whether anyone took part or not.

- The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 47 - Loc. 541-44 - Added on Monday, September 16, 2013, 09:03 AM

Hardman smiled sceptically, glancing up briefly at Kerans. ‘I think you’re being over-optimistic, Doctor. What you really mean is that I won’t be aware of them.’ He picked up a well-thumbed green file, his botanical diary, and began to turn the pages mechanically. ‘Sometimes I think I have the dreams continuously, every minute of the day. Perhaps we all do.’

- The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 49 - Loc. 582-85 - Added on Monday, September 16, 2013, 09:07 AM

‘Perhaps you’re right, Lieutenant. In fact, some people used to maintain that consciousness is nothing more than a special category of the cytoplasmic coma, that the capacities of the central nervous system are as fully developed and extended by the dream life as they are during what we call the waking state. But we have to adopt an empirical approach, try whatever remedy we can. Don’t you agree, Kerans?’

- The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 50 - Loc. 590-93 - Added on Monday, September 16, 2013, 09:09 AM

However varied his faults, in the past he had always believed them to be redressed by one outstanding virtue—a complete and objective awareness of the motives behind his actions. If he was sometimes prone to undue delays this was a result, not of irresolution, but of a reluctance to act at all where complete self-awareness was impossible—his affair with Beatrice Dahl, tilted by so many conflicting passions, from day to day walked a narrow tightrope of a thousand restraints and cautions.

- The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 51 - Loc. 604-7 - Added on Monday, September 16, 2013, 09:10 AM

However selective the conscious mind may be, most biological memories are unpleasant ones, echoes of danger and terror. Nothing endures for so long as fear.

- The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 55 - Loc. 666-67 - Added on Monday, September 16, 2013, 09:29 PM

A more important task than mapping the harbours and lagoons of the external landscape was to chart the ghostly deltas and luminous beaches of the submerged neuronic continents.

- The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 58 - Loc. 706-7 - Added on Monday, September 16, 2013, 09:32 PM

Overhead the sky was vivid and marbled, the black bowl of the lagoon, by contrast, infinitely deep and motionless, like an immense well of amber. The tree-covered buildings emerging from its rim seemed millions of years old, thrown up out of the Earth’s magma by some vast natural cataclysm, embalmed in the gigantic intervals of time that had elapsed during their subsidence.

- The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 60 - Loc. 724-27 - Added on Tuesday, September 17, 2013, 10:02 AM

At first he assumed that this reflected a shrewd unconscious assessment that his good sense would prevail, but as he started the outboard and drove the catamaran through the cool oily swells towards the creek into the next lagoon he realised that this indifference marked the special nature of the decision to remain behind. To use the symbolic language of Bodkin’s schema, he would then be abandoning the conventional estimates of time in relation to his own physical needs and entering the world of total, neuronic time, where the massive intervals of the geological time-scale calibrated his existence. Here a million years was the shortest working unit, and problems of food and clothing became as irrelevant as they would have been to a Buddhist contemplative lotus-squatting before an empty rice-bowl under the protective canopy of the million-headed cobra of eternity.

- The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 62 - Loc. 747-53 - Added on Tuesday, September 17, 2013, 10:04 AM

colonies of bats erupted out of the green tunnels like clouds of exploding soot,

- The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 67 - Loc. 824 - Added on Tuesday, September 17, 2013, 10:12 AM

They were about ten miles north-west of the central lagoons, the towers almost obscured in the mists along the horizon. Five miles away, directly between them and the base, was one of the two motor launches, cruising down an open channel, its white wake fading across the glassy sheet of the water. Blocked by the urban concentration to the south, less silt had penetrated into the area, and the vegetation was lighter, more expanses of unbroken water between the principal lines of buildings.

- The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 69 - Loc. 849-53 - Added on Tuesday, September 17, 2013, 10:15 AM

gazing out over the expanses of blue water. The nearest structure was an isolated department store two hundred yards away, and the open vistas reminded Kerans of Herodotus’ description of the landscape in Egypt at floodtime, with its rampart cities like the islands of the Aegean Sea.

- The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 69 - Loc. 857-59 - Added on Tuesday, September 17, 2013, 10:15 AM

the bright sunlight masking the molten mirror of the surface.

- The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 70 - Loc. 870 - Added on Tuesday, September 17, 2013, 10:17 AM

Phantoms slid imperceptibly from nightmare to reality and back again, the terrestrial and psychic landscapes were now indistinguishable, as they had been at Hiroshima and Auschwitz, Golgotha and Gomorrah.

- The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 89 - Loc. 1133-34 - Added on Saturday, October 19, 2013, 11:15 PM

Quietly he began to move towards it, floating slowly towards the centre of the dome, knowing that this faint beacon was receding more rapidly than he could approach it. When it was no longer visible he pressed on through the darkness alone, like a blind fish in an endless forgotten sea, driven by an impulse whose identity he would never comprehend.

- The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 127 - Loc. 1676-78 - Added on Thursday, November 07, 2013, 10:41 PM

Increasingly, Kerans felt that Hardman’s real personality was now submerged deep within his mind, and that his external behaviour and responses were merely pallid reflections of this, overlayed by his delirium and exposure symptoms.

- The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 196 - Loc. 2637-38 - Added on Friday, November 08, 2013, 07:58 PM

So he left the lagoon and entered the jungle again, within a few days was completely lost, following the lagoons southward through the increasing rain and heat, attacked by alligators and giant bats, a second Adam searching for the forgotten paradises of the reborn sun.

- The Drowned World: A Novel (50th Anniversary Edition) (J. G. Ballard) - Highlight on Page 198 - Loc. 2669-71 - Added on Friday, November 08, 2013, 08:02 PM