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“An aporia in some rhetorics is a pretended dubitation before coming back to the attack, as in Gilbert on Joyce. But Aristotle has it as an insoluble problem in an inquiry, arising from equally plausible but inconsistent premises. He writes that Socrates liked to reduce people to aporia to show them they didn’t really know what they thought they knew. The plural that Aristotle uses in his book on metaphysics is ‘aporiai.’ ‘We should first review the things about which we need from the outset to be puzzled,’ he writes. The word aporia was later adapted by Derrida to mean something like the blank spots in our understanding that we don’t even know are there, with the idea we should try to see these. It is not quite the same idea, but joins a constellation of meanings for the word. The Oxford English Dictionary references a quote from J. Smith’s Mystical Rhetoric of 1657, which says aporia refers to the problem of ‘what to do or say in some strange or ambiguous thing.’ ”

“Like now.”

“Yes. Listen further. The Greek comes from a, ‘not,’ and poros, ‘passage.’ But in the Platonic myth, Penia, the child of poverty, chooses to become impregnated by Poros, the personification of plenty. Their child is Eros, who combines the attributes of its parents. Pointed out as strange here is the vision of Penia as resourceful, and prosperity as drunk and passive-”

“That’s not strange.”

“So that although Penia is not Poros, she is also not a-poria. She has been called neither masculine nor feminine, rich or poor, resourceful or without resources. And so aporia becomes even more an untranslatable term.”

“I am an aporia. And I am in an aporia. This blackliner.”

“Yes.”

All very well, to talk and think-“Thank you, Pauline”-but at the end of it, there was still a week more to live through, and Alex’s death never gone away. She was floating in the bardo, trying to think like someone unborn would think. Full of dubitation, child of a poverty. Would be reborn some other Swan.

But then later-it seemed much later, there in the suspended space of no-time, banging around in her thoughts as they looped over and over-later she came to understand that when the chime in her suit rang and signaled that this trip was over, they would decant the same Swan that went in. There was no escape.

“Pauline-tell me more. Talk to me. Please talk to me.”

Pauline said, “Max Brod once had a very interesting conversation with Franz Kafka, which he later recounted to Walter Benjamin…”

Extracts (3)

Homo sapiens evolved in Terran gravity and it is still an open question what effects time spent in less than one g will have on the individual decrease in bone strength from 0.5 percent to 5 percent per month in 0-. 1 g repeated exposure to gravity incidents greater than 3 g has been shown to create micro-strokes and raise the incidence of major strokes the biomedical research community has changed its mind about these questions more than once through the years aerobic and resistance exercise partially compensates for physiological effects of long-term residence in moderate low g (defined as between Luna’s. 17 g and Mars’s. 38 g) but there are problems left unaddressed maintaining a vigorous physical life substantially mitigates below Luna g, physical etiolation occurs in some organs and tissues no matter how much exercise statistically very significant results in actuarial tables suggest longevity beyond historical norms is impossible without frequent return not just to a one-g environment, but to Earth itself. Why this should be so is a matter of dispute, but the fact itself is very clear in the data. We propose to show one year in every six spent on Earth, with no time away longer than ten years, greatly increases longevity. Neglect of this practice leads to a high risk of dying many decades before oversterile environments cannot the famous or notorious sabbatical has been proposed as an example of hormesis or Mithridatism, in which brief exposure to toxins strengthens the organism against greater