A human being is capable of taking in very few things at one time; we see only what is happening in front of us, here and now. Visualizing a simultan… - Stanisław Lem

Gibarian belonged to what may well have been the last generation of researchers who had the courage to refer back to the glory days of optimism and were not averse to their own kind of faith, which went beyond the boundaries laid

I see a poem as a multi-coloured strip behind peeling plaster, in separate, shining fragments.

My past had disappeared. Not that I believed for a moment that this was an accident; in fact, I had suspected for some time now that the Cosmic Command, obviously no longer able to supervise every assignment on an individual basis when there were literally trillions of matters in its charge, had switched over to a random system. The assumption would be that every document, circulating endlessly from desk to desk, must eventually hit upon the right one. A time-consuming procedure, perhaps, but one that would never fail. The Universe itself operated on the same principle. And for an institution as everlasting as the Universe — certainly our Building was such an institution — the speed at which these meanderings and perturbations took place was of no consequence.