Boa remembers:
“It had been a cricket box of a place, really, but there they had lived, and for a time it had seemed it would always be just like that, husband, wife, son, daughter, clothed in a tiny apartment in Fangzhang, and every day the same, every week the same, in a round that would last forever. Thus the power of thoughtlessness, the power people had to forget what time was always doing.”

[while teaching history] “What’s hardest to catch is daily life. This is what I think rarely gets written down or even remembered by those who did it—-what you did on the days when you did the ordinary things, how it felt doing it, the small variations time and again, until years have passed. A matter of repetitions, or almost-repetitions. Nothing, in other words, that could be easily encoded in the usual forms of emplotment, not dharma or chaos, or even tragedy or comedy, Just…habit.”

—-“The Years of Rice and Salt”, Kim Stanley Robinson —-