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The war went on, uncaring of the dreams of soldiers, a reality so devastating that no other reality could compete.
There were some people in whom weakness, once it had appeared, grew like a cancer.
We complicate our life with machines, then struggle to make it as simple as it was before we had them. Have we gained anything, Ms. Sulaweyo?”
Coca-Cola and fries, the wafer and wine of the Western religion of commerce.
“The wisdom of our parents, grandparents, ancestors. In each individual life, it seems, we must first reject that wisdom, then later come to appreciate it.”
Sometimes people need reasons for things, even when there are no reasons. That’s what makes people believe in conspiracies or religions—if there’s any difference. The world is just too complicated, so they need simple explanations.”
Wasn’t that the way someone said religions—and paranoid obsessions—got started? As an attempt to make sense of a universe too large and too random for human comprehension?
“But often I think that people believe things which can be measured are true things, and things which cannot be measured are untrue things. What I read of science makes it even more sad, for that is what people point to as a ‘truth,’ yet science itself seems to say that all we can hope to find are patterns in things. But if that is true, why is one way of explaining a pattern worse than others?
I try to choose the happier way of saying things, so that my own words will not weigh me down like stones.
There ought to be some way to tell when you were doing something for the last time so you could appreciate it.
