Aurora

by Kim Stanley Robinson

Nevertheless she had to go, they told her; this was youth. Every age had its losses, they said, even youth, which lost first childhood, then youth too. And all first things were vivid, including losses. “Just keep learning,” the old woman said.

Now the test was upon them, and very quickly cracks in their façade of civility began to appear. Where there is faction, there is conflict; where there is conflict, there is anger. And anger distorts judgment.

And yet this particular self is in the end such a small thing. We prefer to hold to the idea that we are a larger complex of qualia, sensory inputs, processing of data, postulated conclusions, actions, behaviors, habits. So very little of that gets into our narrative. We are bigger, more complex, more accomplished than our narrative is.