Aurora

by Kim Stanley Robinson

While linking two objects in a metaphor is always comparing apples to oranges, as they say. Always a lie. Strange to consider that these two linguistic operations, metaphor and analogy, so often linked together in rhetoric and narratology, and considered to be variants of the same operation, are actually hugely different from each other, to the point where one is futile and stupid, the other penetrating and useful.

In the infinite black space of ignorance, it is as if stands as the basic operation of cognition, the mark perhaps of consciousness itself.

Existential nausea comes from feeling trapped. It is an affect state resulting from the feeling that the future has only bad options.

People only invoke history to ballast their arguments in the present.”

Righteous indignation is like some kind of drug or religious mania, addictive and stupidifying.”

It was as if there were only so many things humans could say, and over the course of history, people had therefore said them already, and would say them again, but not often remember this fact.

The cognitive error called ease of representation thrust them into a space where every problem they witnessed convinced them they were in an unprecedented collapse. They were getting depressed.

A great reckoning in a little room:

a language called English. A language both very structured and very amorphous, as if it were a building made of soups.

Galileo: the more people assert they are certain, the less certain they really are, or at least should be. People trying to fool others often fool themselves, and vice versa.

We think now that love is a kind of giving of attention. It is usually attention given to some other consciousness, but not always; the attention can be to something unconscious, even inanimate. But the attention seems often to be called out by a fellow consciousness.

It gave a meaning to our existence. And this is a very great gift; this, in the end, is what we think love gives, which is to say meaning.