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right to her separate tongue, and separate sphere. «I have never
i first saw it when i was 17. it was smaller than i thought, and glarier. but now i can go watch a sunset anytime, i just don’t want to, it’s boring, so slow, monosensory. and before you fuss, i may have grown up never seeing a sunset, but you’ve never seen a six-dimensional homoskedastic crest up from the data sea, and you never will because you’re wasting those nerves on telling you your knee itches.>
right now i’m tracking nine variables with sight, ten with hearing, five really complicated ones with taste and smell, nine with tactile, six with temperature, and eighteen with nerves your body would use for pain, but mine are totally reregistered, not unpleasant at all, so none of that crap about torture, it isn’t torture, it’s a sense, I just cultivated it differently, same as when kids learn music early, or languages, it’s all different ways of cultivating brain growth.>
What we choose means more than what is handed to us by chance.
Micromegas,
The Utopians’ idea with modo mundo is that, if you killed a Utopian, you destroyed their world, their nowhere, their ideas, their fiction, since they all invent stuff even if they don’t all publish. You destroyed a potential other world, so you get banished to this one and don’t get to go to any other worlds anymore. I think what T.M. was trying to communicate was that destroying a manuscript is effectively the same thing, destroying somebody’s creation, the remnant of the world they created, even if they’ve been dead a thousand years.”
It was Dominic who first taught me the art of hat-wearing, and gave me the round and shapeless cap that has shielded me from recognition so many times. It
“Mycroft, thou must have a hat so thou mayest remove it in the presence of thy betters!” He was right. It is a comforting symbol, a way to gesture my submission without alarming people with the antiquated titles ‘master,’ ‘madam,’ ‘sir.’ It is a comfort to have something to fidget with as I stand in obedience before free men. A welcome gift. I thank Dominic for it still, from time to time.
