The Thing Itself

by Adam Roberts

Then I saw – what I saw. Data experiences of a radically new kind. Raw tissues of flesh, darkness visible, a kind of fog (no: fog is the wrong word). A pillar of fire by night, except that ‘it’ did not burn, or gleam, or shine. ‘It’ is the wrong word for it. ‘It’ felt, or looked, like a great tumbling of scree down an endless slope. Or rubble gathering at the bottom and falling up the mountain. Forwards, backwards.

I was, I told myself, happy. I insisted upon it. If I insisted strongly enough, the feeling of chewing apprehension in my stomach would surely recede.

The strong legislate what is true, and after a while we forget that this is whence it came. Our habits of thought are stronger than strait-waistcoats. We walk about with habit-coloured spectacles before our eyes, and see everything as we are accustomed to see it.’

I know Woking, sir, and figure the possibilities for post-bellum architectural improvement worth the cost.’

Schopenhauer believed will the structuring principle of the universe; and what is will if not the idiom of mind? He confessed no master, did Schopenhauer, but Kant; and Kant says as much. Well, then, it might not surprise us if the physical sitter, on his stool, in his artist’s studio, finds his nose changing length, or his eyes moving further apart, or his hair colour darkening, as the portrait dictates.’

We went in short order from no sex in our literature and film to— Well, that. In doing so we hopped right over the broad middle ground. It’s that middle ground where we all live.

people dwelling there go for months, or years, having sex only with themselves, bedding-in (hah!) the poisonous disjunction between commercial fantasy and individual actuality by relying on the same porn that mocks them with their own insufficiencies to bring themselves off. It’s not a recipe for psychological health.

We thought the cosmos revolved around us, and Copernicus came along and showed this wasn’t true. Kant is like an anti-Copernicus. We used to think we were just a part of a pre-existing cosmos, until Kant comes along and shows that, no, actually we make the universe by perceiving it.

Ich habe nicht nöthig zu denken, wenn ich nur bezahlen kann.’

there is something in the thing itself which human consciousness perceives in terms of a temporal structure of things. That’s all. What it is, the whatever that provokes the human mind to perceive time, is hard to say. But it isn’t a one-to-one mapping. Something’s there, though; and the way our minds make sense of it is to see it in terms of consecutivity, cause and effect and so on.

Look at the cosmos. Separate out the categories: don’t dwell on ‘time’ – so no 4004 BC. Don’t get distracted by space, so no sky. Just the fact of existence. The whatever it is that you perceive, and which your mind orders with reference to time, space and the other seventeen categories. The thing, itself. So: ask yourself this. Do you believe it to be inert this thing? Or vital?

The waves cry and dash their foreheads against the stone jetty and the breakwater – like creatures possessed with obsessive-compulsion, like grieving creatures, being all one and the colours of blue-black bruises and black eyes and royal purple. Each individual wave in the harbour has hair turned white in dismay.

The paradox of describing silence: trying to render wordlessness in words. We employ certain signs only so long as we require them for the sake of distinction. New observations subtract some and add some new ones, so that an empirical conception never remains within permanent limits. It is, in fact, useless to define a conception of this kind.

division is painful, because separation and isolation and loneliness is painful. But, see, without divisibility you can’t have space at all. And the thing about time is … the same, really. Time cuts you off from what happened, and seals you away from the to-come. Robinson Crusoe, on his island, is a victim of space. And anybody who has been bereaved is a victim of time.

He is weeping. He does not know why. He dislikes the sensation very much. It is like perspiring – something else he did not do – except concentrated in the eyes. Yet he cannot stop, it seems. Might weeping have the effect of cooling the face, as perspiration the body? Was that its function?