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Now that she had lived in both worlds, she wasn’t sure which chains were heavier: the system that ensured everyone had no more and no less than what they needed, or the poverty that resulted from the struggle for survival. But she did know that all humans loved freedom, and the more their ways of life differed, the more that fundamental commonality prevailed. Freedom! Life is art, and the nature of art is freedom.
Luoying devoured the words. Sometimes you think you’ve got life all figured out, but then a ray of light appears and makes you doubt everything. It’s impossible for us to ever master life, and understanding is an ongoing, interminable process of self-reflection. Only connect. Conversation is soul.
Do you understand the conflict between individualism and collectivism? Do you understand the debate between logos and pathos? Do you understand to what degree they each express the truth? How do they reflect different images of the same unity? This is the Proposition of Reflections. It honors every image in every mirror but worships none of them. It attempts to shift between languages in order to reconstruct the true form of the world through reflections.”
A world was always the unity of its land and its gods. Only those who had wandered through different worlds could lose that unity.
“I’ve never been sure: Are there more stars in the universe or neurons in a human being?” Reini smiled. “The stars win that contest. A person has a little more than ten billion neurons, while there are three hundred billion stars in the Milky Way alone.
“What’s your definition of ‘freedom’?” Luoying bit her lip and looked at Reini with anguish. “I don’t know. That’s the biggest question in my life.”
After the religious worship of natural totems and the industrial ideal of the conquest of nature, humanity entered a third stage of the coevolution of human thought and architecture: the cosmic path of harmoniously fitting into nature. Buildings are flowers blooming from the sand. That was young Galiman’s most famous quote.
Anka could not think the way Juan did. There was no such thing as a base or worthless people, only craven and base individuals. One could only solve one concrete problem after another concrete problem, not attempt to resolve all problems through one abstract collective warring against another abstract collective. That never worked.
What is fate, she thought, but to be changed by chance and then take the inevitable path that belongs to no one else?
