The Lathe of Heaven

by Ursula K. Le Guin

He arrived at ideas the slow way, never skating over the clear, hard ice of logic, nor soaring on the slipstreams of imagination, but slogging, plodding along on the heavy ground of existence. He

sorrow is but the eternal hunger of insatiable desire;—and

Things don’t have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What’s the function of a galaxy? I don’t know if our life has a purpose and I don’t see that it matters. What does matter is that we’re a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade

The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.

“The individual-person is iahklu’.

II descend, réveillé, l’autre côté du rêve. — VICTOR HUGO, LES CONTEMPLATIONS