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To the Historians, tools existed for only one reason: to force the universe into unnatural shapes. They treated nature as an enemy, they were by definition a rebellion against the way things were. Technology is a stunted thing in benign environments, it never thrived in any culture gripped by belief in natural harmony. Why invent fusion reactors if your climate is comfortable, if your food is abundant? Why build fortresses if you have no enemies? Why force change upon a world that poses no threat?
Maybe I wasn’t so afraid of ghosts because this time we were after monsters.
“What I’m asking is, are they natural? Could they be constructs?” “Is a termite mound a construct? Beaver dam? Spaceship? Of course. Were they built by naturally evolved organisms, acting naturally? They were. So tell me how anything in the whole deep multiverse can ever be anything but natural?”
WHY SHOULD MAN EXPECT HIS PRAYER FOR MERCY TO BE HEARD BY WHAT IS ABOVE HIM WHEN HE SHOWS NO MERCY TO WHAT IS UNDER HIM? —Pierre Troubetzkoy
IF I CAN BUT MAKE THE WORDS AWAKE THE FEELING.
IF THE HUMAN BRAIN WERE SO SIMPLE THAT WE COULD UNDERSTAND IT, WE WOULD BE SO SIMPLE THAT WE COULDN’T. —Emerson M. Pugh
Yet the questions persisted, in the minds of the laureates, in the angst of every horny fifteen-year-old on the planet. Am I nothing but sparking chemistry? Am I a magnet in the ether? I am more than my eyes, my ears, my tongue; I am the little thing behind those things, the thing looking out from inside. But who looks out from its eyes? What does it reduce to? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?
