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The heart is pleased by one thing after another.
In this pressured situation, history was little comfort; so far they had dealt with it well, but never before had humanity responded to a crisis of need with any long-term consistent sensible sanity; mass madness had erupted before; and they were the exact same animals that in previous centuries, faced with matters of subsistence and survival, had slaughtered each other indiscriminately.
Without an observer at a twenty-three-degree angle to the light reflecting off a cloud of spherical droplets, there is no rainbow. The whole universe is like that. Our spirits stand at a twenty-three-degree angle to the universe. There is some new thing created at the contact of photon and retina, some space created between rock and mind. Without mind there is no intrinsic worth.”
“That’s just saying there is no intrinsic worth,” one of the guardians replied. “It collapses back to utilitarianism. But there’s no need to include human participation. These places exist without us and before us, and that is their intrinsic worth. When we arrive we should honor that precedence, if we want to be in a right attitude to the universe, if we want to actually see it.”
“They’re only going to be young for as long as we were—a snap of the fingers, right? And then they’re old, and then gone. We all go through it. Even a century’s difference doesn’t matter a damn. And of all the humans who ever existed and ever will exist, these people are the only ones alive at the same time we are. Just being alive at the same time, that makes us all contemporaries. And your contemporaries are the only ones who are ever going to really understand you.” “Yes yes,” Maya said. It was true. “But I still hate them.”
And then the feeling came on her again, the pre-epileptic aura of the presque vu, the sea glittering, a vast significance suffusing everything, immanent everywhere but just beyond reach, pressing in on things—and with a little pop she got it—that that very aspect of the phenomenon was itself the meaning—that the significance of everything always lay just out of reach, in the future, tugging them forward—that in special moments one felt this tidal tug of becoming as a sensation of sharp happy anticipation, as she had when looking down on Mars from the Ares, the unconscious mind filled not with
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No scar was ever fully lost until death and the final dissolution, and that was perhaps the way it should be; one wouldn’t want to lose too much, or it would be trouble of a different kind. A balance had to be kept.
