Blue Mars (Mars Trilogy, #3)

by Kim Stanley Robinson

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 the detritus of a dead past but with the unforeseeable possibilities of the live future, ah, yes—anything could happen, anything, anything. And so as the presque vu washed slowly away from her, unseen again and yet somehow this time comprehended, she sat back on the bench, full and glowing; here she was, after all, and the potential for happiness would always be in her.