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just when people most need help is when their isolation is the most extreme.
history was a wave that moved through time slightly faster than an individual life did, so that even when people had lived only to seventy or eighty, they had been behind the wave by the time they died;
She liked doing the political plays, which angry or hopeful tended to contain an innate utopianism, a drive for progress; but the plays that struck her as most true, and moved her most deeply, were the old Terran tragedies. And the more tragic the better. Catharsis as described by Aristotle seemed to work very well for her; she emerged from good performances of the great tragedies shattered, cleansed—somehow happier.
he had a name for this too: “Presque vu.” Almost seen. “I get that one a lot,” he said. With a characteristic look of secret sorrow.
Almost seen. Almost understood. And then back into the world of light and time. And there was nothing for it but to go on. And so on she went.
Enough days passed and she could forget what it had felt like, forget just how frightened she had been, or how close to joy. It was a strange enough thing that it was easy to forget.
“It isn’t the numbers. It’s who they are, what they believe. The assimilation troubles are getting really severe.”
Of course it was an impossible project being someone’s home as well as their partner;
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.
glacial milk,
Thus the emotional charge of an event had much to do with how fully it was laid out in the memory. Things happened, and the consciousness witnessed or experienced them, and inevitably a great deal of this experience changed the brain, and became part of it forever; particularly the events heightened by emotion. This description seemed right to Sax; what he had felt most he remembered best—or forgot most assiduously, as certain experiments suggested, with an unconscious constant effort that was not true forgetting at all, but repression.
Yes, a disk house, see, a Sattelmeier disk house. It’s lovely to live out in the open air. You’ll see.
