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“You know, it’s odd. In my lifetime they’ve taken away so many of the things that used to kill you when I was young. Cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, even schizophrenia—all of those chronic diseases turned out to be caused by infection, all of them preventable once we targeted the right virus or retrovirus. Who’d have thought it? So with nothing left to kill you, you just live on, and on. But then they took away the world instead.”
And anywhere the living is stable you find the same phenomenon, an enthusiastic discarding of the burden of thinking.”
Of course it was economics, not environmental sensitivity, that killed the automobile.
And, even more traumatically, we had to be weaned off the automobile. It turned out to be simple, politically. In the longer term we were to switch to a new transport paradigm based on hydrogen, biofuels, and electric cells. But for now, as we gave up the oil, Amin enforced drastically improved fuel efficiency, and imposed new environmental and future taxes, reflecting the true price of an auto from its manufacture through its injection of carbon into the air. This “Full Social Cost Pricing” as the economists called it, just priced private cars out of reach.
It was amazing how, when the cost of gas got high enough, you suddenly discovered you really didn’t need to drive so much after all. Instead you caught the bus and the train, of which there were suddenly plenty, or you walked.
‘Lethe’ is the opposite to Gaia. An anti-Gaia,
The hotel itself was a kind of extension of a vast multistory parking lot dating from the second half of the twentieth century, the age of monumental automotive architecture. It was as if the areas set aside for humans had been an afterthought.
Consciousness is the awareness of self, and self is recorded in memory.
A human memory had never been meant to be an objective recording system but a support for ego: without the comforting illusion of control, Poole’s mind might have crumbled in the face of an arbitrary universe.
“That’s the trouble with happy endings,” he told me after the funeral. “You just live on and on, until you’ve sucked all the juice out, and it turns out not to be so happy after all.”
