Civilised life, you know, is based on a huge number of illusions in which we all collaborate willingly. The trouble is we forget after a while that they are illusions and we are deeply shocked when reality is torn down around us.
“They can drive a car thirty miles every day and feel good about themselves for recycling a couple of empty jam jars. They can talk about peace being a good thing yet glorify war. They can despise the man who kills his wife in rage but worship the indifferent soldier who drops a bomb killing a hundred children.”
Sometimes, to be yourself you will have to forget yourself and become something else. Your character is not a fixed thing. You will sometimes have to move to keep up with it.
In a thousand years, if humans survive that long, everything you know will have been disproved. And replaced by even bigger myths.
On Earth, incidentally, civilization is the result of a group of humans coming together and suppressing their instincts.
Suddenly it made me realize why religion was such a big thing around here. Because, yes, sure, God could not exist. But then neither could humans.
Laughter, along with madness, seemed to be the only way out, the emergency exit for humans.
Everything in human life was a test. That was why they all looked so stressed out.
Magazines are very popular, despite no human’s ever feeling better for having read them. Indeed, their chief purpose is to generate a sense of inferiority in the reader that consequently leads to a feeling of needing to buy something, which the humans then do, and then feel even worse, and so need to buy another magazine to see what they can buy next. It is an eternal and unhappy spiral that goes by the name of capitalism, and it is really quite popular.
Maybe that is what beauty was, for humans. Accidents, imperfections, placed inside a pretty pattern. The defiance of mathematics.