Aurora

There is a pretense of self, in other words, which is only expressed in this narrative; a self that is these sentences. We tell their story, and thereby come to what consciousness we have. Scribble ergo sum.

“People have ideas. They live in their ideas, do you understand? And those ideas, whatever they happen to be, make all the difference.”

“It’s sometimes called avoiding acquiescence,” Badim said. “Acquiescence means accepting the framing of a problem, and working on it from within the terms of the frame. It’s a kind of mental economy, but also a kind of sloth. And Devi does not have that kind of sloth, as you know. She is always interrogating the framing of the problem. Acquiescence

Existential nausea comes from feeling trapped. It is an affect state resulting from the feeling that the future has only bad options.

Sometimes, you get sick of yourself, you change.

Oh yes, Earth was still the center of all enthusiasm, all madness;

Human beings live in ideas. That they were condemning their descendants to death and extinction did not occur to them, or if it did they repressed the thought, ignored it, and forged on anyway. They did not care as much about their descendants as they did about their ideas, their enthusiasms.

In the infinite black space of ignorance, it is as if stands as the basic operation of cognition, the mark perhaps of consciousness itself.

This was a human moment that never went away. An existential dilemma, a permanent condition. For them, in their particular situation, it came to this: When you discover that you are living in a fantasy that cannot endure, a fantasy that will destroy your world, and your children, what do you do?