“At the base of human culture,” he said as he looked down into the country of the caldera, “is a neurotic response to people’s earliest psychic wounds. Before birth and during infancy people exist in a narcissistic oceanic bliss, in which the individual is the universe. Then sometime in late infancy we come to the awareness that we are separate

But just when people most need help is when their isolation is the most extreme.

So he flew around the immensities of Candor, looking for some image of himself.

we propose strong environmental courts, perhaps as part of the constitutional court, which will estimate the real and complete environmental costs of economic activities, and help to coordinate plans that impact the environment.”

That was how humans knew each other. Tiny fractions of their lives intersected or were known in any way to anybody else. It was much like living alone in the universe. Which was strange. A justification for living with friends, for marrying, for sharing rooms and lives as much as possible. Not that this made people truly intimate; but it reduced

And justice and freedom do not contradict each other as much as has been claimed, because freedom in an injust system is no freedom at all.

chromotropics

It’s—it’s frustrating. I would rather see what happens then. Sometimes I get so curious. About the history we’ll never know. The future after our death. And all the rest of it. Do you know what I mean?”

remembered or conveyed in any way to others—the stream of one’s consciousness never shared except in thimblefuls, even by the most prolific mathematician, the most diligent diarist.