<<< May 29, 2003 >>>

“But what if it isn’t really that way? What if there isn’t any natural order to imitate? What if the world isn’t scattered around us like a jigsaw puzzle -- what if it’s like a soup with all kinds of things floating around in it, and from time to time some of them get stuck together by chance to make some kind of whole? What if everything that exists is fragmentary, incomplete, aborted, events with ends but no beginnings, events that only have middles, things that have fronts or rears but not both, with us constantly making categories, seeking out, and reconstructing until we think we can see total love, total betrayal and defeat, although in reality we are all no more than haphazard fractions. Our faces and our fates are shaped by statistics; we human beings are the result of Brownian motion -- incomplete sketches, randomly outlined projections. Perfection, fullness, excellence are all rare exceptions -- they occur only because there is such an excess, so unimaginably much of everything!” -- Stanislaw Lem, The Investigation, 1959

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