Words&Dirt

“That is what happens. You put something away for a little while, and now and again you look in the closet for something else and you remember, and you think, soon. Then it becomes something that is just there, in the closet, and other things get crowded in front of it and on top of it and finally you don’t think about it at all.

The thing that was your bright treasure. You don’t think about it. A loss you could not contemplate at one time, and now it becomes something you can barely remember.

That is what happens.

And even if it’s not put away, even if you make your living from it, every day? Juliet thinks of the older teachers at the school, how little most of them care for whatever it is that they teach. Take Juanita, who chose Spanish because it goes with her Christian name (she is Irish) and who wants to speak it well, to use it in her travels. You cannot say that Spanish is her treasure.

Few people, very few, have a treasure, and if you do you must hang on to it. You must not let yourself be waylaid, and have it taken from you.”

––Runaway: Stories, by Alice Munro, pg. 83-4

“If those who live in a simulated reality can themselves simulate lower-level realities, perhaps upper-case Reality is nothing more than an infinite cascade of realities simulated within higher-level realities (dreams within dreams, or turtles all the way down). This may well be the simplest explanation of the world, since assuming an infinite regress permits doing without a ‘base reality’ which generates all other realities.”

–– “Transcendent Engineering,” by Giulio Prisco, The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future, eds. Max More and Natasha Vita-More, pg. 237