In the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.
Evidence is always partial. Facts are not truth, though they are part of it _ information is not knowledge. And history is not the past _ it is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past. It__ the record of what__ left on the record. It__ the plan of the positions taken, when we to stop the dance to note them down. It__ what__ left in the sieve when the centuries have run through it _ a few stones, scraps of writing, scraps of cloth. It is no more __he past_ than a birth certificate is a birth, or a script is a performance, or a map is a journey. It is the multiplication of the evidence of fallible and biased witnesses, combined with incomplete accounts of actions not fully understood by the people who performed them. It__ no more than the best we can do, and often it falls short of that.
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Evidence is always partial. Facts are not truth, though they are part of it _ information is not knowledge. And history is not the past _ it is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past. It__ the record of what__ left on the record. It__ the plan of the positions taken, when we to stop the dance to note them down. It__ what__ left in the sieve when the centuries have run through it _ a few stones, scraps of writing, scraps of cloth. It is no more __he past_ than a birth certificate is a birth, or a script is a performance, or a map is a journey. It is the multiplication of the evidence of fallible and biased witnesses, combined with incomplete accounts of actions not fully understood by the people who performed them. It__ no more than the best we can do, and often it falls short of that.
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A mind is a simulation that simulates itself.
The universe has become not only conscious and aware of itself but capable in some respects of choosing its path into the future--though all three, the consciousness, the knowledge, and the choice, are dispersed over a vast crowd of beings, acting both individually and collectively.
P33- Oppression is domesticating. Gravest obstacle to the achievement of liberation is that oppressive reality absorbs those within it and thereby acts to submerge human beings consciousness.
As survivors and procreators, we unravel stories that at their root are not dissimilar from the habitual behaviors seen in nature. But as beings who know they will die we digress into episodes and epics that are altogether dissociated from the natural world. We may isolate this awareness, distract ourselves from it, anchor our minds far from its shores, and sublimate it as a motif in our sagas. Yet at no time and in no place are we protected from being tapped on the shoulder and reminded, __ou__e going to die, you know._ However much we try to ignore it, our consciousness haunts us with this knowledge. Our heads were baptized in the font of death; they are doused with the horror of moribundity.
You come to this place, mid-life. You don__ know how you got here, but suddenly you__e staring fifty in the face. When you turn and look back down the years, you glimpse the ghosts of other lives you might have led; all houses are haunted. The wraiths and phantoms creep under your carpets and between the warp and weft of fabric, they lurk in wardrobes and lie flat under drawer-liners. You think of the children you might have had but didn__. When the midwife says, __t__ a boy,_ where does the girl go? When you think you__e pregnant, and you__e not, what happens to the child that has already formed in your mind? You keep it filed in a drawer of your consciousness, like a short story that never worked after the opening lines.