Posts tagged: James Richardson
95.
The Mystery we’re absorbed in takes precedence over all the mysteries that won’t be solved when the hour ends, a protective parenthesis within the larger stories of Love and Work, which are inside the story of Life, which is inside Big Bang. Actually, scale is irrelevant: it’s just as likely we’d use cosmology to distract us from a bad day at the office. Theoretically, all these are contained within a larger Storylessness, but that itself is only the romantic story I have at last attained freedom, which in an instant decays into more stable stories such as I’m so bored I’d rather be afraid or I must punish the deluded masses with this hard truth or Let’s watch TV.
(James Richardson)
43.
I often find myself intoning Clarke’s Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, or anyway half of it, since everyone’s heard it already and interrupts. Actually the technology doesn’t have to be very advanced. I drive a car and grasp the basics of internal combustion engines but I still treat mine as halfway between pet and malevolent deity, muttering reassurances, curses and spells. Maybe a chip designer gets computers well enough that they are purely technology, but he can’t know that much about meteorology or gene-splicing or, well, poems. What differentiates technology form magic is not our knowledge but our faith: that someone else understands.
(James Richardson)
And for him, gloomy, overwhelmed with himself,
her brightness was more beautiful than beauty
and he basked in it. But when his turn came to shine back
it seemed her feelings were a storm of flowers
he could not gather, and the story gets ordinary:
he is angry at his heart and hurts her.
(James Richardson)
