“Your shock is the shock that attends all new and sudden acquisitions of knowledge. Things go on behind your back, and you resent this. You’re reminded that not even youth possesses total awareness of the magnitude, subtlety, and horror of Life’s hidden engines.”
“Each of us finds that in [our] own life every moment of time is completely filled. [We are] bombarded every second by sensations, emotions, thoughts… nine-tenths of which [we] must simply ignore. The past [is] a roaring cataract of billions upon billions of such moments: Any one of them too complex to grasp in its entirety, and the aggregate beyond all imagination…. At every tick of the clock, in every inhabited part of the world, an unimaginable richness and variety of ‘history’ falls off the world into total oblivion.”
English novelist-critic C. S. Lewis (1967)
- When a feeling was there, they felt as if it would never go; when it was gone, they felt as if it had never been; when it returned, they felt as if it had never gone.”
George MacDonald, What’s Mine’s Mine, 1886
