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I'm sitting here on this huge, dirty, old rock, when I look up and see a furnace in the sky. It's looks about
as big as a dime, and yet I can feel it's heat. As I ride my rock through a blackness that
apparently never ends, at a tremendous speed I can't even perceive, I realize that's
what's really frightening--how little I can perceive.
The colors I can see squeak through a slit in a much larger spectrum.
I hear only a narrow band of sound. My sense of smell is remarkably inferior to other
creatures who move a little closer to the surface of the rock.
Even so, some members of my tribe act like they know everything, as if they own the whole
rock. We all go around looking for patterns, but when some of us see a pattern repeat
itself often enough, they assume it will always work that way. And even though the more
patterns they find, the more questions they raise, some of them insist there's only one
way to behave. They rely entirely on the same process that makes their hands jerk away
from a fire.
The rest of us tend to let the sum of our experience show us the
way. When we express ourselves, we call it art. One of us once said that the job of the
artist is to "make strange the world." It's really not that difficult, life is strange.
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