The Stranger

The lack of recognition in a person’s eyes … She would not look at me. She looked away. I could not get her to acknowledge that I was there, until – finally! – I had talked for ten minutes. Then she turned in her chair and looked at me with a smile.

The double of no original

tv personality marmalade in the finer points

I can’t believe that

“That is absolutely incredible … “

(One could see this as a definition of science fiction.)

The role of the personality in trauma

It occurs to me that the childhood traumas that I continue to, or that I continually, re-live, that I repeatedly revive (in whatever fashion) in adulthood, the traumas, defeats, the things that I can’t live down, that keep re-manifesting in the various types of the aberrant behaviour that I indulge in, that those old forgotten worn out cases were in anycase experienced in the first instance because I had a personality prone to them, and that in a manner of speaking induced them,  so in a way it was not just ‘accident’ that they should have happened and therefore it is not just time pressure or the weight of worldly affairs that I should be convinced that they form an indelible part of my personality.  When I tell myself, “You fail there because of incident x or y” I forget that yes it’s true: these things are indeed a mirror of who I am.

When better is harder to understand …

William Golding’s descriptions of key moments in Lord of the Flies are sometimes hard to understand, not clear.  Hard to visualise or to get a handle on.  Better is harder.  Simplicity should be the ultimate aim; but you can’t start out like that. 

Pragmatism and nonsense are the same branch of the tree.

The Soldier

Kafka: in actuality these fashion models are rehearsing their induction into a future army. [Vaguely remembered.]

A robot expresses …

A robot expresses our grasp of infinity.

The species conundrum

It is not a cultural fact that we are heading into a world of robots. It is not even a technological one. In a sense we have always been doing so because as a species (that is in contrast with wild creatures) we are doomed to live in a finite universe.

The robot / human conundrum

The dissolution of the robot/human interface is the inevitable terminus of the fact that we live in a finite world without end …

An Emotional Robot

Describe