"I'm like everybody else. This kind of living ain't much better than being dead." He laughed again, shaking his head from side to side. "And it ain't… - Walter Tevis

All day yesterday she read a new kind of writing called poems. Some of them she read aloud. In places they were like chess—incomprehensible—and in other places they said strange and interesting things.

And then I began to feel it, the whole enormous scope of it, in what had begun in some dark antiquity of trees and caves and the plains of Africa; of human life, erect and ape-like, spreading itself everywhere and building first its idols and then its cities. And then dwindling to a drugged trace, a remnant, because of a failed machine. A tiny part of a failed machine. And a more-than-human robot that would not try to repair it.

Noticing and thinking are sometimes a strain and a bafflement and I wonder if the Designers were aware of that when they made it almost impossible for the ordinary citizen to make use of a recorder. Or when they had us all taught that earliest learned wisdom: “When in doubt, forget it.”