Writing Inspiration | 19 | May 11 — May 18
Excerpts
Does consciousness exist without interaction?
from Ex Machina (2015), written and directed by Alex Garland
He’d been thinking about the quality of sunshine, that is, how daylight wipes away the stars and the planets, making them invisible to human eyes. If one needed the darkness in order to see the heavens, might daylight be a form of blindness? Could it be that sound was also be a form of deafness? If so, what was silence?
from Do Not Say We Have Nothing: A Novel by Madeleine Thien (recommended by Chris Rawle)
There is no physical location for your memory of a first kiss. The recollection changes with the stimulus that triggers it, depending on whether you recall the kiss the next day, read about it in a letter, or run into that old girlfriend twenty years later. So if the connectome project works, and we’re transferred to silicon, we might be invulnerable to physical decay and capable of astounding feats of learning and ratiocination, yet shorn of that first memory of crocuses in a spring rain. But maybe we’d have no memory of caring.
from Silicon Valley’s Quest to Live Forever by Tad Friend, The New Yorker
Words
- ignominy: public shame or disgrace
- ideogram: a written character symbolizing the idea of a thing without indicating the sounds used to say it, e.g., numerals and Chinese characters
- abscond: leave hurriedly and secretly, typically to avoid detection of or arrest for an unlawful action such as theft; escape; (of honeybees, especially Africanized ones) to abandon a hive or nest
If you run across an amazing piece of writing, word, or excerpt, let me know about it here. ❤️
