Timescape

* There are no privileged observers in the universe.
* To shine is better than to reflect.

Gregory Benford

Martian Time-Slip

The way he sprinted about, on the tips of his toes, as if dancing to some unheard music, some tune from inside his own mind whose rhythms kept him enthralled. We are so pedestrian, compared to him, Steiner thought. Leaden. We creep along like snails, while he dances and leaps, as if gravity does not have the same influence on him as it does on us. Could he be made from some new and different kind of atom?

Philip K. Dick

Little tragedy of life

A strange thing happened to me, once, back on Earth. A very small thing. I got down a cup from the cupboard, a cup I hardly ever used. In it I found a spider, a dead spider; it had died because there was nothing for it to eat. Obviously it had fallen into the cup and couldn't get out. But here's the point. It had woven a web, at the bottom of the cup. As good a web as it could weave under the circumstances. When I found it - saw it dead in the cup, with its meager, hopeless web - I thought, It never had a chance. No flies would ever have come along, even if it had waited forever. It waited until it died. It tried to make the best of the circumstances, but it was hopeless. I always wondered, Did it know it was hopeless? Did it weave the web knowing it was no use?

Philip K. Dick (Galactic Pot-Healer)

Why I play video games

I cannot be what I am
so I become money, quarter by quarter,
and live as long as I can live.

Tony Barnstone (Why I Play Video Games)

Galactic Pot-Healer

Now reading and enjoying:

* What ties me here? he asked himself. The known, he decided. The fact that I am used to it. You can get used to anything, and even learn to like it. Pavlov's theory of learned reflex is correct; I am held by habit.

* A man is an angel that has become deranged.

* No creature knows itself.

* Maybe he's right; maybe even failure is valuable. As he says, it tells us the limit of ourselves; it maps our boundaries.

Philip K. Dick