less larger than life

05 April 2008

10:09 PM

view from the window

'ORANGES are not the only FRUIT'

I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had. This is not fancy.

If a potter has an idea, she makes it into a pot, and it exists beyond her, in its own separate life. She uses a physical substance to display her thoughts.

If I use a metaphysical substance to display my thoughts, I might be anywhere at one time, influencing a number of different things, just as the potter and her pottery can exert influence in different places.

There's a chance that I'm not here at all, that all the parts of me, running along all the choices I did and didn't make, for a moment brush against each other.

We are all historians in our small way. And in some ghastly way Pol Pot was more honest than the rest of us have been.

Pol Pot decided to dispense with the past altogether. To dispense with the sham of treating the past with objective respect.

Memory - what is that?
The imperfect ramblings of fools who will not see the need to forget.

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How is it that no one will believe that the whale swallowed Jonah when every day Jonah is swallowing the whale?

Jeanette Winterson