The Library - Ninth Scene
from Stories Hosted by Francis Rosenfeld
Life doesn’t give you time to actually look at it except during extraordinary circumstances. It’s in those gaps, those experiences that don’t fit, that you see its inherent strangeness. You notice then that things are never clean cut: the laws of physics have exceptions, moral imperatives have exceptions, even life and death have exceptions. One doesn’t see that when things are normal, whatever that means, within the range of possibility, and one forgets that very unlikely outcomes are well within the range possibility as well. We understand freedom as the ability to control our fate and we’re so proud of our marketable skills, our net worth, our physical attractiveness, our fitness, in every sense of the word, and we fail to see the gigantic mechanism we’re locked into, the much larger drift of social dynamics that runs our lives and to which we blind ourselves to maintain our illusion of control. When all our social ties are cut, when we’re thrown out of humanity and denied the facilities of civilization at first we’re overwhelmed by dread.
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