Orts #918
Our brain is doing its best to make sense of ambiguous sensory input. In some ways, our perception of the world is just the story our brains are telling us based on the sum of our senses.
-- Carolyn Merriman, in The Atlantic, November 30, 2018
https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/577087/neuroscience-perception/
. . . life is frequently confusing at best, and guaranteed to be hard and weird and sad at times. . . . We witness and try to alleviate others’ suffering, but sometimes it just outdoes itself and we are left gasping, groaning. And running through it all there is the jangle, both the machines outside and the chattering treeful of monkeys inside us.
-- Anne Lamott, in Almost Everything: Notes on Hope
. . . the life of interior solitude. . . . the disconcerting task of facing and accepting one's own absurdity. The anguish of realizing that underneath the apparently logical pattern of a more or less "well organized" and rational life, there lies an abyss of irrationality, confusion, pointlessness, and indeed apparent chaos. This is what immediately impresses itself upon the man who has renounced diversion.
— Thomas Merton, Notes for a Philosophy of Solitude
Illusions are the most valuable and necessary of all things. . . . Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth. Roll up that tender air and the plant dies, the colour fades.
-- Virginia Woolf, Orlando https://bit.ly/2T1Jmo0