A pretty long time ago, I was on an internet forum. The topic had come to “things robots will never understand”. One person said this: The feeling of holding a book in your hand after finishing it.
When I heard that, I could feel a giant valley of determination welling up from within me. Like I could be someone who really figures things out.
No. It can’t be this way. We’re not supposed to live in a world where something like holding a book can cause such a strong emotional response, and yet nobody has the tools to give that kind of sensation a name.
I’m writing to you. I’m writing to everyone. Everyone who goes online and thinks “what the hell is this whole thing for?”
I’m here for you. I’m here for everyone.
Listen to me. When you hold a book in your hand, what you feel is…..
the friction of potential and dormancy versus effect and activity.
When you close the book, when you fold it up, when you carry it with you,
you understand that this thing is just a physical object, and yet it has so many strange abilities to bend much time and space and emotion and fate…..
and yet, it may never again, although, it certainly has, you having taken it in.
It feels so weird to think that this piece of matter can inform you, inspire you, uplift others, send countless people down strange routes that may indeed be more dignified than those that have happened before.
But it may never again if it’s not opened. Not only that, the effects that it has on you or anyone may indeed be of almost no significance whatever.
But when you touch the book, and feel what it represents, you know that it is definitely some kind of beautiful flaw within reality, the kind of thing that couldn’t exist if we were not creatures
who can feel our connection and our disconnection to everything else,
who knows that time moves forward only one gigantic frame at a time.
When you hold that book, you can feel yourself undulate. You feel the tension between what something is for and what it may do.
You ache for it to fulfill something, while also being steadily in tune with its limitations.
You feel such a humble love when you hold your favorite book.
But even so, I’m not here to congratulate the world. I’m here to change it. Right here, right now, I’m solving all this rage. I’m saving 2020 because that’s what I decided.
You see, my friend, the reason we feel okay with what we do to each other
is because within nearly all malice is the lust for the possibility of true human niceness.
It all comes down to virtue.
The Found Emotion (Invoke Yourself) 