consciousness 3

It’s gray, flat, dim, quiet, and temperate, and I’m looking at all that gray, flat, dimness, while it’s quiet and temperate.

Perhaps that’s the lesson at the heart of both The Master and His Emissary and Moby-Dick: when we adopt a utilitarian posture of domination over the world, we misapprehend it.

And nowhere, not in so much as a page of this literature, does one discover even the beginnings of an answer to the question, “what is it like to be…