““Hi, you’ve reached Faison! I’m not able to take your call right now…" It makes for an odd sensation, watching her real-time person in the middle distance while holding her disembodied voice to his ear. It puts a frame around the situation, gives it focus, perspective. It makes him aware of himself being aware of himself, and here is a mystery that seems worth thinking about, why this stacking of awareness should even matter. Ant the moment all he knows is that there’s structure in it, a pleasing sense of poise or mental ordering. A kind of knowledge, or maybe a bridge thereto–as if existence didn’t necessarily have to be a moron’s progress of lurching from one damn this to another? As if you might aspire to some sort of context in your life, a condition he associates with adultness. Then comes the beep, and he has to talk.””
![“[L]et my reader who is puzzled by my awkward explanations close his eyes for no more than two minutes, and see if he does not find himself suddenly not a compact human being at all, but only a consciousness on a sea of sound and touch . . .” quote by Shirley Jackson](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/579/shirley-jackson-1526_awkward_l-et-my-reader-who-is-puzzled-by-my-awkw_3121753.jpg)
![“I never knew any man who had once tasted the sweetness of experimental knowledge, that ever afterward fasted after ye Vapour garlick and onions of phantasmatical seeming philosophy." [William Petty]” quote by Carl Zimmer](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/e5a/carl-zimmer-16331_knowledge_i-never-knew-any-man-who-had-once-tasted_1770.jpg)
