Human Beings Consider Themselves Satisfied Only Compared

"the Diagnosis" Is By Far My Most Ambitious Book. I Such Great Hopes For It... There Was So Much I Wanted To Do With The Book. I Was Extremely Insecure About It For Several Years. Just Didn't Know Whether I Would Finish The Book Much Less For It To Come Close To What I Intended. I Think That For Any Novel You Never Know Exactly How The Book Is Going To Turn Out...

The Tragedy Of This World Is That No One Is Happy, Whether Stuck In Atime Of Pain Or Of Joy. The Tragedy Of This World Is That Everyone Is Alone. For A Life In The Past Cannot Be Shared With The Present. Each Person Who Gets Stuck In Time Gets Stuck Alone.

I Think People All Over The Institution Recognize That Different Ways Of Understanding Are Valuable. Artists May Think In A Different Way Than Biologists Or Chemists, But You Can Learn Something From That. It Is True That The Arts At Mit Don't Have The Same Amount Of Funding Or Same Status As The Sciences Or Engineering.

I Think That The Scienti?c Way Of Looking At The World, And The Humanistic Way Of Looking At The World Are Complementary. There Are Important Differences Which Should Be Preserved, And In Trying To Do Away With Those Differences We Would Lose Something The Same Way As If We Tried To Make All Religions One Religion Or All Races One Race. There Is A Cultural Diversity That's Very Valuable, And It's Valuable To Have Different Ways Of Looking At The World.

That Has Been The Great Achievement Of Our Age: To So Thoroughly Flood The Planet With Megabits That Every Image And Fact Has Become A Digitized Disembodied Nothingness. With Magnificent Determination, Our Species Has Advanced From Stone Age To Industrial Revolution To Digital Emptiness. We've Become Weightless, In The Bad Sense Of The Word.