It Was A Truism That All Civilizations Were Basically Neurotic Until They Made Contact With Everybody Else And Found Their Place Within The Ever-changing Meta-civilisation Of Other Beings, Because, Until Then, During The Stage When They Honestly Believed They Might Be Entirely Alone In Existence, All Solo Societies Were Possessed Of Both An Inflated Sense Of Their Own Importance And A Kind Of Existential Terror At The Sheer Scale And Apparent Emptiness Of The Universe.

-Iain Banks

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It Was A Truism That All Civilizations

Iain Banks

It Was A Truism That All Civilizations Were Basically Neurotic Until They Made Contact With Everybody Else And Found Their Place Within The Ever-changing Meta-civilisation Of Other Beings, Because, Until Then, During The Stage When They Honestly Believed They Might Be Entirely Alone In Existence, All Solo Societies Were Possessed Of Both An Inflated Sense Of Their Own Importance And A Kind Of Existential Terror At The Sheer Scale And Apparent Emptiness Of The Universe.

Topic

Civilization

Might

Emptiness

I'm Too Drunk To Recall Much Of What I've Said. Which, Come To Think Of It, Is Probably Just As Well, Judging By The Way People Who Are Normally Quite Sensible Dissolve Into Gibbering, Rude, Opinionated And Bombastic Idiots Once The Alcohol Molecules In Their Bloom-stream Outnumber The Neutrons, Or Whatever. Luckily, One Only Notices This If One Stays Sober Oneself, So The Solution Is As Pleasant (at The Time, At Least) As It Is Obvious.

Thinking

People

Drunk