Our internal monologue is the longest conversation any of us have, yet none of it will ever be written down. I find myself asking think, what it would be great to have a machine to plug into your head, which transcribed it to the document of our lives.
If we for the moment ignore the possibility of such a document falling into the hands of someone we don't want to see it, we could investigate what we actually were thinking in the past.
About 15 years ago I got to play with an early version of IBMs ViaVoice, the main thing I learnt was that I say, ahem, a lot and mumble a lot, far more than my internal a dialogue does, I also learnt that my voice doesn't have the authoritative deep gravely sound of my internal monologue. I was already faintly aware of this from recording answer phone messages. but it still came as a shock that I sounded like one of the yokels caught in the lights of a TV news broadcast, trying to describe what just happened.
The greatest achievement of the human mind is the fiction of our memory. If it was a film our memory would have to be described as "inspired by real events". Depending on what type of person we are it is either a heroic epic, full of great deeds and victories snatched from the jaws of defeat or a forlorn tragedy, epic in its misfortune, missed chances and immense regrets.
In my head, I have written this next bit at least 20 times. It's funny, witty, erudite and enlightening. Your lives will be greatly enhanced by the wisdom and insight it provided. It seems to lose a certain something in transferring from my mind to the written form.
What you are experiencing here is the equivalent of watching an advert for the latest Ultra High Def TV on a 512 line black and white TV. With the sound being provided by a the valve of a 1950s AM radio. It's a horrible, degrading thing which only hints at the at what I am experiencing.
I'm 90% confident that what you experience, as your day to day life, in your own internal monologue, is as far removed from the fumbling, creaking, inarticulate wreck that the rest of us see, as this paragraph is from the wonders realisation of the glories of existence and the appalling gulf between these little islands of consciousness that each of us represent.
If the greatest writers could transcribe even the smallest sliver of true experience, they would have to be 10 or 100 times greater than they actually are. The greatest works of art are a mere caricature of the universe and the slightest shadow of the human experience. The greatest novel, poem, play or installation figures as only the smallest vignette, in a small fraction of a a daily epic. In its solid, existent form it it is less, than a grain of sand in the experience of the creator and less than the smallest atom in that grain to the observer.
The creative efforts of man are simply the fertilizer for the internal experience, to add to the great and only work of all our lives, our internal monologue. The experience of work is greatest for its creator, true experience is the creation of things not in the appreciation of them. What you take away from seeing something is the best bit of the experience, what you take away is the internal dialogue and it is for the most part created by you.
Hearing a sound is more productive than the mundane, repetitive process of reproducing that sound.
If we for the moment ignore the possibility of such a document falling into the hands of someone we don't want to see it, we could investigate what we actually were thinking in the past.
About 15 years ago I got to play with an early version of IBMs ViaVoice, the main thing I learnt was that I say, ahem, a lot and mumble a lot, far more than my internal a dialogue does, I also learnt that my voice doesn't have the authoritative deep gravely sound of my internal monologue. I was already faintly aware of this from recording answer phone messages. but it still came as a shock that I sounded like one of the yokels caught in the lights of a TV news broadcast, trying to describe what just happened.
The greatest achievement of the human mind is the fiction of our memory. If it was a film our memory would have to be described as "inspired by real events". Depending on what type of person we are it is either a heroic epic, full of great deeds and victories snatched from the jaws of defeat or a forlorn tragedy, epic in its misfortune, missed chances and immense regrets.
In my head, I have written this next bit at least 20 times. It's funny, witty, erudite and enlightening. Your lives will be greatly enhanced by the wisdom and insight it provided. It seems to lose a certain something in transferring from my mind to the written form.
What you are experiencing here is the equivalent of watching an advert for the latest Ultra High Def TV on a 512 line black and white TV. With the sound being provided by a the valve of a 1950s AM radio. It's a horrible, degrading thing which only hints at the at what I am experiencing.
I'm 90% confident that what you experience, as your day to day life, in your own internal monologue, is as far removed from the fumbling, creaking, inarticulate wreck that the rest of us see, as this paragraph is from the wonders realisation of the glories of existence and the appalling gulf between these little islands of consciousness that each of us represent.
If the greatest writers could transcribe even the smallest sliver of true experience, they would have to be 10 or 100 times greater than they actually are. The greatest works of art are a mere caricature of the universe and the slightest shadow of the human experience. The greatest novel, poem, play or installation figures as only the smallest vignette, in a small fraction of a a daily epic. In its solid, existent form it it is less, than a grain of sand in the experience of the creator and less than the smallest atom in that grain to the observer.
The creative efforts of man are simply the fertilizer for the internal experience, to add to the great and only work of all our lives, our internal monologue. The experience of work is greatest for its creator, true experience is the creation of things not in the appreciation of them. What you take away from seeing something is the best bit of the experience, what you take away is the internal dialogue and it is for the most part created by you.
Hearing a sound is more productive than the mundane, repetitive process of reproducing that sound.