How long, forsooth, does thou perceive this piece of string?
You cannot see the piece of string, you say? Does this matter in such things? Perception is, of course, in the eye of the beholder, ‘twixt a cosmic dance of known and unknown, the felt and the real.
For what is the real? Can anything be real? I think, therefore I am… but what is it to think? To actually experience one’s thoughts, in chronological or fluid time? Pray, the brain in the jar – does he not think? Is he am? Of course, so goes the common thread. But what of the simple, affordable glazier near Melbourne? Could he build such a jar? Why would he do such a thing?
The maintenance of brains and jars is a fraught issue, that has caused many a philosophical row in the distant future – indeed, not far from the very spot where you are reading this today. Melbourne sheds its name, as do all things who live long enough to watch themselves die. An idea, however… and idea can never die. It can be moulded, twisted, forgotten and lost – but death? Death is as foreign to an idea as life is to a memory.
Understood, replicated… but never approached.
Return, then, to our glazier, hard at work on an affordable stair balustrade repair, renovation, revivification. But isn’t he imaginary, to you? Real as he may be, somewhere, you have never laid thought on him – how so is he touchable? Provable.
Alive?
Such conversations are meaningless, of course, lacking in course and destination; but that doesn’t mean they’re useless. Why, the two terms are interlinked, inextricable, intertwined but… so distant. Never to touch. For if they were to touch, they would surely no longer be; separate.
And so too must we separate. The time for lurid words is behind and ahead, but here no longer. I leave you with but one thought:
Do you know anywhere to find an affordable glazier in Melbourne?
Think on it a while.