Sunday morning chat

This morning, the parents took the twins to Sunday School. I stayed home on religious grounds. I claimed I was a Buddhist. I wasn't, but Junjie was. It didn't matter. They took advantage of me. You grasp hold of whatever advantages you can. Junjie taught me that.

Malik was good with the kids anyway. So it didn't matter too much if I wasn't there. Not that the parents weren't capable of dealing with them. They just didn't like the bother.

I had a feeling Brook would be done about now so I walked over to the Holder estate. I saw him through the solarium window as I approached. He was just getting out of his chair. I stayed out of sight. I don't think he cared for me. I waited until he'd left before I approached the solarium. Brooke signaled me to enter as she unlatched the solarium door before carrying the breakfast tray to the kitchen. She smiled as she served me coffee. But then I began to notice she had the wrinkle in her eyebrow and that frown she gets at the corners of her mouth. “Did he do it again?” I asked.

“Last night, she said. And then he threatened to fire me.”

“He threatens you lot doesn’t he?”

“Almost constantly. I guess it's part of the job. How are you doing?”

“Oh, I started writing something new."

“Another novel?”

“No. This is something new. It’s about economics and neuropsychology, I guess.”

“You don’t know?”

“No, my muse says she’ll explain it as we go.”

“Your muse?”

“That’s what she calls herself.”

“Weird.”

“Even weirder, I saw her in broad daylight the other day. And for once, I wasn't half asleep."

Horrors

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."

I think H. P. Lovecraft got it wrong. The mind has a wonderful ability to build maps of the world. We can expand those maps, building models of what we cannot see. We can bend our thoughts in all sorts of useful directions while drawing from a variety of inner resources. What we cannot do is see the world as it is, for the world doesn't exist until our eyes see it and our brain models it. But it's a mistake to believe that only one's own world is real or that what you do in the real world has no consequences.