Life is agid, life is fulgid.
Life is a burgeoning, a
quickening of the dim primordial
urge in the murky wastes
of time. Life is what the
least of us make most of
us feel the least of us
make the most of.
Willard Van Orman Quine, in Hugh S. Moorhead (ed.) The Meaning of Life: According to Our Century’s Greatest Writers and Thinkers, Chicago, 1988, pp. 154-155
Suppose that we were to divide a square into a million smaller squares by dividing each of its sides into a thousand equal parts. And suppose that we took the first million digits in the decimal part of pi and interpreted each as corresponding to one of the million squares by some simple correspondence rule (something like this: the top left square is assigned the first digit, the next square to the right is assigned the second digit, and so on). And suppose that we assigned a color to each of the numbers 0 through 0 and painted each of the small squares with the color corresponding to the number assigned to it.
What would we say if the result turned out to be a meaningful picture—a landscape or a still life or something equally representational—of surpassing beauty?
Peter van Inwagen, Metaphysics, Boulder, Colorado, 1993, p. 137
The purpose of philosophy is to find out by rigorous methods what the truth is. Often its results clash with the common sense view. In such cases it is reasonable to maintain that our relatively unexamined common sense views should be abandoned and give way to the conclusions of rigorous philosophical analysis.
George Schlesinger, ‘Possible Worlds and the Mystery of Existence’, Ratio, vol. 26, no. 1 (1984), p. 10
We do not want our theories to tell us that what we see is surprising in the last analysis, i.e., surprising even when every explanation has been found; for that would just show that our theories are probably wrong. Our project must be one of showing instead that all this smoke, so to speak, could in the end be very much to be expected, were there a fire.
John Leslie, Universes, London, 1989, p. 108
The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.
But if there is no solace in the fruits of our research, there is at least some consolation in the research itself. Men and women are not content to comfort themselves with the tales of gods and giants, or to confine their thoughts to the daily affairs of life; they also build telescopes and satellites and accelerators, and sit at their desks for endless hours working out the meaning of the data they gather. The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.
Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origins of the Universe, London, 1977, p. 147
A person finds the arrangement of cards remarkable because it is one that is already familiar, which has special significance for him. We find it remarkable that the conditions for life are satisfied in our universe, because we are already intimately familiar with life. We think there is a contrary-to-chance match, but what we are familiar with is a consequence of these fundamental conditions. No one has given an advance characterization of a universe and then found that, contrary to chance, this universe conforms to the characterization, the characterization invoked being one derived from the given universe. But if no order has been initially specified to which things are found inexplicably to correspond, there is no call to postulate an intelligence to account for this otherwise inexplicable match.
Bede Rundle, Why there is Something rather than Nothing, Oxford, 2004, p. 36
It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas. If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you. On the other hand, if you are open to the point of gullibility and have not an ounce of sceptical sense in you, then you cannot distinguish useful ideas from the worthless ones. If all ideas have equal validity then you are lost, because the, it seems to me, no ideas have any validity at all.
Carl Sagan, ‘The Burden of Skepticism’, 1987
Some people should not have been born; and as there are other people whose existence is a good thing, we may say of the that they, in the same sense, “should have been born”; though of course they were, and it is not a point of much practical importance so far as it concerns the individual the desirability of whose birth is in question. Hitler should not have been born, Churchill should have been born, and there are other cases where it is debatable—though I admit that all such questions, are, as we say, “merely theoretical”. What I am claiming is that, if we regard ‘Hitler’ and ‘Churchill’ as proper names, Hitler’s mother and Churchill’s mother could not have presented themselves, prior to their conception, with sensible questions of the form, “ought we to give birth to Hitler?”, “Ought we to give birth to Churchill?” The latter appear to be parallel to, “ought I to spank Adolph?”, “Ought I to spank Winston?”; but they plainly are not.
Jan Narveson, ‘Utilitarianism and Future Generations’, Mind, vol. 76, no. 301 (January, 1967), p. 64
Whereas many philosophers and theologians appear to possess an emotional attachment to their theories and ideas which requires them to believe them, most scientists tend to regard their ideas differently. They are interested in formulating many logically consistent possibilities, leaving any judgment regarding their truth to observation. Scientists feel no qualms about suggesting different but mutually exclusive explanations for the same phenomenon.
John Barrow and Frank Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, Oxford, 1986, p. 15
I try not to think with my gut. If I’m serious about understanding the world, thinking with anything besides my brain, as tempting as that might be, is likely to get me into trouble. Really, it’s okay to reserve judgment until the evidence is in.
Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, London, 1996, p. 170
Are the conclusions true? Before I address this issue, I want to observe that it is not clear that they are always intended to be true, that is, to correspond to the actual world. Rather, they sometimes represent a form of science fiction—an analysis of the action and interaction of ideally rational agents, who have never existed and never will. The analysis of ever-more-refined forms of strategic equilibria, for instance, is hardly motivated by a desire to explain or predict the behaviour of actual individuals. Rather, the motivation seems to be an aesthetic one. Two of the most accomplished equilibria theorists, Reinhart Selten and Ariel Rubinstein, have made it quite clear that they do not believe their models have anything to say about the real world. When addressing the workings of the latter, they use some variety of behavioural economics or bounded rationality. To cite another example, social choice theory—the axiomatic study of voting mechanisms—became at one point so mathematically convoluted and so obviously irrelevant to the study of actual politics that one of the most prominent journals in economics, Econometrica, imposed a moratorium on articles in this area.
An interesting question in the psychology and sociology of science is how many secret practitioners there are of economic science fiction—hiding either from themselves or from others the fact that this is indeed what they are practicing. Inventing ingenious mathematical models is a well-paid activity, but except for the likes of Selten and Rubinstein payment will be forthcoming only if the activity can also be claimed to be relevant; hence the incentive for either self-deception or deception. To raise this question might seem out of bounds for academic discourse, but I do not see why it should be. Beyond a certain point, academic norms of politeness ought to be discarded.
Jon Elster, Explaining Social Behavior: More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences, Cambridge, 2007, p. 461
Apparently, beliefs are like clothes. In a harsh environment, we choose our clothes mainly to be functional, i.e., to keep us safe and comfortable. But when the weather is mild, we choose our clothes mainly for their appearance, i.e., to show our figure, our creativity, and our allegiances. Similarly, when the stakes are high we may mainly want accurate beliefs to help us make good decisions. But when a belief has few direct personal consequences, we in effect mainly care about the image it helps us to project.
Robin Hanson, ‘Enhancing Out Truth Orientation’, in Nick Bostrom & Julian Savulescu (eds.), Human Enhancement, Oxford, 2009, p. 358
Because philosophy operates at a presuppositional level by clarifying and justifying the presuppositions of a discipline, philosophy is the only field of study that has no unquestioned assumptions within its own domain. In other words, philosophy is a self-referential discipline, for questions about the definition, justification and methodology of philosophy are themselves philosophical in nature. Philosophers keep the books on everyone, including themselves.
J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, Illinois, 2003, p. 13
[T]here is a fundamental paradox in the search for such a complete unified theory. The ideas about scientific theories outlined above assume we are rational beings who are free to observe the universe as we want and to draw logical deductions from what we see. In such a scheme it is reasonable to suppose that we might progress ever closer towards the laws that govern our universe. Yet if there really were a complete unified theory, it would also presumably determine our actions—so the theory itself would determine the outcome of our search for it! And shy should it determine that we come to the right conclusions from the evidence? Might it not equally well determine that we draw the wrong conclusions? Or no conclusion at all?
The only answer that we can give to this problem is based on Darwin’s principle of natural selection. The idea is that in any population of self-reproducing organisms, there will be variations in the genetic material and upbringing that different individuals have. These differences will mean that some individuals are better able than others to draw the right conclusions about the world around them and to act accordingly. These individuals will be more likely to survive and reproduce, so their pattern of behaviour and thought will come to dominate. It has certainly been true in the past that what we call intelligence and scientific discovery have conveyed a survival advantage. It is not so clear that this is still the case: our scientific discoveries may well destroy us all, and even if they don’t, a complete unified theory may not make much difference to our chances of survival. However, provided the universe has evolved in a regular way, we might expect that the reasoning abilities that natural selection has given us would also be valid in our search for a complete unified theory and so would not lead us to the wrong conclusions.
Stephen Hawking with Leonard Mlodinow, A Briefer History of Time, London, 2005, p. 17
[O]nce space travel begins, there are, in principle, no further physical barriers to prevent Homo sapiens (or our descendants) from eventually expanding to colonize a substantial portion, if not all, of the visible Cosmos. Once this has occurred, it becomes quite reasonable to speculate that the operations of all these intelligent beings could begin to affect the large scale evolution of the Universe. If this is true, it would be in this era—in the far future near the Final State of the Universe—that the true significance of life and intelligence would manifest itself. Present-day life would then have cosmic significance because of what future life may someday accomplish.
John Barrow and Frank Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, Oxford, 1986, p. 614
Professor [Benjamin] Jowett […] is one of the lions of Oxford. That town is subjected to constant inroads of tourists, all of whom crave a sight of the famous professor. It so happened, while he was engaged on his translation of Plato, that a guide discovered the professor’s study-window looked into the Broad Street. Coming with his menagerie, the guide would begin: ‘This, ladies and gentlemen, is Balliol College, one of the very holdest in the huniversity, and famous for the herudition of its scholars. The ‘head of Balliol College is called the Master. The present Master of Balliol is the celebrated Professor Benjamin Jowett, Regius Professor of Greek. Those are Professor Jowett’s study-windows, and there’ (here the ruffian would stoop down, take up a handful of gravel and throw it against the pain, bringing poor Jowett, livid with fury, to the window) ‘ladies and gentlemen, is Professor Benjamin Jowett himself.’
William Shepard Walsh, A Handy-book of Literary Curiosities, Philadelphia, 1893, pp. 640-641
Revisions are the food additives of theory construction. In the case of utilitarian revisionism the junk theories which have flooded the market have been particularly indigestible.
Wayne Sumner, ‘Classical Utilitarianism and the Population Optimum’, in R. I. Sikora and Brian Barry (eds.), Obligations to Future Generations, Philadelphia, 1978, p. 96
That suicide harms those who are thereby bereaved is part of the tragedy of coming into existence. We find ourselves in a kind of trap. We have already come into existence. To end our existence causes immense pain to those we love and for whom we care. Potential procreators would do well to consider this trap they lay when they produce offspring.
David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence, Oxford, 2006, p. 220
Consequentialism may be able to provide reasons for why their theory does not, in fact, entail some counter-intuitive outcome in the world in which we happen to live. But in relying on some contingent feature of the world, their theory, when it rules our such counter-intuitive outcomes, does so for the wrong reason.
Alan Carter, ‘Inegalitarian Biocentric Consequentialism, the Minimax Implication and Multidimensional Value Theory: A Brief Proposal for a New Direction in Environmental Ethics’, Utilitas, vol. 17, no. 1 (March, 2005), p. 71
Many of us have little tricks we play on ourselves to make us do the things we ought to do or to keep us from the things we ought to foreswear. Sometimes we put things out of reach for the moment of temptation, sometimes we promise ourselves small rewards, and sometimes we surrender authority to a trustworthy friend who will police our calories or our cigarettes. We place the alarm clock across the room so we cannot turn it off without getting out of bed. People who are chronically late set their watches a few minutes ahead to deceive themselves. I have heard of a corporate dining room in which lunch orders are placed by telephone at 9:30 or 10:00 in the morning; no food or liquor is then served to anyone except what was ordered at that time, not long after breakfast, when food was least tempting and resolve was at its highest. A grimmer example of a decision that can’t be rescinded is the people who have had their jaws wired shut. Less drastically, some smokers carry no cigarettes of their own, so they pay the “higher” price of bumming free cigarettes.
In these examples, everybody behaves like two people, one who wants clean lungs and long life and another who adores tobacco, or one who wants a lean body and another who wants dessert. The two are in a continual contest for control: the “straight” one often in command most of the time, but the wayward one needing only to get occasional control to spoil the other’s best laid plan.
Thomas Schelling, ‘Egonomics, or the Art of Self-Management’, The American Economic Review, vol. 68, no. 2 (May, 1978), p. 290
Life is not long, and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent; deliberation, which those who begin it by prudence, and continue it with subtilty, must, after long expence of thought, conclude by chance. To prefer one future mode of life to another, upon just reasons, requires faculties which it has not pleased our Creator to give us.
Samuel Johnson, in James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, London, 1791, vol. 1, p. 282
[O]ne good testimony to one’s existence having a point is that the question of its point does not arise, and the propelling concerns may be of a relatively everyday kind such as certainly provide the grounds of many sorts of happiness.
Bernard Williams, ‘Persons, Character and Morality’, in Moral Luck, Cambridge, 1981, p. 12
Once a scholar has identified a suitable mathematical function or a suitable set of dependent or independent variables, she can begin to look for a causal story to provide an intuition to back the findings. When she writes up the results for publication, the sequence is often reversed. She will state that she started with a causal theory; then looked for the most plausible way of transforming it into a formal hypothesis; and then found it confirmed the data. This is bogus science. In the natural sciences there is no need for the “logic of justification” to match or reflect “the logic of discovery.” Once a hypothesis is stated in its final form, its genesis is irrelevant. What matters are its downstream consequences, not its upstream origins. This is so because the hypothesis can be tested on an indefinite number of observations over and above those that inspired the scholar to think of it in the first place. In the social sciences (and in the humanities), most explanations use a finite data set. Because procedures of data collection often are nonstandardized, scholars may not be able to test their hypotheses against new data. [Footnote:] One could get around or at least mitigate this problem by exercising self-restraint. If one has a sufficiently large data set, one can first concentrate on a representative sample and ignore the rest. Once one has done one’s best to explain the subset of observations, one can take the explanation to the full data set and see whether it holds up. If it does, it is less likely to be spurious. Another way of keeping scholars honest would be if journals refused to consider articles submitted for publication unless the hypotheses to be tested together with the procedures for testing them had been deposited with the editor (say) two years in advance.
Jon Elster, Explaining Social Behavior: More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences, Cambridge, 2007, pp. 48-49
We cannot live by reason alone. This is why no quantity of reason, applied as antiseptic, can compete with the balm of faith, once the terrors of this world begin to intrude upon our lives. Your child has died, or your wife has acquired a horrible illness that no doctor can cure, or your own body has suddenly begun striding toward the grave—and reason, no matter how broad its compass, will begin to smell distinctly of formaldehyde. This has led many of us to conclude, wrongly, that human beings have needs that only faith in certain fantastical ideas can fulfil. It is nowhere written, however, that human beings must be irrational, or live in a perpetual state of siege, to enjoy an abiding sense of the sacred. On the contrary, I hope to show that spirituality can be—indeed, must be—deeply rational, even as it elucidates the limits of reason. Seeing this, we can begin to divest ourselves of many of the reasons we currently have to kill one another.
Science will not remain mute on spiritual and ethical questions for long. Even now, we can see the first stirrings among psychologists and neuroscientists of what may one day become a genuinely rational approach to these matters—one that will bring even the most rarefied mystical experience within the purview of open, scientific inquiry. It is time we realized that we need not be unreasonable to suffuse our lives with love, compassion, ecstasy, and awe; nor must we renounce all forms of spirituality or mysticism to be on good terms with reason.
Sam Harris, The End of Fair: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, London, 2005, p. 43
The family went back to Greece when I was young and we returned to America when I was eight. I’m told that at school at the time I couldn’t speak English, only Greek. But the language barrier means nothing to me. Language is just a bunch of symbols. People’s emotions are fundamentally the same everywhere.
John Cassavetes, in Ray Carney (ed.), Cassavetes on Cassavetes, London, 2001, p. 4
There was a real irony to the NLPers I knew who prided themselves on their communication skills yet because of their need to let everyone know how engaging they were, they were among the least engaging people I have ever known. In one extreme, we see this in the Christian fanatics who stand on the street and preach the word of their Lord, unaware that for every one rare, impressionable soul who might respond positively to their shouting and intrusion there are many hundreds of others in whom they have merely confirmed a belief that all Christians must be nutters. People are too often terrible advertisements for their own beliefs.
Derren Brown, Tricks of the Mind, London, 2007, p. 357
Why shouldn’t I eat toothpaste? It’s a free world. Why shouldn’t I chew my toenails? I happen to have trodden in some honey. Why shouldn’t I prance across central park with delicate sideways leaps? I know what your answer will be: “it isn’t done”. But it’s no earthly use just saying it isn’t done. If there’s a reason why it isn’t done, give the reason—if there’s no reason, don’t attempt to stop me doing it. All other things being equal, the mere fact that something “isn’t done” is in itself an excellent reason for doing it.
Derek Parfit, ‘The Eaton College Chronicle’, in Anthony Cheetham and Derek Parfit (eds.), Eton Microcosm, London, 1964, p.101
We thus have an interesting historical paradox: Darwin’s theory was a better starting point for humans than any other species, and required a major pruning to adjust to the rise of genetics. Nevertheless, the Descent had no lasting influence on the social sciences that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century. Darwin was pigeonholed as a biologist, and sociology, economics, and history all eventually wrote biology out of their disciplines. Anthropology relegated his theory to a subdiscipline, biological anthropology, behind the superorganic firewall. Since the midtwentieth century, many social scientists have treated Darwinian initiatives as politically tainted threats. If anything, the gulf between the social and natural sciences continues to widen as some anthropologists, sociologists, and historians adopt methods and philosophical commitments that seem to natural scientists to abandon the basic norms of science entirely.
Peter Richerson & Robert Boyd, Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution, Chicago, 2005, p. 17
I doubt […] that any fundamental ethical dispute between consequentialists and deontologists can be resolved by appeal to the idea of respect for persons. The deontologist has his notion of respect—e.g., that we not use people in certain ways—and the consequentialist has his—e.g., that the good of every person has an equal claim upon us, a claim unmediated by any notion of right or contract, so that we should do the most possible to bring about outcomes that actually advance the good of persons. For every consequentially justified act of manipulation to which the deontologist can point with alarm there is a deontologically justified act that fails to promote the well-being of some person(s) as fully as possible to which the consequentialist can point, appalled.
Peter Railton, ‘Alienation, Consequentialism, and the Demands of Morality’, Philosophy & Public Affairs, vol. 13, no. 2. (Spring, 1984), p. 163, n. 32
Nature, as we know, regards ultimately only fitness and not our happiness, and does not scruple to use hate, fear, punishment and even war alongside affection in ordering social groups and selecting among them, just as she uses pain as well as pleasure to get us to feed, water and protect our bodies and also in forging our social bonds.
Leonard Katz, ‘Toward Good and Evil’, in Evolutionary Origins of Morality: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives, Thorverton, 2000, p. xv
[S]ome critics of Humeanism are looking for a club with which to beat those who ignore moral reasons. They have already beaten them with the club of immorality–to no effect. They want a bigger club; they want the club of irrationality.
Donald Hubin, ‘What’s Special about Humeanism’, Noûs, vol. 33, no. 1 (1999), p. 40
Even if moral truths cannot affect people, they can still be truths.
Derek Parfit, ‘Reasons and Motivation’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supp. vol. 71 (1997), p. 111
[P]ublicly expressed beliefs advertise the intellectual virtuosity of the belief-holder, creating an incentive to craft clever and extravagant beliefs rather than just true ones. This explains much of what goes on in academia.
Steven Pinker, ‘So How Does the Mind Work?’, Mind & Language, vol. 20, no. 1 (February 2005), p. 18
I know all this sounds like playing games. But love is a game, nature’s only game. Just about every creature on this planet plays it—unconsciously scheming to pass their DNA into tomorrow. By counting children, nature keeps her score.
Helen Fisher, Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love, New York, 2004, p. 202
I see no limit to the extent to which intelligence and will, guided by sound principles of investigation, and organized in common effort, may modify the conditions of existence, for a period longer than that now covered by history. And much may be done to change the nature of man himself. The intelligence which has converted the brother of the wolf into the faithful guardian of the flock ought to be able to do something towards curbing the instincts of savagery in civilized men.
Thomas Henry Huxley, ‘Evolution and Ethics’, in Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays, London, 1884, p. 85
Una vez, en un diálogo público que mantuvimos en una Feria del Libro, [Bioy Casares] nos explicó a mí y a la concurrencia que había tres clases de amores: “El fugaz, que dura el tiempo necesario para satisfacer el deseo y luego se olvida o se desecha sin pesar; el intermedio, que suele ser muy divertido pero al cual en un momento determinado lo alcanza el tedio y, entonces, se deja caer sin casi darse uno cuenta y, por último, los grandes amores que persisten en el recuerdo y a los cuales uno puede volver con renovado placer y esperanza. Éstos son los mejores.”
María Esther Vázquez, La memoria de los días: mis amigos, los escritores, Buenos Aires, 2004, pp. 142-143
The Beatles are not getting back together again. Brahms is dead. Composers will not return to Baroque style in large numbers. It is we who hold the power of “the cheapest possible artistic revolution” in our hands. We need only will it. Imagine that if one year the world produced 200 brilliant symphonies, 5,000 amazing pop songs, 300 first-rate CDs of jazz, and 5,000 mind-blowing ragas. And that is just a start.
Tyler Cowen, Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist, New York, 2007, p. 72
Nearly all modern economic theories of politics begin by assuming that the typical citizen understands economics and votes accordingly—at least on average. […] In stark contrast, introductory economics courses still tacitly assume that students arrive with biased beliefs, and try to set them straight, leading to better policy. […]
What a striking situation: As researchers, economists do not mention systematically biased economic beliefs; as teachers, they take their existence for granted.
Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies, Princeton, 2007, p. 13
The reasons for legal intervention in favour of children, apply not less strongly to the case of those unfortunate slaves and victims of the most brutal part of mankind, the lower animals.
John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Toronto, 1988, vol. 3, p. 952
Y cuando hubo movimiento todas las palancas empezaron a abrirse las puertas y el zapatero traspuso umbrales y antesalas e ingresó en salones cada vez más majestuosos y oscuros, aunque de una oscuridad satinada, una oscuridad regia, en donde las pisadas no resonaban, primero por la calidad y el grosos de las alfombras y segundo por la calidad y flexibilidad de los zapatos, y en la última cámara a la que fue conducido estaba sentado en una silla de lo más corriente el Emperador, junto a algunos de sus consejeros, y aunque estos últimos lo estudiaron con ceño adusto e incluso perplejo, como si se preguntaran qué se le ha perdido a éste, qué mosca tropical lo ha picado, qué loco anhelo se ha instalado en el espíritu del zapatero para solicitar y obtener una audiencia con el soberano de todos los austrohúngaros, el Emperador, por el contrario, lo recibió con palabras llenas de cariño, como un padre recibe a su hijo, recordando los zapatos de la casa Lefebvre de Lyon, buenos pero inferiores a los zapatos de su dilecto amigo, y los zapatos de la casa Duncan & Segal de Londres, excelentes pero inferiores a los zapatos de su fiel súbdito, y los zapatos de la casa Niederle de un pueblito alemán cuyo nombre el Emperador no recordaba (Fürth, lo ayudó el zapatero), comodísimos pero inferiores a los zapatos de su emprendedor compatriota, y después hablaron de caza y de botas de caza y botas de montar y distintos tipos de piel y de los zapatos de las damas, aunque llegado a este punto el Emperador optó velozmente por autocensurarse diciendo caballeros, caballeros, un poco de discreción, como si hubieran sido sus consejeros quienes hubieran sacado el tema a colación y no él, pecadillo que los consejeros y el zapatero admitieron con jocosidad, autoinculpándose sin trabas, hasta que finalmente llegaron al meollo de la audiencia, y mientras todos se servían otra taza de té o café o volvían a llenar sus copas de coñac le llegó el turno al zapatero y éste, llenándose los pulmones de aire, con la emoción que el instante imponía y moviendo las mandos como si acariciara la corola de una flor inexistente pero posible de imaginar, es decir probable, le explicó a su soberano cuál era su idea.
Roberto Bolaño, Nocturno de Chile, Barcelona, 2000, pp. 53-55