Good And Bad, I Define These Terms, Quite Clear, No Doubt, Somehow

...it was mathematics -- not nuclear weapons, computers, biological warfare or our climate Armageddon -- which was changing our world to the point where, in a couple of decades at most, we would simply not be able to grasp what being human really meant.  Not that we ever did, he said, but things are getting worse.  We can pull atoms apart, peer back at the first light and predict the end of the universe with just a handful of equations, squiggly lines and arcane symbols that normal people cannot fathom, even though they hold sway over their lives.  But it's not just regular folks; even scientists no longer comprehend the world. Take quantum mechanics, the crown jewel of our species, the most accurate, far-ranging and beautiful of all our physical theories.  It lies behind the supremacy of our smartphones, behind the Internet, behind the coming promise of godlike computing power.  It has completely shaped our world.  We know how to use it, it works as if some strange miracle, and yet there is not a human soul, alive or dead, who actually gets it.  The mind cannot come to grips with its paradoxes and contradictions. It's as if the theory had fallen to earth from another planet, and we simply scamper around it like apes, toying and playing with it, but with no true understanding. 

When We Cease to Understand the World

Benjamin Labatut

Limits of survival are set by climate, those long drifts of change which a generation may fail to notice.  And it is the extremes of climate which set the pattern.  Lonely, finite humans may observe climate provinces, fluctuations of annual weather and, occasionally may observe such things as "This is a colder year than I've ever known." Such things are sensible.  But humans are seldom alerted to the shifting average through a great span of years.  And it is precisely in this alerting that humans learn how to survive on any planet.  They must learn climate.

Children of Dune

Frank Herbert

1981

This was never me, but still...

I long for the days of disorder.  I want them back, the days when I was alive on the earth, rippling in the quick of my skin, heedless and real.  I was dumb-muscled and angry and real.  This is what I long for, the breach of peace, the days of disarray when I walked real streets and did things slap-bang and felt angry and ready all the time, a danger to others and a distant mystery to myself.  

Underworld

Don DeLillo