" 'A sad spectacle!' exclaimed Thomas Carlyle, contemplating the possibility that millions of planets circle other suns. 'If they be inhabited, what a scope for pain and folly; and if they be not inhabited, what a waste of space!' " --from Martin Gardner's Order and Surprise (1983)

Sometimes when i am feeling particularly arrogant, i console myself with the thought that the only thing that kept me from a mathematical career was, i couldn't convince myself that calculus was true.

"We know so much intellectually, indeed, that we are in danger of becoming the prisoners of our knowledge. We suffer from a hubris of the mind. We have abolished superstition of the heart only to install a superstition of the intellect in its place. We behave as if there were some magic in mere thought, and we use thinking for purposes for which it was never designed. As a result we are no longer sufficiently aware of the importance of what we cannot know intellectually, what we must know in other ways, of the living experience before and beyond our transitory knowledge." Laurens van der Post, The Heart of the Hunter (1961)
  [How nostalgic the first part of that makes me feel!--]

As a child i felt toward cars & other vehicles much as primitive humans must have felt toward animals.

"I have always been grateful that I was born into a world and shall die in one where the lion, however diminished in number, is still roaring. Heard in his and my native setting, it is for me the most beautiful sound in the world. It is to silence what the shooting star is to the dark of the night." --ibid

I dreamed that i buried my heart. It was still alive but not beating, & i buried it deep in the ground.
  I'm still thinking about what that means...
  It looked like cicadas do when they're still in thev larval stage: gray & moist & ugly. I tried to get some images of what comes next. ...I realized i couldn't have the rest of it yet--not until i live it--but somehow there's a rightness in waiting. ...--Or: i have never planted my heart here; that's why nothing has grown.

Fantasy flourishes in the decline of empire, becoming indistinguishable from empire itself.