Silence Once Begun

All true convictions should proceed from a scientific investigation the results of which can be replicated (and which should be shown to be replicable). A particular person should not necessarily have any involvement whatsoever in the investigation into or trial of their offense. The world itself should provide all details and all evidence. If such evidence is lacking, then a crime cannot be proven without a doubt, and a person ought not to be convicted or punished.

knowledge about ourselves is our least reliable knowledge.

When a man has committed a crime, it should be prosecuted in a fair society only if the evidence of that crime may be seen. No imaginary documents, that is to say, documents that are the province solely of the human mind unconnected with the world, should be used toward a prosecution or conviction.

This is to say, if a man makes a soup, a patently bad soup, and another tastes it on the end of a spoon and says to the first, “This is good soup,” the soup then is known as good. It is acknowledged good. It fulfills its purpose as soup. The consensus regarding the soup is that the soup is good. It perhaps will be made again in the same way. Others arriving on the scene, perhaps with doubt in their hearts as to their ability to accurately judge a soup to be good or not, they hear this verdict of the soup. They taste the soup and know it to be good. They are not judging the soup themselves; this power they have not obtained: rather they listen to that initial agreement.

He could not see the difference, couldn’t see: his Joo was gone and had been replaced by a gray woman with a raincoat who nodded and sat and cooked and blinked and blinked.

Where have I been, he wondered. With whom, in my loveliest dreams, have I so endlessly been speaking? But as he thought it fell away, and he was poorer then than anyone.
Raise yourself up, the others called to him. Raise yourself up, you fool.
Ah, he said, so this is how fools are made. For I did never know.

Months can go by without anyone looking at you, years, without anyone so much as touching your hand or shoulder. One becomes almost like a deer, impatient to be touched, terrified of it.