1 result for (book:deavf2 AND session:939 AND stemmed:possess)
[... 55 paragraphs ...]
I explained that lately I’ve been thinking about what can happen when a person chooses to be born with very strong gifts, but then discovers that for whatever reason or reasons he or she cannot use them, or has to pay a high price to do so. At first I thought it contradictory that such conflicts can arise within nature’s framework—then I realized that they must happen all of the time, and so, actually, are natural after all. I used to think that nothing could keep an individual from showing a great ability. Now, I told Jane, I realize that things are far from being that simple. The use or nonuse of an attribute can have as many ramifications as there are human beings who possess whatever version of it: ranging all the way from being completely buried in a life, to being simply left alone, used just “as is,” or thoroughly transformed in expression.
[... 36 paragraphs ...]
5. It was inevitable that Jane’s images would remind me of the note I’d written well over two months ago, on re-creating the past, or updating it, through nostalgia. In Chapter 11 of Dreams, see Note 8 for Session 936. Her images led me to search out the collection of battered black-and-white snapshots of her that somehow, some way, she’d managed to save from her early childhood. Along with scraps of her youthful poetry, the pictures are the only physical remnants she possesses of her first years, and studying them anew I realized just how valuable they really are. I talked of having them copied and enlarged by a professional photographer; I speculated about eventually having some of them reproduced in a book. That idea may have to wait, however: For some years Jane hasn’t cared to be photographed—or have pictures of herself shown, no matter when they had been taken.
[... 17 paragraphs ...]
“The universe is not dependent upon your belief in it in order that it can exist. It contains within itself its own comprehension of its own knowledge, its own magical recognition of itself, its own harmonious laws and orders, its own cabinetry. It possesses and holds intact even the smallest probability, so that no briefest possible life or creature or being is ever lost in the shuffle of a cosmic mechanics.
[... 15 paragraphs ...]