1 result for (book:ur2 AND session:741 AND stemmed:world)
[... 7 paragraphs ...]
(In ordinary terms, I think that during our first month in the hill house we’ve been busy forming a fresh psychic atmosphere within which we can feel comfortable — and that anyone in a similar situation intuitively does the same thing. Perhaps not until a start is made in this way can any of us initiate certain functions in the “new” place. Actually, then, we seek to wed the old environment with the new, using the psyche as a bridge between the two worlds. Now when Jane and I drive past the old house we lived in on Water Street, close by downtown Elmira, we engender within ourselves mixed feelings of strangeness and familiarity. We see the intimately known windows of the two apartments we shared still vacant, the blinds hanging at careless angles. Friends have told us both places are being redecorated to a modest degree. “I’m glad they’re being changed,” Jane said the other day, in a strangely possessive response. “That means the world we had there can’t ever be entered by anyone else.”
(In that big, intriguing house her whole psychic world — and mine — had begun to open up late in 1963; various aspects of that becoming are detailed in her different books. Yet when Jane left the Water Street apartments that day in March, she never looked back: When she’s through with something, she’s through with it. She’s remarkably free in that way. I’m the one who’s apt to become attached to old things, old places, to look back with a bit of nostalgia. Now as we waited for tonight’s session to begin, our 14-year-old cat, Willy, dozed on the couch beside me. At the same time our black cat, Rooney, who’d died in his fifth year, lay in his grave in the backyard of the house on Water Street.6
[... 13 paragraphs ...]
There is something highly important here concerning your technological civilization: As your world becomes more complicated, in those terms, you increase the number of probable actions practically available. The number of decisions multiplies. You can physically move from one place on the planet to another with relative ease. Centuries ago, ordinary people did not have the opportunity to travel from one country to another with such rapidity. As space becomes “smaller,” your probabilities grow in complexity. Your consciousness handles far more space data now. (In parentheses: I am speaking in your terms of time.) Watching television, you are aware of events that occur on the other side of the earth, so your consciousness necessarily becomes less parochial.8 As this has happened the whole matter (smiling) of probabilities has begun to assume a more practical cast. Civilizations are locked one into the other. Politicians try to predict what other governments will do. Ordinary people try to predict what their government might do.
[... 36 paragraphs ...]