Consciousness

Last week I read Pedro Paramo, by Juan Rulfo, a Mexican author. It's a small book, a quick read. It's not well known like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, yet it's credited as one of the sources of magical realism. Someone recommended it to me years ago, but I never could remember the title until I stumbled across it in a bookstore a few weeks ago. It's a ghost story. It's a collection of voices that made me think of a lecture on the many voices in The Waste Land. The author never published another novel, although he apparently wrote and destroyed one.

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Has my cat made the connection between the silver box lighting up and the room filling with rhythmic sounds?

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It's silly to be depressed by it. I mean one thinks of it like being alive in a box, one keeps forgetting to take into account the fact that one is dead... which should make a difference... shouldn't it? I mean, you'd never know you were in a box, would you? It would be just like being asleep in a box. Not that I'd like to sleep in a box, mind you, not without any air - you'd wake up dead, for a start and then where would you be? Apart from inside a box. That's the bit I don't like, frankly. That's why I don't think of it. (from Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead)