Quote O' Teh Day

From Virginia Heffernan at her NYT blog, on an entirely different topic.

There’s an excerpt from George Eliot’s “Middlemarch” currently posted on ads in some subway cars in New York; it perfectly expresses my squeamishness about perceiving the world too closely. “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life,” Eliot wrote, “it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.”

This reminds me for some reason of the fairly recent discovery of the human canabanoid system, which produces THC-like substances to help us forget, else we would go mad from all the sensory input. (It's also there for childbirth.)