March 11, 2013

There Is Only Awe
“There is no such thing as a complete consciousness,” he writes. “All about us lie the remnants of our recent bicameral past.” He attributes one of the most mysterious mental phenomena—the sense that ideas come to us unbidden, from some external location—to the fact that our brains were once inhabited by gods…It happens in moments of inspiration, late at night, when the writer is all alone.