A Human Strategy, Matt Berry aphorism 98
98
Often one feels a tremor without seeing anything at all ... not merely a subconscious tremor which can be coaxed out and understood, but a collision of invisible, alien fates with histories which precede all observers. As in a collision of two icebergs, one feels the tremor, but from tip to tip the distance is so great and there is so much sea and fog between them that one is truly confused as to what has just happened.
One of the icebergs may even break up, ground into pieces between several older and harder mountains of ice, leaving some observers with a sense of victory and others with defeat.
This is how a man wakes up one day and congratulates himself while another gnashes his teeth, simply because each found himself atop his own berg when the two collided. They do not really understand why or how it happened but take what little they have seen thus far for all that has happened thus far ... concluding with some personal quality that gratifies or blames—or with a conceptual “truth” that rationalizes the event into something explainable and safe.