For a long time, including the day I met Emily, I believed that decent people did not wish to cause suffering. This I now know not to be true.

Knowing how things are doesn’t make you see them correctly, doesn’t stop you from seeing things incorrectly. Stare at the image as much as you like, it’s all in vain. It will never surrender the truth, not to your naked eyes; you have to go in armed with a straightedge.

I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.

—Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art?

It’s when the thing interacts that its properties are revealed, even resolved.

Putting things on paper makes things real, hardens them, makes them unchangeable, even before things have made sense.