Task: Spend all day trying to think for yourself.
But already, we're off to a bad start! These words you are now reading, whose are they?
Whose is that voice in your head? Yours or mine?
When you hear someone speak, the words remain theirs - to be ignored or disagreed with as you choose. But somehow to read someone's thoughts is to allow them, however temporarily, to take over the language centres of your brain. For as long as you are caught up in what they say, the writer becomes your inner voice.
Does that mean that, for a moment, the writer becomes the reader?
Or does it mean instead that, for a moment, the reader becomes the writer?
...
...
I can imagine the go-getting Type A personalities spluttering over this question.
"Of course I remain myself, what else could I be?" Su might well retort. "What a stupid question!"
My experience tells me that the everyday, familiar 'I, myself' is no more than a process upon what we now know as the Third Rock from the Sun. Here's what I mean.
I used to travel by 'mini-buses' in the Klang Valley 80s and 90s since they were cheap, convenient and ubiquitious. One ordinary morning I hopped on one to find that all the seats were taken, so I set myself upon the steel rail separating the driver from the passengers, facing the back of the bus as I did so.
For perhaps ten seconds or so, I had the curious realization that I was looking at 'versions of myself' even as I knew that the passengers were ordinary commuters like myself.
This strange experience turned up again at a mall a few days later, though the crowd this time was rather more dispersed and moving around.
Perhaps I'm a little 'cuckoo' to use the popular term, but I do not think that I would plot deliberately to harm anyone, since I should then be harming myself.
By sheer chance (again!) here's what turned up in today's StarTwo of Star: The people's paper:
"We actually are Earth. We really, really are just animated bits of the Earth's crust, so to talk about us and the Earth is wrong."
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