Green Mars, the second book in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy.
Now, whilst I thoroughly enjoy the series I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone. To say it can be “dry” in places is a bit of an understatement. I tell people it feels as much like a technical manual on how to terraform the red planet as it does a fictional story.
But when I first read it in my early twenties I was having a bit of an existential crisis. I knew Abrahamism wasn’t for me so I had began exploring Eastern religion/philosophy but again that didn’t scratch the itch I had.
And then I read this passage;
And because we are alive, the universe must be said to be alive. We are its consciousness as well as our own. We rise out of the cosmos and we see its mesh of patterns, and it strikes us as beautiful. And that feeling is the most important thing in all the universe—its culmination, like the color of the flower at first bloom on a wet morning.
It caused a mini-epiphany. I stopped searching for a greater truth because that was all I ever needed. It basically taught me to stop worrying and just enjoy existing.
Green Mars, the second book in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy.
Now, whilst I thoroughly enjoy the series I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone. To say it can be “dry” in places is a bit of an understatement. I tell people it feels as much like a technical manual on how to terraform the red planet as it does a fictional story.
But when I first read it in my early twenties I was having a bit of an existential crisis. I knew Abrahamism wasn’t for me so I had began exploring Eastern religion/philosophy but again that didn’t scratch the itch I had.
And then I read this passage;
And because we are alive, the universe must be said to be alive. We are its consciousness as well as our own. We rise out of the cosmos and we see its mesh of patterns, and it strikes us as beautiful. And that feeling is the most important thing in all the universe—its culmination, like the color of the flower at first bloom on a wet morning.
It caused a mini-epiphany. I stopped searching for a greater truth because that was all I ever needed. It basically taught me to stop worrying and just enjoy existing.