On the cover of a book I’m reading there is this statement: “Triumphs of imagination such as the person you love is 72.8% water”. Which made me think – is it a triumph of imagination to visualise the person you love as over a hundred pounds of water, or is it a greater leap of the imagination to look at said hundred pounds of water and decide to love it?
But the stuff that makes you human is the other stuff. Right? The 27.2% that isn’t water. But that’s clearly untrue. You might as well say that the person you love is one fifth coal to four fifths water. You’d still be way off. The person you love is a self-organising generated string of information that has mutated and transformed and lengthened and retransmitted itself over hundreds of millions of years. They are the latest holographic representation of a stream of information broadcast from the ancient past. They are the carriers of chinese whispers passed down from a universe of different creatures that have watched the world change – that have changed the world. And they are the only people that carry this message. Now that’s something worth loving.