"No matter how I imagine in detail what is going to happen to me, still how inadequate, how abstract and stilted is the thing I have imagined in comparison to what actually happens! The realization brings with it an unforeseeable nothing which changes everything."
Bergson, The Possible and the Real
Scragg, a small animated aquaintance who was once mistaken for a marmoset by a child in the street, reports on her recent visit to New York - 'It was exactly as I imagined it, exactly.' 'Oh, come on', I replied, 'nothing is exactly like you imagine it, not even the next room, isn't this the very mark of reality, that it always exceeds our imaginings?" "No", she insisted, obviously not having read Bergson, "I'm telling you it was just the same as the image I had of it". I wasn't prepared to grant this at all."The only way it could have been exactly as you imagined it, I retorted, was if you'd imagined that it would exceed your image of it", at which point she disappeared in a puff of logic.
n.b. Some excellent reflections on this post at new blog Fort Kant
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