mind games

Was walking through the underground tunnel in Finch Station when I thought of how in Ayn Rand's The Art of Fiction she says the most important skill a writer can aquire is the ability to concretize the abstract. It made me think. How I always used to start with an object, say, a coconut candy, I'd look at it and all the meaning would swarm upon it, layers and layers of meaning like dust, and I'd end up with words like nostalgia and growth and paralysis and kindness and all the fuzzy abstractions my fragile mind could think of. Nowadays I start with the abstraction, say paralysis, for example, and find an object that captures the essence of paralysis. The process of concretizing the abstract used to take some time, but now it takes less and less time because I do it so much in my head, I'd feel something and an object pops up, a blue yarn sweater, something like that, and I start to make objects out of feelings and sometimes I feel as if I... They say you can talk to yourself as long as you don't talk out loud, well, even if you talk out loud, I supposs it's okay long as you don't respond to yourself. I thought that's kinda funny.

In Philosophy class, the teacher asked the kids, "Hasn't everyone here at some point thought about the origin of the universe?"

This tall girl in the back says yes, enthusiastically. Then she starts talking about the big bang theory about how we were very small and then BANG we became big and expand expand expand and then we will become small again and then BANG we'll expand and expand and then we'll be small again... (This is pretty much the way she said it).

Then the teacher asks, "What do you suppose is behind all of this?"

"God?" the girl replies.

It was the most colourful expression I've heard in a long time.