What is reality?

ByCarma Spence

The future is now
Public domain image from Pixabay.com
I wrote this entry in my Random Thoughts journal on July 19, 1999.

What is reality, really? How does one determine what is truth? Sometimes, when I’m walking the dog at night, I look up, watch the tangerine clouds move across the periwinkle sky and think, “This doesn’t look real. It looks more like painted tufts of cotton floating across a darkened bowl.”

I guess that’s one of the perks of living in the city — the light pollution makes your telescope a useless bauble sitting in your living room to impress your friends.

I know I’m not the only one to contemplate “what is real?” If I was, we wouldn’t have TV shows like VR5, movies like Videodrome, The Matrix and The Thirteenth Floor, or characters like Granny Weatherwax saying, “…”

I left that blank because I was going to go an look it up … but I never did. In one of Terry Pratchett’s books, she contemplates reality and said something quite profound that stuck with me … but not obviously enough for me to quote it. Erg.

I know the quote appeared in one of these books:


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