A Commonplace Book

   "You know," said Arthur thoughtfully, "all this explains a lot of things. All through my life I've had this strange unaccountable feeling that something was going on in the world, something big, even sinister, and no one would tell me what it was."
   "No," said the old man, "that's just perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the Universe has that."

Do you ever have the feeling you're a tourist on earth? You'll be walking down the street and suddenly it's like a moving postcard around you? "Here's how people live, in big house-shaped boxes to keep off 'rain' and 'snow,' holes cut in the sides so they can see out. They move around in smaller boxes, painted different colors, with wheels on the corners. They need this box-culture because each person thinks of herself and himself as locked in a box called a 'body,' arms and legs, fingers to move pencils and tools, languages because they've forgotten how to communicate, eyes because they've forgotten how to see. Odd little planet. Wish you were here. Home soon.

Timothy Fenwick, Jr.: Do you ever get the feeling that there's something going on that we don't know about?

Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne): What you know you can't explain, but you feel it. You've felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.

Happy Harry Hardon [Christian Slater]: Did you ever get the feeling that everything in America is completely fucked up. You know that feeling that the whole country is like one inch away from saying 'That's it, forget it.' You think about it. Everything is polluted. The environment, the government, the schools you name it.

If we are on the outside, we assume a conspiracy is the perfect working of a scheme. Silent nameless men with unadorned hearts. A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It's the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. We are the flawed ones, the innocents, trying to make some rough sense of the daily jostle. Conspirators have a logic and a daring beyond our reach. All conspiracies are the same taut story of men who find coherence in some criminal act.

I'm completely dominated by that whole subsurface reality that the brutal majority will not acknowledge, where every billboard is an endless bible of interpretations, where every lunch menu is a heinous political creed, where every boring phone conversation is a rape of multiple meanings, and always, always, malignant intent.

And there, in retrospect, might lie the secret of the first "Matrix": beyond the balletic violence, beyond the cool stunts, the idea that the world we live in isn't real is one that speaks right now to a general condition. For the curious thing about the movie was that everybody could grasp the basic setup instantly. Whether it occurs in cult science fiction or academic philosophy, we seem to be fascinated by the possibility that our world might not exist. We're not strangers to the feeling that, for much of our lives, we might just as well be brains-in-vats, floating in an amniotic fluid of simulations. It doesn't just strike us as plausibly weird. It strikes us as weirdly plausible.

...all yearnings for the existence of a conspiracy in life were hopeless illusions from childhood that surfaced later in idle moments, the illusions having been caused by a child's false perceptions of order above him...