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Scarry passage on the light bulb

“A light bulb transforms the human being from a creature who one who would spend approximately a third of each day groping in the dark, to one who sees simply by wishing to see: its impossibly fragile, milky-white globe curved protectively around an even more fragile, upright-then-folding filament of wire is the materialisation of neither retina, nor pupil, nor day-seeing, nor night seeing; it is the materialisation of a counterfactual perception about the dependence of human sight on the rhythm of the earth's rotation; no wonder it is in its form so beautiful.”

https://fsireci.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/orange-designed-in-clive-dilnot-assignment.pdf


last updated january 2018