Posts by Elizabeth Castillo4

Sure, a book has a set number of pages, and yeah, every language has a specific word count too.

But I think you’re overlooking one massive thing that both books and languages share: context.

See, any piece of writing only really starts making sense when you look at the context surrounding it.

And when you think about it, a language is such a living, breathing, dynamic system where meanings shift constantly and new slang pops up out of nowhere all the time.

If we really want to take this to the extreme—and I love a good thought experiment—you could ask if the total number of ways to arrange words in a standard 400-page novel is finite. Of course it is! And if you handed a supercomputer a task to churn through every single possible permutation of those words, sure, among those billions upon billions of combinations, you’d eventually stumble upon the greatest masterpiece ever written. But even then, it would only be a masterpiece within its own specific context.

So, if we just shuffle every possible context with every possible string of text... we'll eventually hit on the absolute greatest works of literature for their specific era and place.

But honestly, that’s basically what writers do every single day. They take the finite vocabulary they know and they sift through it, tossing out almost everything else to craft something they feel actually matters within the context they're working in.

In a way, authors are just literary critics who act as their own gatekeepers, rejecting all the combinations that don't work and holding onto the ones that truly sing.

I was watching this incredibly witty pseudo-philosopher who put together some lectures for the MTA, and he mentioned—in his trademark quirky way—that religion isn't really the opium of the people anymore. Instead, he argued that actual opium has stepped back into that role long ago.

I mean, marijuana is an opiate, right? Honestly, I don't care how enlightened you think you've become by smoking it; most likely, you're just temporarily jamming a repressive mental mechanism that usually keeps certain ideas from ever reaching your conscious mind. It’s kind of like how alcohol works—it’s technically a depressant, but in small amounts, it feels almost opposite because it suppresses those internal "rule-following" mechanisms before it actually starts depressing your ability to think clearly.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it can't be helpful—by blocking those aforementioned mental barriers, it might allow something we've been trying to push down to finally surface (and yeah, someone is probably going to call me out for sounding like a psychoanalyst, but I really don't care)—but there aren't any genuine "religious" or "transcendental" experiences happening there.