Season 6 episode 12 of tng "Ship in a Bottle" at the end Patrick Stewart says, "who knows, maybe our reality is just an elaborate simulation..." That shit was from like 1993

  • Multihedra [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Funnily enough, I was just listening to Wallace Shawn’s The Fever which came out in 1990 (Wallace Shawn later becoming the grand negus of course)

    As I listened, I couldn’t help but see his depiction of a certain stage of becoming conscious as very similar to the red-pill, as portrayed in the matrix.

    Below, I’ll put the passage in a spoiler tag (it is around this part that, without fail, I start crying for real).

    Wallace Shawn performing (video):

    • Part 1: https://podcast.lannan.org/2010/05/05/wallace-shawn-reading-part-1-15-december-1999-video/

    • Part 2: https://podcast.lannan.org/2010/05/05/wallace-shawn-reading-part-2-15-december-1999-video/

    Text: http://wischik.com/lu/senses/fever.html

    Somewhat extended quote (I think it represents a critical inflection point in the tone of the play and therefore would best be encountered by watching/reading the whole thing. But it’s long so whaddya gonna do

    Dear God, every muscle in my body aches with the effort of constant lying. I'm twisted, contorted—lying from the minute I get up each day till the minute I go to bed, and even when I'm asleep I think I'm lying. I can't stop, because the truth is everywhere, it's in plain sight—

    Listen to me, my darling. Just let it happen, just let it happen for this moment, just for tonight, and then we'll go back to lying again, as if it never happened. We'll pretend that it never happened. We'll forget that it happened.

    All right, go ahead. Go ahead. Say it.

    The life I live is irredeemably corrupt. It has no justification. I keep thinking that there's this justification that I've written down somewhere, on some little piece of paper, but that it's sitting in the drawer of some desk in some room in some place I used to live. But in fact I'll never find that little piece of paper, because there isn't one, it doesn't exist. There's no piece of paper that justifies what the beggar has and what I have. Standing naked beside the beggar—there's no difference between her and me except a difference in luck. I don't actually deserve to have a thousand times more than the beggar has. I don't deserve to have two crusts of bread more.