*13 That sharing is one of discourse’s functions, though it has not caught up to the expansion of population, cultures, and cultural encounters that has so increased in our last few thousand years. The dissemination of the unique—through an incredibly complex set of filters that the illusion of intelligence, not to mention intelligence itself, are what we and the world are—is among evolution’s most powerful tools as well as its fuel, as long as those filters can receive and utilize energy.
*14 Readers of my Return to Nevèrÿon series may recognize this as relating to the “Naming, Listing, and Counting Theory” that occasionally crystallizes in one or another of its appendices.
*15 George Bernard Shaw’s “The Quintessence of Ibsenism” (1891), “The Perfect Wagnerite” (1898), The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (1928), and The Black Girl in Search of God (1932) are all still entertaining as well as informative, as is reading the plays themselves and their extraordinary prefaces.
A, B, C: Three Short Novels Page 50