An adult isn’t just a big cell. A big zygote. Adding small, imperceptible changes (at the time) produces a big change at the end. Who you are now is not who you will be; who you are now is not even like who you will be; you will be a completely different person in ten years; most of your cells and even your personality will be completely different. But you won’t notice the difference until you compare big chunks of time. You can’t notice — not even if you wanted to. We suck like that. A person who knows one kanji and a person who knows two thousand are not the same person. They’re not even the same type of person. But it all happened just five to ten kanji at a time. That’s the weird part. The steps are small — IRL, they’re almost pathetically small. But the change is big. The sum is big. Quantitative changes produce qualitative changes. Quantity is quality. An SD card isn’t like 64,000 3.5-inch floppy disks; it is something else. You thought that the destination was easy and the path was hard. You thought that you would struggle and stumble and (if Richard […]
↧