DENSITY OF MEANING: WHY LIFE NEVER FEELS ENOUGH

A man stands at a window at six in the morning, in a warm house, in the richest civilisation that has ever existed, and finds that it is not enough. This book is about that sensation, and about why every explanation offered for it is wrong. It is not a shortage. There is no stock of meaning, no unit in which it is counted, and no supplier from whom more may be bought. What there is, is a creature that takes delivery of the world through an aperture so narrow that almost everything arriving at its senses is destroyed before it is ever seen - and that can nonetheless feel, at a window, the presence of what it cannot receive. Moving from Gumilyov's sixth sense and Pascal's hunter to the reducing valve of the brain, Borges's Funes, the world of a tick and the economics of manufactured attention, Boris Kriger argues that what is missing is neither meaning nor life but throughput: the number of distinctions a person actually draws in the short time available. Density, not quantity. A count, divided by a life. No consolation is offered, and none is available. The dawn still has no verb. What the book proposes instead is precision - the only form of respect a creature of ten bits a second can pay to anything.