North Campus Everyday conceptual life is based on integrating clashes and compressing vital relations.
Life is various and often diffuse.
Its many lines of connection run simultaneously over large expanses of time and space and involve complicated relations of change, cause and effect, intentionality, identity, analogy, and representation. To form a conceptual apparatus and use it requires constant and frequent compressions over these vital relations. Compression is so natural to us that when literature uses them to compress large worlds of life into a few pages, we hardly notice. When we imagine how we would now answer a criticism directed at us several years ago, we are compressing over times. We compress over time when we tell someone our life story in three minutes.