We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind - mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality.
Man is by nature metaphysical and proud.
He has gone so far as to think that the idealistic creations of his mind, which correspond to his feelings, also represent reality. I had come to suspect, and now felt compelled to acknowledge, that science and the physical world were products of human imagining - that we were not the cool observers of that world, but its passionate creators. We were poets and the world was our metaphor. Roger S Jones, Physics As Metaphor There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own. We have found that where science has progressed the farthest, the mind has but regained from nature that which the mind has put into nature.