Words Worth Noting - September 11, 2025

“David Foster Wallace famously described this background belief: ‘Everything in my own immediate experience supports my belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe, the realist, most vivid and important person in existence.’ Although Wallace refers to this basic belief as ‘hard-wired,’ I think a more historically informed take is that while we naturally perceive the world through our own experiences, the sense that we are the absolute centre of the universe was much more difficult to believe in the 1400s, when the universe was seen as a cosmos with God at the centre. The temptation is to believe that the way we experience life today is fundamentally the same as someone six hundred years ago except for our material conditions, but the image of ourselves as the authoritative interpreters and protagonists in the story of existence is a fundamentally modern construct. This construct involves a movement we need to challenge if we are to address a distracted, secular age.”

Alan Noble Disruptive Witness