Category: Essays

watched a documentary once about people who had lost a limb. Apparently, it is common knowledge that many amputees can feel their lost arm or leg. In some instances, they can even feel pain from a limb that is no longer there – this is called phantom limb pain. Even if you throw a ball at an amputee’s lost arm, for instance, they will instinctively try to catch it with their phantom arm. Of course, they adjust eventually, but the feeling and awareness never really go away. I often wondered about this phenomenon. Is it the same mechanism that drives us to yearn for people we’ve lost?

In the film, Man of Steel, there is a scene where the young Superman is in a classroom, and suddenly gets overwhelmed by his sensitivity to the world. He hears distant and even the most minute sounds – the clock ticking, sirens blazing, hearts beating, and even the sound of pencils scratching on paper. He sees food digesting in people’s stomachs, eyeballs rolling in their sculls, lungs inflating and deflating, and even the clamour of his classmates’ most deplorable thoughts. Eventually, he storms out of the classroom, locks himself in a storeroom and covers his eyes and ears, hoping to silence the avalanche of information. Finally, his mother arrives, and he cries out to her, saying, “The world’s too big mom.” To which she replies, “then make it smaller.”

During the early 1900s, there was a problem in the music industry. By and large, people were using gramophones to listen to their favourite songs. But the technology only allowed for approximately four minutes of playback, and the quality was awful: the high notes from flutes and violins, together with the low notes from the tuba or the base were either distorted or barely audible. Incidentally, this gave rise to the four-minute-long pop music that we are familiar with today, where the prominent feature is the human voice.