The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
I was, of course, well aware of the myth stating that the memory span of a goldfish lasts only three seconds; and that, because a goldfish takes much longer than three seconds to die outside of water, to it its entire existence would seem to have been comprised of nothing but the agonizing struggle of suffocation, that all it could remember of its life was dying. I knew this was wrong, of course. I also knew it could never happen to a human being.
But then, science'd made a great many things possible.
There have been a few times in my life when I was glad I was a synesthesiac. See, my brain is all wired wrong. I don't experience the senses like someone else would. Taste and touch intermingle with smell and sound and it can get really hard to talk to someone else who has no idea the new an interesting ways I'm living life. But it can have its advantages. Case in point, the guy from Vinny's gang who's trying to put the fear of God into me. A street beating just doesn't work the same when the pain you're trying to inflict just makes everything taste purple to me.