The Ship of Bafflement and Wonder

Do you know what life is? Rigel Vale Kent doesn't. And that is where The Ship of Bafflement & Wonder begins. In this brief philosophical essay on life and love, Kent considers the things that ordinary arithmetic cannot quite account for: why a person who has been lost can remain present; why love can survive its own subtraction; why the past and future inhabit the present; why eternity may be encountered in a moment; and why a human life eventually requires something more complicated than addition and subtraction to understand. From these questions emerge the Life-Hologram Theory and Life Math—ways of considering memory, time, love, loss, and the strange values that remain in our lives long after the original equations have changed. But mathematics can carry us only so far. Beyond it lies bafflement. Beyond bafflement lies wonder. And somewhere in that mysterious country, we discover ourselves aboard a ship we have been traveling on all along: The Ship of Bafflement & Wonder. A short work about very large things, On Life & Love is for wondering wanderers—and for anyone who has ever looked at existence and suspected that the ordinary explanations do not quite add up.