With the singular exception of chronic pain and distress, the content of consciousness is usually fleeting. As anyone who has tried meditation knows all too well, it is surprisingly difficult to hold the mind still. Experiences are short-lived…
William James coined the metaphor ‘stream of consciousness.’ A few decades earlier, before James’s work, Richard Wagner’s heady operas, such as The Valkyrie or Twilight of the Gods, prefigured this metaphor in continuously evolving landscapes — so many voices, leitmotifs, and strains intertwined into a single, vast stream encompassing empathy, lust, love, fear, hate, anger, desire, will to power, regret, and compassion — merging, separating, waxing and waning, rising and falling, flowing on, like life itself. Half a century later, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce would perfect the literary equivalent of the stream of consciousness, the interior monologue of the narrator.
Then I Am Myself the World
Christof Koch
