Karl Schroeder: Emotions

"There are no distinct emotions. You have learned that in the human heart, love resides within such and such a circle, hate there in another, and between are pride, jealousy, all the royal and plebeian emotions. We say instead emotion is one unbounded field. Our way of life causes us to cross this field, now in one direction, now another, again and again on our way to the goals to which or world has constrained us. The paths crisscross, and eventually, the field has well-travelled intersections, and blank areas where we have never walked. 

We name the intersections just as we do towns but not the empty fields between them. We name these oft-crossed places  love, hate, jealously, pride. But our destinations were made by the conditions of our lives, they are not eternal or inevitable.  

We know that the answer to human suffering lies in changing the ratio of emotions so grief and sorrow lie neglected, even nameless, in an untravelled wild." 

-Karl Schroeder, Ventus.