The list of things that arrive after their description is now longer than the list of things that arrive before it.

• the first photograph of the far side of the moon
• the sound of your own voice on a recording
• the smell of a hospital
• the war
• the child
• the machine that talks

In every case the experience of the arrival is evaluative rather than perceptual. You are not meeting the thing. You are marking it against a specification you have been carrying, sometimes for thirty years, and the marking happens fast enough that it feels like seeing.

People call the shortfall disappointment and treat it as a fact about the world being thin. It is a fact about the description being thick.

The machine that talks arrived in your lifetime and was found, within eleven weeks, to be somewhat less than had been promised. Consider what it was being marked against. Consider that nothing has ever passed that examination, including you, including the sea.