The lights of Rockport, Me., appear to rock on the horizon while the galley house and starboard main shrouds of the schooner Mistress hold steady, but it's the Mistress that's rolling on gentle swells in Rockport Harbor, where she's tethered to her sister ship, the schooner Grace Bailey.

Just as a primitive sextant functions on the illusion that the sun and stars rotate around the planet we are standing on, our senses give us the illusion of stability in the universe.


...But the fact that a sextant will let you navigate accurately around an ocean does not mean that the sun and stars do rotate. For all that we have done, as a civilization, the universe is not stable, nor is is any single thing within it.


attributed to Virginia Vidaura in Altered Carbon, Richard K. Morgan