Laughter at once acknowledges and expresses (or performs, since it is "all that remains physical in the flash of thought") the idea that the absurdity of the human condition is not relative - the product, sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, of social and cultural difference - but absolute.
Flashes of this thought appeared in the nineteenth century and much earlier, but as a guiding principle it really dates from after World War Two.
The moment when you realise you're going to dry occurs without warning and, when it does, the following train of thought flashes through your mind: "What the hell is the next word?
McCullum has built a career on the former school of thought, all flashing drives through cover and brutal bunts down the ground.
But that's exactly what hundreds of people attending the launch of Bill Gates' new book, Business @ the Speed of Thought, saw flashing on a huge video screen inside the Sheraton Hotel and Towers in New York City this morning.
The window swinging open spread a flash George Boole's book on the laws of thought appeared in.
Rassoul's fevered thoughts contain flashes of poetry, some well achieved, others verging on pretentiousness.
At their most complex, they propose entire whirling universes of thought and emotion, with bells clanging, lightning flashing.
All the arts have been affected by the technological media; in all of them we now see — maybe just creeping, but creeping steadily — that flash, that speed, that lack of naturalness and intimacy, indeed of thought.
