I thought this was the crux of the story. Page 536 in my inferior edition:
People believe, thought Shadow. It's what people do. They believe. And then they will not take responsibility for their beliefs; they conjure things, and do not trust the conjurations. People populate the darkness; with ghosts, with gods, with electrons, with tales. People imagine, and people believe: and it is that belief, that rock-solid belief, that makes things happen.
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Yes, I agree. That's the crux of it. I like the sentence "People populate the darkness." That captures so much of the human experience. And "with tales" — I've often thought about that in the context of the human instinct to not only tell stories but to refine them in devoted, painstaking ways. It's kind of mind-boggling, for example, that someone dreams up "King Lear" or "Moby Dick" or "Pride and Prejudice" and those tales, those dreams become these rock-solid things that inform our culture for hundreds of years. Like we're all just these little insignificant humans toiling on the earth, not understanding much, and one of us occasionally writes down something like "Othello," and everyone really relates to it and it becomes a THING, even though it's just words on paper — so fragile in and of itself, not like a cathedral or Great Wall or anything, but it has this massive, real existence nonetheless.
That's a wonderful way to put it. "Those dreams become these rock-solid things that inform our culture for hundreds of years." It's more beautiful to see the human imagination committed to such pursuits in lieu of conjuring petty gods to control their crops, exact revenge or summon love spells. It meets a great human aim, I guess. Not that I can blame anyone looking for about any potential deity to avoid starving.
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