Liora’s Literary Encounters: 3 Liora and the Voices of the World

Late afternoon found Liora atop a gentle hill, where the wind carried whispers from the farthest corners of the valley. The grasses trembled with sound, and the trees hummed low, secret melodies. She closed her eyes and listened. At first, it was chaos — a tangle of voices, none distinguishable from another.

Then, gradually, certain threads drew her attention: a soft murmur from the brook, a quiver of laughter from a distant field, the resonant sigh of a wind-bent pine. Each was a perspectival actualisation, a voice emerging from the structured potential of the world. Liora realised that the world was not inherently ordered; it was alive with unspoken possibilities, each awaiting the cut of perception to become intelligible.

As she tuned her mind, she could “grasp” more voices, each revealing a tiny climate of meaning: the lament of a dying leaf, the bright chatter of sunlight on dewdrops, the serene cadence of shadows moving across the grass. Some voices overlapped, blending into chords of improbable harmony; others slipped away when attention faltered, returning to the field of latent potential.

Liora understood that construal — her lived, attentive experience — shaped what emerged. The voices were not properties of objects, nor of sound alone; they were relational, appearing only through the interplay of world and perception. She could record them in her mind, note them in her journal, or paint them in shimmering watercolours, yet even the act of translation could never fully exhaust their possibilities.

By twilight, the hill was quiet again, yet Liora carried a chorus of experiences within her. Each voice she had heard was a fleeting instantiation, a delicate actualisation of potential, reminding her that the world’s richness is not in fixed things, but in the relational dance of attention, perspective, and experience.

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Relational Ontology in the Story:

• System / structured potential: the multitude of latent voices and sounds in the environment.

• Instance / perspectival actualisation: each voice perceived as Liora focused her attention.

• Construal / first-order phenomenon: the vivid, emotional, and cognitive experience of the sounds.

Through Rilke-inspired imagery, the story demonstrates that meaning and resonance are emergent relationally, dependent on engagement rather than representation. The world’s latent potential becomes alive only through perspectival cuts and lived experience, reinforcing the relational ontology insight: perception is always an enactment of potential, not passive reception of objects.