I believe it was a Reuters or maybe a Guardian report of the battle for a Ukrainian town outside of Bakhmut.  A soldier who survived the assault described the kill zones that awaited the advance of his unit.  The Ukrainians prevailed but at a terrible cost.  I simply felt numb upon finishing the piece.  How does one find words to tell the horror that one has survived, a ravening terror that haunts the body and mind indefinitely?

Discovery or even, to invent words to bear the weight of experience, this is the meaning of consciousness.

Nietzsche had this to say about consciousness:

Consciousness
has developed only
under the pressure of the need for communication;
that from the start
it was needed and useful only between human beings.

…Consciousness
is really only a net of communication
between human beings:
it is only as such that it had to develop;
a solitary human being
who lived like a beast of prey
would not have needed it.

…As the most endangered animal,
he/she needed help and protection,
he/she needed his/her peers,
he had to learn to express his distress
and to make himself understood;
and for all of this he needed consciousness,
first of all, he needed to “know” himself what distressed him,
he needed to “know” how he felt,
he needed to “know” what he thought.

…My idea is, as you see, that consciousness
does not realty belong to man’s individual existence
but rather to his social or herd nature.

We simply lack any organ
for knowledge, for “truth”:
we “know”…
just as much as may be useful
in the interests of the human herd, the species;
and even what is here called “utility”
is ultimately also a mere belief,
something imaginary,

and perhaps precisely that most calamitous stupidity
of which we shall perish some day.

–excerpt The Gay Science, Book 5, Section 354 by Friedrich Nietzsche