The number system is like human life

"The foundation of mathematics is numbers. If anyone asked me what makes me truly happy, I would say: numbers. Snow and ice and numbers. And do you know why?"
He splits the claws with a nutcracker and pulls out the meat with curved tweezers.
"Because the number system is like human life. First you have the natural numbers. The ones that are whole and positive. The numbers of the small child. But human consciousness expands. The child discovers longing, and do you know what the mathematical expression is for longing?"
He adds cream and some drops of orange juice to the soup.
"The negative numbers. The formalization of the feeling that you are missing something. And human consciousness expands and grows even more, and the child discovers the in-between spaces. Between stones, between pieces of moss on the stones, between people. And between numbers. And do you know what that leads to? It leads to fractions. Whole numbers plus fractions produce the rational numbers. And human consciousness doesn't stop there. It wants to go beyond reason. It adds an operation as absurd as the extraction of roots. And produces irrational numbers."
He warms French bread in the oven and fills the pepper mill.
"It's a form of madness. Because the irrational numbers are infinite. They can't be written down. They force human consciousness out beyond limits. And by adding irrational numbers to rational numbers, you get real numbers."
I've stepped into the middle of the room to have more space. It's rare that you have a chance to explain yourself to a fellow human being. Usually you have to fight for the floor. And this is important to me.
"It doesn't stop. It never stops. Because now, on the spot, we expand real numbers with the imaginary ones, square roots of negative numbers. These are numbers we can't picture, numbers that normal human consciousness cannot comprehend. And when we add the imaginary numbers to the real numbers, we have the complex number system. The first number system in which it's possible to explain satisfactorily the crystal formation of ice. It's like a vast, open landscape. The horizons. You head towards them and they keep receding. That is Greenland, and that's what I can't be without! That's why i don't want to be locked up."
I wind up standing in front of him.
"Smilla," he says, "Can I kiss you?"
-- Peter Høeg, Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow, pp. 101-102

After hearing that kind of that beautiful metaphor, I think I want to kiss her also. The excerpt is my favourite among others in the TOK textbook. It's a very good example of an allegory, an extended metaphor.
Why post this now? Because I just finished the book and the movie. The former is highly recommended, the latter not at all.
Despite that, this is the scene from the movie, although it is significantly different from the book: