Elizabeth Reuter's Blog - Posts Tagged "now-reading"

I am reading Emma, my first Jane Austen. It's wonderful.

It strikes me that Austen is rare among "classic" authors in her optimism. Without diminishing human flaws, she seems to genuinely like human beings, and writes us to give the most ardent pessimist hope for our future.

It's an uncommon view for someone with such keen insight into human nature, and reading her gives me hope, too.

For the life of me, I can't come up with a review for this book. It left me full of thought and feeling, but in a jumbled way, so I can't get anything out on paper.

Here's a segment from the novel, and in my opinion, one of the most fascinating segments of a story I've read anywhere, ever, where our human hero speaks to Homo gestalt, the next stage in evolution, about morality and shame.

***

Listen to me, Gestalt boy. You found power within you beyond your wildest dreams and you used it and loved it. So did I.

Listen to me, Gerry. You discovered that no matter how great your power, nobody wanted it. So did I.

You want to be wanted. You want to be needed. So do I.

Do you know what morals are? Morals are an obedience to rules that people laid down to help you live among them. You don't need morals. No set of morals can apply to you. You can obey no rules set down by your kind because there are no more of your kind. And you are not an ordinary man, so the morals of ordinary men would do you no better than the morals of an anthill would do me.

So nobody wants you and you are a monster.

Nobody wanted me when I was a monster.

But Gerry, there is another kind of code for you. It is a code that requires belief rather than obedience. It is called ethos.

The ethos will give you a code for survival too. But it is a greater survival than your own, or my species, or yours. What it is really is a reverence for your sources and your posterity. It is a study of the main current which created you, and in which you will create still a greater thing when the time comes.

Help humanity, Gerry, for it is your mother and your father now; you never had them before. And humanity will help you for it will produce more like you and then you will no longer be alone. Help them as they grow; help them to help humanity and gain still more of your own kind. For you are immortal, Gerry. You are immortal now.

And when there are enough of your kind, your ethics will be their morals. And when their morals no longer suit their species, you or another ethical being will create new ones that vault still farther up the main stream, reverencing you, reverencing those who bore you and the ones who bore them, back and back to the first wild creature who was different because his heart leapt when he saw a star.

I was a monster and I found this ethos.

You are a monster.

It's up to you.