More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Every age fraught with discord and danger seems to spawn a leader meant only for that age, a political giant whose absence, in retrospect, seems inconceivable when the history of that age is written.
“Only someone who is willing to look beyond the bureaucratic limits of tactics and strategies and the obsolescent will to ‘win’ can truly wield an artist’s touch with a medium so difficult as warfare in the modern age.”
“For our race to achieve the true satori, for us to move to that next level of consciousness and evolution that so many of our philosophies proclaim, all facets of human endeavor must become conscious strivings for art.”
How did the abomination of the cruciform fit into Teilhard and Duré’s view of inevitable, benevolent evolution toward the Godhead?
“The best lack all conviction,” he thought, “while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
Still, it was a peaceful way to wait for the end of the world, sitting high in the known galaxy’s tallest living tree, listening to a warm evening breeze rustle a million acres of leaves and watching stars twinkle and twin moons hurtle across a velvet sky.
“We have spread out through the galaxy like cancer cells through a living body, Duré. We multiply without thought to the countless life forms that must die or be pushed aside so that we may breed and flourish. We eradicate competing forms of intelligent life.”
“Man and his machine intelligences. Which is a parasite on the other?
One of our futures. This is where the Time Tombs were formed and launched backward in time.”
I remember my mother and how pale she looked, her face almost shining in the gloom of the darkened room. My sister and I were allowed to touch her clammy hand, kiss her fevered lips, and then withdraw. I remember that once I furtively wiped my lips as I left that room, glancing sideways to see if my sister or others had seen my sinful act.
Odd how many suffering members of humankind have faced eternity obsessed with their bowels, their bedsores, or the meagerness of their diets.
“If I should die,” said I to myself, “I have left no immortal work behind me—nothing to make my friends proud of my memory—but I have lov’d the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember’d.”
“Is there another Life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream? There must be, we cannot be created for this sort of suffering.”
Where religious values might be relative, intellectual values fleeting, moral values ambiguous, and aesthetic values dependent upon an observer, the existence value of any thing is infinite—thus the “mountains in the sun”—and being infinite, equal to every other thing and all truths.
Now comes the pain of truth/ to whom tis pain/ O folly! for to bear all naked truths/ And to envisage circumstance/ all calm/
That is the top of sovereignty
Or shall the tree be envious of the dove
wind dying from scream to sigh to whisper, curtains of dust diminishing and then parting to show the stars,
Sol knew now that little could be returned except by memory—that
A wondrous lesson in thy silent face: Knowledge enormous makes a god of me. Names, deeds, gray legends, dire events, rebellions, Majesties, sovran voices, agonies, Creations and destroyings, all at once Pour into the wide hollows of my brain, And deify me, as if some blithe wine Or bright elixir peerless I had drunk, And so become immortal.
Religion and ethics were not always—or even frequently—mutually compatible. The demands of religious absolutism or fundamentalism or rampaging relativism often reflected the worst aspects of contemporary culture or prejudices rather than a system which both man and God could live under with a sense of real justice.
Sacrifice and the agreement to sacrifice had written human history in blood.
Abraham was testing God. By denying the sacrifice at the last moment, by stopping the knife, God had earned the right—in Abraham’s eyes and the hearts of his offspring—to become the God of Abraham.
Abraham came not to sacrifice, but to know once and for all whether this God was a god to be trusted and obeyed. No other test would do.
