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Like most peons, he could conceive of no more than one social class higher than his own.
You’ve heard the saying, “A legend, a lie, and a likelihood make a tradition”?’
The alcalde threw out his chest, as politicians do whenever they see an opportunity to speak for more than a couple of sentences.
Sometimes when all our attention is thus focused on memory, our eyes, unguided by ourselves, will distinguish from a mass of detail some single object, presenting it with a clarity never achieved by concentration.
But I believe there is no other difference between those who are called courageous and those who are branded craven than that the second are fearful before the danger and the first after it.
The coward is a coward, then, because he has brought his fear with him; persons we think cowardly will sometimes amaze us by their bravery, if they have had no forewarning of their danger.
Oaths are only mere weak things of honor compared to the benefits we give to others, which are things of the spirit; let us once save another, and we are his for life.
The dawn-men went to red Verthandi, who was then named War. And because they thought that had an ungracious sound that would keep others from following them, they renamed it, calling it Present. That was a jest in their tongue, for the same word meant Now and The Gift.
Verðandi (Mars) is a Norn from Norse mythologi, like Urðr (Urth) and Skuld (Venus?)
‘Then others – who would have drawn a people to the innermost habitable world for their own reasons – took up the game as well, and called that world Skuld, the World of the Future. Thus our own became Urth, the World of the Past.’
Venus?
‘It is beyond value, which means it is worthless.
‘I am no scholar,’ he began, ‘but I know it has been said that the greatest causes are often joined by the basest means.
Some will say they were at one time troubled in sleeping but have ‘recovered’ from it, as though awareness were a disease, as perhaps it is.
If the future did not exist now, how could we journey toward it? If the past does not exist still, how could we leave it behind us?
That we are capable only of being what we are remains our unforgivable sin.
