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Kindle Notes & Highlights
The feel and flow of life among the Rulvyn is very different from what it was before.
‘When last I was there, a woman still married a man with the same rituals and prayers, feast-foods, and flowers; but the look in her eyes has changed. So has the look in his.
Now Nevèrÿon is where money comes from, and indeed they have used it there for at least four generations now—far longer than we.
And do you know …? My friend could not see the difference. At least not the differences I saw.
No, my dear girl”—and why my friend calls me that I shall never know, since I am three years the elder—“
And three years ago, when my friend saw it—oh, what exclamations about the marvelous cleverness of native knowledge, once that tall, proud people put down their spears and cleaned off their hunting paint!
No, I gave my Nevèrÿon friend no enlightenment that, indeed, it was a much better example of what that tall, proud people could do once they put down their babies and their water baskets and their turnip rakes. Nor did I mention the design was mine
Spending practically every minute of your day on pure survival is an absolutely involving and absolutely boring life.
flowers—about a month before, I had invented green paint and now the whole tribe was using it on everything.
The Rulvyn value daughters much more than sons—Oh, to a stranger like my friend, it seems just the opposite:
you finally begin to understand why the men turn out the way they do: high on emotions, defenses, pride; low on logic, domestic—sometimes called “common”—and aesthetic sense.
But the problem begins with trying to reduce them all to the same measure of coin in the first place: skilled time, unskilled time, the talk of a clever woman, nature’s gifts of fish and fruit, the invention of a craftsman, the strength of a laboring woman—one simply cannot measure weight, coldness, the passage of time, and the brightness of fire all on the same scale.’
‘You mean,’ said Enin, ‘that money, like a mirror, flattens everything out, even though it looks, at first, like a perfect copy, moving when things move, holding shape when they’re still.’
‘There are certain thoughts,’ Venn said, dryly, ‘which, reflected by language in the mirror of speech, flatten out entirely, lose all depth, and though they may have begun as rich and complex feelings, become, when flattened by language, the most shallow and pompous self-righteousness.
‘People would have to trust each other even more than they did just trading goods. And that trust would probably be a new value in our tribe.
‘Venn, would another example of this idea you’re talking about be men and women?
