Tales of Nevèrÿon

by Samuel R. Delany

He was learning that power—the great power that shattered lives and twisted the course of the nation—was like a fog over a meadow at evening. From any distance, it seemed to have a shape, a substance, a color, an edge. Yet, as you approached it, it seemed to recede before you. Finally, when common sense said you were at its very center, it still seemed just as far away; only by this time it was on all sides, obscuring any vision of the world beyond it.

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.’

Childhood is that time in which we never question the fact that every adult act is not only an autonomous occurrence in the universe, but that it is also filled, packed, overflowing with meaning, whether that meaning works for ill or good, whether the ill or good is or is not comprehended.

Adulthood is that time in which we see that all human actions follow forms, whether well or badly, and it is the perseverance of the forms that is, whether for better or worse, their meaning.

It was only after the strangers came and took him away that it occurred to him there really were just four to the Seven Clans, and that therefore his tribe had probably once been much larger. Suddenly Small Sarg began to conceptualize something that fitted very closely to a particular idea of history—which, because we have never truly been without it, is ultimately incomprehensible to the likes of you and me—only one of the many ideas he had been learning in the rough, brutal, and inhuman place they called civilization. Once that had happened, of course, he could never be a true barbarian again.

The mark of the truly civilized is their (truly baffling to the likes of you and me) patience with what truly baffles.

‘Ours is a very strange kind of information.’ Raven went over to the wall, folded her arms, and leaned there. ‘It is far easier to argue that something nobody believes in actually exists than it is to argue that something everybody believes in is unreal.

Now come and let us wander these deserted halls, these abandoned stairs, these cramped and damp cells and high chambers where history has left off happening.

Do you know what a dragon is? For me? Let me tell you, Myrgot: it is an expression of some natural sensibility that cannot be explained by pragmatics, that cannot survive unless someone is hugely generous before it.