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Pride was a library.
Icarus, hurtling from the sky; Arachne, limbs splitting into eight. What was pride? For Augustine, the original sin; for Pope Gregory, the root of all evil. For Plato, the First Court punished those possessed of a timocratic soul—the soul who purported to love justice and honor and beauty, but who cared more about preserving the appearance of such things rather than making the sacrifices necessary to fulfill those things themselves. For Confucius, the Court of Pride housed the xiaoren, the petty men, who chased the names of things but not their nature. A mismatch between the name and the
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“So very sorry, won’t happen again—why, you look new! Just arrived?” “Yes indeed,” said Alice. “Double suicide,” Peter added, which Alice found rather dramatic but did not challenge.
The continuity of one’s soul was tied inextricably to the persistence of one’s memories. When memories were gone, a new soul was born. The Lethe was forgetting was death was change.
“Here there be dragons!”
For this reason, many Tartarologists argued that the punishment of Desire, which by most accounts encompassed both lust and gluttony, was the source of addiction itself—both motivation of appetite and cause of harm. It trapped you with enticements; it made you the cause of your own suffering. Every other court kept you trapped with locked doors and difficult challenges and vengeful deities, but Desire trapped you all on its own.
He couldn’t help her, after all; he could only pity her, and so she just didn’t see the point.
Most likely Peter was just that brilliant, arrogant, and absent-minded all at once; a combination of traits that only talented men like him could be, for the world forgave them any number of transgressions so long as they dazzled.
All she knew was this: She could coexist with Peter Murdoch. She could even, when she let her guard down, when she was either sleep-deprived or desperate enough, be very fond of and unfortunately attracted to Peter Murdoch. But she would be a fool to think that she knew him.
Now, Chicago doesn’t mind predators; lesbians, that’s another story.
And so perhaps it was entirely possible—common, even—for you to look into the eyes of someone you’d been falling in love with, someone you had spent every waking moment with, whose breathing sounded as familiar as your own—and fail to recognize them at all.
Peter shuddered. “But that’s not a life anymore.” “They aren’t living lives,” said Elspeth. “They’re just rote functions. Dedicated to a single end.”
You could achieve so much without the burdens of personhood. Who wouldn’t wash away the rest?
The upshot is, Hell’s not so bad for the people who are in it. They’re exactly where they wanted to be.”
A paradox means that somewhere along the path, we have gotten something deeply, terribly wrong.
“斷腸,” because although the words translated figuratively meant “a broken heart,” 腸 meant literally all one’s internal organs and viscera, and for a heart to break meant that everything felt twisted and ripped apart and spilled onto the sand. A heart didn’t just break, a heart yanked out the rest of you.
Now all that was gone. This was the unbelievable fact of death. This was a paradox her mind could not accept, that someone could be in the world one moment and simply be gone the next.
Let them have it their way, she thought. Those cages were ugly anyhow. She could build a prison all on her own.
She sensed only his resentment, a bitter and hostile wave, as abrupt as it was confusing. And Alice, well accustomed to placating volatile men, knew only to await her punishment.
But that meant Hell demanded something more than a guilty plea. That the Furies, or whoever that mysterious they was, if they existed at all, expected a more profound acknowledgment of guilt. And whatever this was—whether because her mind would not admit it, or because it was out of the grasp of her understanding—Alice was not certain she could ever put it down on paper, or set it to words at all.
A crystal shattered in her mind. The illusion could not hold; impatience exploded; a million ants crawling over her skin.
“Suppose you’re rescued by an act of divine grace.” “Don’t be a cunt, Alice.”
“If I die, I die,” said Alice. “But there’s no life otherwise, I think. Life is an activity that’s got to be sustained. You have to fight for it. Otherwise it’s no life at all. That’s just it. It’s just an impulse. And we’ve both determined that’s not enough. You know that.”