‘You provincials are all alike,’ the Clerk said wearily. ‘Filled with impossible dreams of order and perfection, which are mere idealized projections of your own incompletion. You should know by now that life is a sloppy affair, that power tends to break things up rather than put things together, and that the greater the intelligence, the higher the degree of complication which it detects. You may have heard Holgee’s Theorem; that Order is merely a primitive and arbitrary relational grouping of objects in the chaos of the Universe, and that, if a being’s intelligence and power approached
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