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Hubris it is, reader, to call one’s self the most anything in history: the most powerful, the most mistreated, the most alone.
Experience, and the Greek blood within my veins, teach me to fear hubris above all sins,
Hobbes tells us that war consists not in Battle only, but in that tract of time wherein the Will to Battle is so manifest that, scenting bloodlust in his fellows and himself, Man can no longer trust civilization’s pledge to keep the peace.
But we do not know how to turn the Will to Battle into Battle.
a coffin-stale drawer.
Tears welled in me, but practice did not let them fall.
If one man in this world had deserved to see the oath live, to have been present when his allegiance shifted to a new commander in chief, that man was Ockham Saneer.
“O.S. has not gone rogue. It remains that arm which acts when the Humanist Hive is best served by taking human life.
Has it occurred to you, Member President, that your goal may not be achievable with peaceful means?”
O.S. intentionally keeps few records, so many details are irretrievable.”
How does it feel, I wonder, to bear the sins, not of a father, but of a semiparent, half forgotten?
The European Union had only to revise its constitution for the umpteenth time, and tradition claims that the Masons have not changed a letter of their law since law began, but the rest of the Hives have patchwork law codes, stitched in haste from those of corporations, clubs, families, custom, fiction, and, yes, relics of the geographic nations, too.
Hence the honest and necessary plea: terra ignota. I did the deed, but I do not myself know whether it was a crime.
“A nation could kill to protect its sovereign soil. Can you define a Hive’s sovereign soil, Mycroft? Can you define the limits of Hive self-defense?”
Their courtesy has been conspicuous.”
“Do you suppose we recognize it because the Masons did a good job copying ancient sources? Or because our memories are made out of current expectations of what ancient things should look like?”
“What are civilians when we have no soldiers?”
Mayors and city ordinances have always had power over more than building height and street food stalls, we just trusted each other to leave these old swords in their glass cases on the wall.
I think all humans feel rage at our finitude when we see others read what we cannot.
Make everyone on Earth a field medic and you’ll still want more.”
Never was the letter of the law so meticulously followed and its spirit so ridiculously failed.
I wish there were a name for that expression, part smirk, part sigh, part sniff, all irony, which we use when we acknowledge the sad, sardonic humor of our own unhappy state.
Most events are close for me, reader, and far for you, but some, like this, we watch from equal distance, as Jehovah’s twin enemies, distance and time, render us both impotent.
You must not think, reader, that MASON’s dictates mold the Senate like wax. Sixty-one Masons among two hundred votes is not near a majority, merely enough to steady or to tip a rocking boat.
The savvy public knows the difference between when ice ‘breaks up’ from the sun, and when it is shattered by some conniving submarine.
And the children publicly identified as set-sets are not the only ones involved in this crisis whose development was crippled by parental manipulation which intentionally destroyed their ability to think rationally about their crimes.
Or rather… failed in their logical reasoning to incorporate even the shallowest empathy.
“I think you’re as ready as people of this era can be, but when you have a blade in one hand and a soft throat in the other, that’s when you discover not everyone’s mettle is battle-strong.
Yet, just as the first man to mint a coin could not imagine stocks and banks and usury, so the Beast of Malmesbury could not see far enough past sword and field and banditry to imagine a world where equality and equal rights were no longer in debate, or where a man might push a button and exterminate a city.
Even Trojan Paris’s great crime saw no trial but war.”
In darker ages Justice stood alone before courthouses, but in Carlyle’s vision her sister Temperance stands to one side holding back her sword, while from the other side Reason lifts away her blindfold, so Justice can finally see the contents of her scales.
Well observed, Master Hobbes; this law is not for the government, it is for those with none.
The fish that rides the great whale’s belly must not bite the giant whose least effort can crush him and his thousand kin.
And it’s horrible to accept that this wonderful world we’ve made is made from killing people.
When you can tell friend from foe, you can make battle lines.”
the puffed and rustling archaism of academia,
If the mote cannot perceive the workings of the Whole, how can the Whole comprehend the anguish of the mote?”
Mycroft has many well-honed instincts, but not self-preservation.”
To this day I don’t know whether, before its operation, the now-hermaphrodite was male or an Amazon, but if I had known, seeing Sniper beside me now I think my mind would have rebelled at assigning it a sex, as if I were asked to sex the sky, or fleeting clouds.
“The truth? Unusable in court? Who does that help?”
All capitals became police states.
BECAME??
Back channels breed doppelgangers.”
Fugitives cannot control which words carry your names.”
sort author from impostor.
existence is truth; lies unmake truth and so unmake existence; that is evil.”
The patron touches no stone, yet builds the cathedral; the judge wields no sword, yet strikes off the traitor’s head.
When every guest at a dinner has a motive for wanting the host dead, in one sense it doesn’t really matter who strikes first, the oppressed stepdaughter or the vengeful rival—either way, the victim dies.
Dark times, reader, when a million free hospitals do not make a Cousin’s face brighten. “That plan isn’t public yet.”
They could sell farmland, marshland, or those hunks of rainforest that just sit there being ecologically important and full of frogs.”
Some acts are too cruel, reader, even for philosophers. If William of Ockham’s art we dub a razor, and if Nietzsche subtitled his Twilight of the Idols “How to Philosophize with a Hammer,” then Pascal’s is surely a flaying knife, petal-thin and cruel, that peels the victim’s skin back inch by inch, leaving no shield between the tender soul and the infinite dark mirror.
I learned from him that all the activities of my life, all my duty, my penitence, my love, all these are mere diversions to distract me from thinking about the only certainty: someday I will die.
