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I don’t know whether I’ll succeed on the hundredth day of the war, the thousandth, or the negative-twentieth, but I will make peace. I’m already making it.
“All mortal things are doomed: you, me, this peace, the Empire, this planet. Achilles doesn’t choose sides based on how likely things are to succeed, only whether they’re worth dying for.”
Permanencia, un acto de sacrificio (Permanence, an act of sacrifice).
He is always awkward ending handshakes, easily distracted by the question of how much souls touch when hands do.
“Though my return here makes narrative sense, and narrative is a powerful force in the world, at least for me.”
Surely you have discovered that emotions let you sometimes tell yourself the possible is real, even without proof. Perhaps on some historical tour you have been shown an artifact: this might be the sword of Charlemagne, this little face of gold might be the tomb-mask of Agamemnon, this grove is where Robin Hood camped if he was real; you let yourself believe a little bit, even if you disbelieve, too.
Plastic has been made flesh, a messiah resurrected, and an ancient demigod walks the Earth; Church is currently more indispensable than Law, so I’m impregnable.
Complacency is the enemy, Mycroft, not xenophobia. An old phoenix needs burning.”
It was Papa, worry swirling his wrinkles as a stationer swirls the stripes of paint that will stain marbled endpapers.
MASON was not with them. Nothing beneath the inconstant Moon is perfect, reader, not the crumbling slopes of Olympus, nor the fractal structure of the water-flea, so even here, as Earth teeters between a New World Order and Apocalypse, this Emperor, who guards more lives than any sovereign in Earth’s throne-rich history, still had to use the bathroom.
The terms of office allow, in fact command, each Emperor to take the Oath, but then to add or change three words of the text he himself received, though without violating the spirit of what stood before. Thus each MASON refines and guides, in those three potent words, the reigns of all successors. Thus, slowly, three atoms per generation, the Oath evolves to suit the changing needs of humankind.
Behind the shades, the broad gray plain, that sea of shapeless gloom extending on and on across the mockeries of trees, that vast borderless shadow, millions on millions. Souls, reader. That gray waste is all forgotten souls, minds empty of memory, smeared one into another, stripped of self but conscious and eternal still. And to this absolute dissolution Caesar damns his enemies. Damnatio Memoriae. Keep it away! Away! Back, sea of shadows! Not me! I will never let you take me! I will carve my memory into history, by work, by force, by guile, in swathes of blood and ashes if I must! I will! I
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I knew why Achilles doubted. He himself had tried so hard to stay away from Troy, donning women’s robes to hide among the maidens, but the Achaean chieftains would not let this best of fighters live in peace, and sent crafty Odysseus to expose him.
“Like priests, then. In the wilds of war, a wise man will hurl even an infant from a parapet to keep it from growing up to seek revenge, but, if he hopes for any future worth living in, he still honors the gods and spares their priests.”
I want a better world badly enough to smash this one to make it,
As Machiavelli observed, Rome showed, tyrant after tyrant, how those reared in palatine luxury, expecting to be master of the world, basely abused the godlike authority that fell to them unearned, while those promoted through merit—Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius—made judicious use of the Imperium of which they considered themselves, not owners, but custodians.
Students felt the fear most, as the campuses, which should be—must be, for pity’s sake!—unspotted oases of self-creation were suddenly pierced by the elder generation’s failure.
I hereby renounce the right to complacency, and vow lifelong to take only what minimum of leisure is necessary to my productivity, viewing health, happiness, rest, and play as means, not ends, and that, while Utopia provides my needs, I will commit the full produce of my labors to our collective effort to redirect the path of human life away from death and toward the stars.
my days do not belong to me, but to the future.
Leviathans are wild humans made macrocosmic, so all Leviathans live in a state of constant War: the war for resources, for land, for subjects.
“I Am the same Species as My Peer your Maker, Who created plague, and death, and earthquakes, and forgetting, and hid from you the nature of your souls, and, for the sake of Our Conversation, We—not He alone—We drive you now to war and your destruction.
I tried to turn my back on my Maker’s Plan, to stop thinking of myself as a sailor on His sea, but I still love Apollo’s stars so much that I forget Jehovah is bigger. My dreams are still within this universe, so infinite, so small, so near.
It took more than a glance but less than an evening with Mycroft to realize they were something special. It was like a myth, a pool where village maidens go to skinny dip, and one day we realize a nymph has joined us, glowing like the Moon and not quite real. No one says anything, and we treat the nymph like one of us, for fear any acknowledgment might scare this marvel off forever. And if one day the nymph follows us back into the village to take a turn at weaving, we don’t dare refuse, we just take constant extra care with this visitor who lends the town a little touch of magic.
If there is a Kingdom of Dreams, I bet its gods spent that week wondering where everybody’d gone.
Mycroft always said no one should mourn them. Well, shut up, Mycroft, we’re going to make you eat your lunch, and take your pills, and sleep your hours, and rest your rest, and we’re going to mourn you, and there’s nothing you can do to stop us.
