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“we are carving out a new social order and the next step in the human story”—i.e., the latest variant in primate dominance dynamics.
The Aztecs had believed the world would end in one of four ways: earthquake, fire, flood, or jaguars falling from the sky.
History too has an inertia. In the four dimensions of spacetime, particles (or events) have directionality; mathematicians, trying to show this, draw what they call “world lines” on graphs.
Emergencies in space can be as obvious as an explosion or as intangible as an equation,
“The urge to excel and the urge to lead aren’t the same. Sometimes I think they may be opposites.”
History is not evolution! It is a false analogy! Evolution is a matter of environment and chance, acting over millions of years. But history is a matter of environment and choice, acting within lifetimes, and sometimes within years, or months, or days!
tap-and-die
no geologist ever born could keep away from a land cut.
“You damned liberals.” “I don’t know what that means.” “It means you’re too soft-hearted to ever actually do anything.”
It’s too dangerous to keep the consciousness of the universe on only one planet, it could be wiped out.
You can’t make love to your fame. Even though some people try.
But grief runs off us, Michel thought as he sat with her, like rain off a duck.
I believe in haecceity, Sax had said, in thisness,
in here-and-nowness, in the particular individuality of every moment. That’s why I want to know what is this? what is this? what is this?
this usually led directly to considerations of ecology, and its deformed offshoot economics;
“Anyway that’s a large part of what economics is—people arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven’t just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful.”
computers were becoming dangerously unreliable, a lot of hardware breakdown, a lot of AI neurosis or retardation.
a scientific research station is actually a little model of prehistoric utopia, carved out of the transnational money economy by clever primates who want to live well.”
the hypocrisy of the West, where people talked of profit at prayer breakfasts, people who couldn’t articulate a single belief they had; people who thought their values were physical constants, who would say “That’s just the way things are,”
it’s like in eco-economics where what you take from the system has to be balanced by what you give in to it, balanced or exceeded to create that anti-entropic surge which characterizes all creative life and especially this step across to a new world, this place that is neither nature nor culture, transformation of a planet into a world and then a home.
“Syncretism
The tiny imaginary audience inside his head did not exist; no one watches our life movies.
“Live,” as the Japanese said helpfully, “as if you were already dead.”
They were not so much students of the land as lovers of it; they wanted something from it. Ann, on the other hand, asked for nothing but questions to be asked. There were so many different kinds of desire.
a hilarious truth, a truth so delicious that just saying it made you laugh out loud.
Strange how one remembered faces until you tried to look at them in your mind, when they turned away from you.
It was a world of acts, and words had no more influence on acts than the sound of a waterfall has on the flow of the stream.
what Orwell said about Barcelona in the hands of the anarchists—it is the euphoria of a new social contract, of a return to that child’s dream of fairness we all began with—”
Frank was now trying to muscle the process along by the sheer force of his anger at his lack of influence.
glossolalia;
