Empire of Silence (The Sun Eater, #1)

by Christopher Ruocchio

“Knowledge is the mother of fools,” he said. “Remember, the greatest part of wisdom is in recognizing your own ignorance.”

But in the same way that close reading allows the reader to absorb, to synthesize the truth of what he reads, drawing allows the artist to capture the soul of a thing. The artist sees things not in terms of what is or might be, but in terms of what must be. Of what our world must become. This is why a portrait will—to the human observer—always defeat the photograph. It is why we turn to religion even when science objects and why the least scholiast might outperform a machine. The photograph captures Creation as it is; it captures fact. Facts bore me in my old age. It is the truth that interests me, and the truth is in charcoal—or in the vermilion by whose properties I record this account. Not in data or laser light. Truth lies not in rote but in the small and subtle imperfections, the mistakes that define art and humanity both. Beauty, the poet wrote, is truth. Truth, beauty. He was wrong. They are not the same.

Certain scholiasts teach that each experience is only the sum of its parts. That our lives may be reduced to a set of equations, that they may be factored, weighed, balanced, and understood. They believe the universe is one of objects and that we are only objects among objects. That even our emotions are no more than electrochemical processes carried out in our brains, accessories to the pressures of Bloody-Handed Evolution. This is why they struggle for apatheia, the freedom from emotion. This is their great failing. Human beings do not inhabit a world of objects, nor did our consciousness evolve to live in such a place. We live in stories, and in stories, we are subject to phenomena beyond the mechanisms of space and time. Fear and love, death and wrath and wisdom—these are as much parts of our universe as light and gravity. The ancients called them gods, for we are their creatures, shaped by their winds. Sift the sands of every world and sort the dust of space between them, and you will find not one atom of fear, nor gram of love nor dram of hatred. Yet they are there, unseen and uncertain as the smallest quanta and just as real. And like the smallest quanta, they are governed by principles beyond our control.

My memory is to the world as a drawing is to the photograph. Imperfect. More perfect. We remember what we must, what we choose to, because it is more beautiful and real than the truth.

No one as observed as I was is free. Like light particles, the unobserved man is free to become whatever is in him and the world allows. But beneath the eye and auspice of the state, he can be only what his betters demand of him. Pawns, knights, bishops. Even the king may move but one step at a time.

Joy is a wind, Hadrian. It will pick you up only to smash you against the rocks again.

Ghosts, I thought, were only the echoes at night of that which we expected to find by day, haunting our consciences.

Often I have found that such outsiders cling hardest to those labels that are denied them. Thus weak men are the most aggressive and unskilled ones loudest to boast.

The future might come only in its own time, but the scholiasts teach that there are many futures, and it is only the crashing of the waves of time and possibility against the interminable now that makes the world. It is not the future that is present in Ever-Fleeting Time but the futures. Freedom—freedom of thought and action—matters and is guaranteed because the future is not. There are no prophecies, only probabilities. No Fate, only chance. The present time is not when we are, but what we do.