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“I’m not talking about the Church,” Rudy says. “I’m talking about Societas Eruditorum.”
“I feel like I’m going to die,” he says. “Good,” Shaftoe says, “that means you probably won’t.”
Not that it’s devoid of interest now, but it is easier to introduce new complications than to resolve the old ones.
“We could end up in prison married to the guy with the most cigarettes,”
Your clients—some of them, anyway—are, for all practical purposes, aborigines. They will either make you rich or kill you, like something straight out of a Joseph Campbell footnote.”
It only takes a single generation to revert to savagery.”
It is easy to be eyes and ears. It is harder to be fists and feet.
Anticipation never killed anyone. Anticipation can actually be kind of enjoyable. What did Avi say? Sometimes wanting is better than having.
Randy is always impressed by the mixture of love, hate, hope, disappointment, admiration, and derision that Filipinos express towards America.
Meenaz Lodhi and 3 other people liked this
that Charlene’s limbic system was simply hooked up in such a way that she liked dominant men. Again, not in a whips and chains sense, just in the sense that in most relationships someone’s got to be active and someone’s got to be passive, and there’s no particular logic to that, but there’s nothing bad about it either. In the end, the passive partner can have just as much power, and just as much freedom.
Intuition, like a flash of lightning, lasts only for a second. It generally comes when one is tormented by a difficult decipherment and when one reviews in his mind the fruitless experiments already tried. Suddenly the light breaks through and one finds after a few minutes what previous days of labor were unable to reveal.
you pile one thing on top of the next and you keep it up and keep it up—sometimes the galleon sinks in a typhoon, you don’t get your slab of granite that year—but you stick with it and eventually you end up with something sooo big.
ignoti et quasi occulti, which means ‘unknown and partly hidden’ or words to that effect,” says Enoch Root. “It is the motto of a society to which I belong.
“I was trained as an astronomer,” Randy says. “So I learned all about occultation—the concealment of one body behind another, as during an eclipse.”
the ancient Greeks (who, though utter shitheads in many ways, were terrifyingly intelligent people)
the same entities or patterns persisting through time, but casting slightly different shaped shadows for different people.
it has enough of a pattern to give our minds something to work on and yet an irregularity that indicates some kind of organic provenance—
the Norse had Loki.
And in the case of Trickster gods the pattern is that cunning people tend to attain power that uncunning people don’t. And all cultures are fascinated by this.
Valerity (Val) and 2 other people liked this
This isn’t very nice, but it’s a fact: civilization requires an Aegis. And the only way to fight the bastards off in the end is through intelligence. Cunning. Metis.”
it’s the elbow in the exponential curve.
“Well the short answer is that we won because the Germans worshipped Ares and we worshipped Athena.”
theogonical analysis.
PEOPLE SMELL ALL KINDS OF WAYS BEFORE THEY HAVE burned, but only one way afterwards.
Trust goes a long way, but at some point, if you’re going to sponsor a stable currency, you must put up or shut up. Somewhere, you have to actually have a shitload of gold in the basement.
War’s weird.
Over and over again we see the pattern of the Titanomachia repeated—the old gods are thrown down, chaos returns, but out of the chaos, the same patterns reemerge.”
“Ares always reemerges from the chaos. It will never go away. Athenian civilization defends itself from the forces of Ares with metis, or technology. Technology is built on science. Science is like the alchemists’ uroburos, continually eating its own tail. The process of science doesn’t work unless young scientists have the freedom to attack and tear down old dogmas, to engage in an ongoing Titanomachia. Science flourishes where art and free speech flourish.”
Talking openly and freely is a pleasure, talking carefully is work, and Randy doesn’t feel like work. He calls his parents to tell them everything’s fine, calls Chester to thank him.
One nice thing about being in Asia is that tense, volatile people blend right in.
“Enoch Root, no one knows the sins of the world better than me. I have swum in those sins, drowned in them, burned in them, dug in them. I was like a man swimming down a long cave filled with black cold water. Looking up, I saw a light above me, and swam towards it. I only wanted to find the surface, to breathe air again. Still immersed in the sins of the world, at least I could breathe. This is what I am now.”
“The whole world is a grave,” says Enoch Root. “Graves can be moved, corpses reinterred. Decently.”
“Wealth that is stored up in gold is dead. It rots and stinks. True wealth is made every day by men getting up out of bed and going to work. By schoolchildren doing their lessons, improving their minds. Tell those men that if they want wealth, they should come to Nippon with me after the war. We will start businesses and build buildings.”
M. liked this
“Educated men created this cemetery.”
“Jesus takes away the sins of the world, but the world remains: a physical reality on which we are doomed to live until death takes us away from it. You have confessed, and you have been forgiven, and so the greater part of your burden has been taken away by grace. But the gold is still there, in a hole in the ground.
For Avi it’s an inextricable mixture of the sacred and the satanic.
it’s a good day to die
But mostly the air is filled with this continual slow progress of things that didn’t survive, making their way down through the column of air and into the water, which flushes them away: dead leaves and the exoskeletons of insects, sucked dry and eviscerated in some silent combat hundreds of feet above their heads.
And that is the problem right there in a nutshell. The bad guys tend to have the means.
One of the useful things about military service is that it gets you acclimatized to having loud, blustery men say rude things to you.
