The God is Not Willing (Witness #1)

by Steven Erikson

Because everyone knew, death was the one truth you couldn’t outrun.

Longing. Look for it, in every crowd, and you will find it. Paint it any colour you choose: grief, nostalgia, melancholy, remembrance, these are but flavours, poetic reflections.

The world seemed vast, but he wondered if there would come a day when the last wild place vanished, when old hunters like him would sit in taverns, drunk on ale and weeping with nostalgia,

Too many of them were stupid. They couldn’t think clearly enough to save their lives. The worst part was, they didn’t know they were stupid. Every failure had an excuse, every loss was someone else’s fault.

Stupid people always had a reason to be angry but didn’t have the capacity to understand that they were angry because they were frustrated, and they were frustrated because they didn’t understand, and they didn’t understand because they were stupid.

It was the smart people who had no excuse. And that was another thing: even smart people could be stupid on occasion, or stupid about some things even if smart about others. More often than not, in Damisk’s experience, many people were smart about everyone around them, yet stupid about themselves.

Was there ever a civilization, in all the world’s history, where honesty wasn’t rare? The honesty that looked both ways, that is. Inward and outward.

‘Good and evil, Rant. Sages talk and write about them all the time. Temple priests. Magisters, executioners. And they talk about those two things as if someone was around to judge, some god or gods, maybe, or even the universe itself. But no one is, or if they are, they ain’t talking.

Justice doesn’t exist in the Wilds, you see. I spent a lifetime looking for it out there, never found it.

Stupidity, lad, will defeat every god, crush every dream, topple every empire. Because, in the end, stupid people outnumber smart people.

The present age is only unique because you live in it.

step aside. Your day is done. Any regression into childish tantrums makes a mockery of wisdom.

History isn’t the past. The past is gone, behind us all, with no going back to it, ever. No, history is what we carry in us right now. It’s the story of our memories of how things were, in our own life, in the life of everyone who’s gone before. And the further back you go, the fewer the memories, so we take all the gaps and fill them up with how we imagine things had to be. You might think your imagination is good at that. But it isn’t. The more limited your life experience, the weaker your imagination.

‘Pedantry is no virtue,’ she retorted. ‘Rather, the product of a small mind, a confined misery of obsessive precision.

‘Sadness is what all living things share.

An avalanche of words buries all wisdom,

‘Because a child cares for no one but itself. Because each one of you lives as if right and wrong is someone else’s problem. Because you are without restraint, consumed by greed – you would stuff the entire world into your mouth given the

chance.

Dimness of thought and lack of introspection made many humans less than human, surrendering their precious gifts to a headlong plunge forward, always forward.

The stupid knew better than to look into their wake. The wise could not help it and so suffered greatly. This was humanity’s great divide, and many a time, Damisk had envied the stupid and all the obstinate incomprehension he saw in their eyes and faces. In the end, it takes wisdom to scream.

To live is to lose the faith you were born with to a thousand cuts, each year bleeding into the next.

happiness wasn’t kind anyway, the way it could vanish in an instant.