Howling Dark (The Sun Eater #2)

by Christopher Ruocchio

The rightly tuned mind does not deny its emotions, but floats with them. It accepts what it feels and so incorporates that feeling to itself. Thus the mind is not subject, but rules itself.

“Sad is like a big ocean, and you can’t breathe deep down. You can float on it, you can swim a little, but be careful. Grief is drowning. Grief is deep water.

True lessons require not only knowing, but that the student practices his knowledge again and again. Thus knowledge becomes us, and we become more than the animal and the machine. That is why the best teachers are students always, and the best students are never fully educated.

The bright line, he writes, between man and what was before man is drawn by that dignity with which we honor the dead. Man does not leave her dead to rot, but burns or buries or builds, protecting the body and the memory of the fallen. There is civilization: its cornerstone a grave.

We have little control over our ends, and none over what passes beyond them. But if we live well and truly, those who follow on may remember us for our lives and not our deaths.

Critics of the oldest stories used to say that men believe women to be goals, prizes to be won or bought. They did not understand. No man could think such a thing and remain a man, for to love is in part the attempt to become a creature worthy of love.

It is strange, is it not, that there are always people such as I? Men who believe the stranger is always more trustworthy than their neighbor? When we were young we looked to the stars with hope, praying that what gods or kings there were in the unpastured Dark were greater than Man, and so moral and righteous beyond imagination. We imagined they might descend from heaven and bless us with their gifts, and that it was only human nature that corrupted, for evil required the black hearts of men to create it.

Do not mistake me. I do not dismiss facts. But that two and two are four requires first that a mind has conceptualized two as two and four as four, and understands addition. Of this, there is no guarantee.

Rarely does the universe match my capacity for drama. Rarely is not never.

But we are not bodies. We have bodies.

I can think of no greater evil than the insistence that we are only meat. How many lives have been demeaned—destroyed—by that insistence? How many millions? That city, what it offered, suggested that we were nothing more, and so the men who traded in flesh—offering surgery, therapy, and replacement—offered people a vision of their best selves. As if identity were fluid. As if who we are is only granted to us by others and is by others taken away. As if no part of us is our own.

We believe our fear destroyed by new bravery. It is not. Fear is never destroyed. It is only made smaller by the courage we find after. It is always there.

As children we imagine that there is a secret mythology in nature, and that everything in nature is a party to it. As we grow, we experience enough of nature to know there is no such magic, and are forced to inhabit the everyday. We trade the mythology of childhood for knife-edged reality and call it truth, forgetting that there are deep truths, and deeper magics in our universe.

There is no morality in poverty. It is only that wealth gives the immoral greater opportunity for abuse.

“Wars end,” I said coldly. “Wars end,” Kharn agreed, more coldly still. “War does not.

We like to imagine that we are ourselves a unity: one mind, one spirit. Not so. In truth we are each a little legion, a pack of little personae—each one-eyed in its attentions and single-minded in its aim.

There was a strength in her clean limbs and an urgency that scattered my legion and left a single, one-eyed soldier at attention.

But one need not know Truth to speak it. Truth is, and may be found as readily as disaster and by the same process. One need only put one’s finger on it, or one’s foot in it.

Listen! Listen! “I am, Brethren!” Lucifer and Prometheus are the same. “What?” Listen! “I am!”

The world is filled with monsters: dragons in the wilderness, serpents in the garden. We must become monsters to fight them. Anyone who thinks otherwise has never really had to fight for anything.

A man is the sum of his memories—and more—he is the sum of all those others he has met, and what he learned from them. And that is an encouraging thought, for that knowledge and those memories survive and are part of us through every storm, and every little death.

We are not always the authors of our own stories. Some of us never are. I think that is what we struggle for: the command of our own lives. We struggle against our families, against the state, against nature, against our own weakness. All that we might choose for ourselves, if only for a moment. If only once.