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Why are you suddenly interested in rosewater?’ ‘I’m interested in everything.’ ‘So you are. I forgot.
She felt as if she’d caught a glimpse of a long-lost memory, something intensely important that was buried under thousands of days of ordinary life.
It was another of those still grey days when silence itself seemed to be a meteorological phenomenon; not just the result of nothing happening but a positive presence larger than gardens, and colleges, and life.
A false modesty would be ostentatious, don’t you think? It would seek to turn away emphatically from public distinctions and offices while privately lobbying to get them. And then allow itself to be dragged into them, protesting volubly about its unworthiness. I’m sure you’ve seen that cast of mind. But true modesty would accept that there is a place that one could fill, that one’s talents are not illusions, that it would be wrong to turn away from a task if one could do it well.
The other side’s got an energy that our side en’t got. Comes from their certainty about being right. If you got that certainty, you’ll be willing to do anything to bring about the end you want. It’s the oldest human problem, Lyra, an’ it’s the difference between good and evil. Evil can be unscrupulous, and good can’t. Evil has nothing to stop it doing what it wants, while good has one hand tied behind its back. To do the things it needs to do to win, it’d have to become evil to do ’em.’
The question was, she thought, was the universe alive or dead?
knowledge is like water: it always finds gaps to leak through.
‘Revealing the truth in the way I’ve described it would not work. There are too many habits, ways of thought, institutions, that are committed to the way things are and always have been. The truth would be swept away at once. Instead we should delicately and subtly undermine the idea that truth and facts are possible in the first place. Once the people have become doubtful about the truth of anything, all kinds of things will be open to us.’
‘Spirit is what matter does.’
The sky full of stars seemed dead and cold, everything in it the result of the mechanical, indifferent interactions of molecules and particles that would continue for the rest of time whether Lyra lived or died, whether human beings were conscious or unconscious: a vast silent empty indifference, all quite meaningless.
She had become what she’d been trying to become ever since the beginning of this journey: invisible. Combined with the dowdy-depressed way of moving recommended by Anita Schlesinger, the veil made her actively resistant to other people’s interest. Men in particular walked in front of her as if she had no more substance or importance than a shadow, barged ahead at street crossings, took no notice at all. And little by little she began to feel a kind of freedom in this state.
