More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
October 29 - December 24, 2021
And they did not expect commands to be arbitrary, so they had no practice in disobeying them.
he had felt not that he was doing all the things he did, but that they were doing him. He had been in other people’s hands. His own will had not acted. It had had no need to act. It was his own will that had started it all, that had created this moment and these walls about him now.
“It costs less,” Shevek repeated meditatively. He said the words the way a paleontologist looks at a fossil, the fossil that dates a whole stratum.
“Educated men certainly would understand that, these officers are ignorant.” “But is it only bigots, then, who are allowed to go out into the cosmos?”
The sister planet shone down upon them, serene and brilliant, a beautiful example of the improbability of the real.
their landscape was like a crude sketch in yellow chalk compared with this fulfilled magnificence of life, rich in the sense of history and of seasons to come, inexhaustible.
He was unbearably restless, restless yet rigid, a woodrasp of a man.
Sabul turned away, scowling with what appeared to be an endemic, not a specific rage.
His gentleness was uncompromising; because he would not compete for dominance, he was indomitable.
He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream.
all the operations of capitalism were as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, and as unnecessary.
where were the hands, the people who made? Out of sight, somewhere else. Behind walls. All the people in all the shops were either buyers or sellers.
where there’s property there’s theft?” “To make a thief, make an owner; to create crime, create laws.
In the night one of them cried out aloud, dreaming. The other one reached his arm out sleepily, muttering reassurance, and the blind warm weight of his touch outweighed all fear.
unless the past and the future were made part of the present by memory and intention, there was, in human terms, no road, nowhere to go,
umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus.
“Why do you people cling to your shame?”
It was easy to share when there was enough, even barely enough, to go round. But when there was not enough? Then force entered in; might making right; power, and its tool, violence, and its most devoted ally, the averted eye.
They owned him. He had thought to bargain with them, a very naïve anarchist’s notion. The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.
To him a thinking man’s job was not to deny one reality at the expense of the other, but to include and to connect. It was not an easy job.
he saw her face clearly; white and lined, with the dead, hostile stare of weariness.
To be among so many people, so immense a crowd, thousands marching together, filling all the side streets as well as the broad thoroughfare down which they marched, was frightening, but it was exhilarating too. When they sang, both the exhilaration and the fear became a blind exaltation; his eyes filled with tears. It was deep, in the deep streets, softened by open air and by distances, indistinct, overwhelming, that lifting up of thousands of voices in one song.
he now understood why the army was organized as it was. It was indeed quite necessary. No rational form of organization would serve the purpose. He simply had not understood that the purpose was to enable men with machine guns to kill unarmed men and women easily and in great quantities when told to do so. Only he still could not see where courage, or manliness, or fitness entered in.
As he started down, the air grumbled a little and he felt a strangeness: no jolt, no tremor, but a displacement, a conviction that things were wrong. He completed the step he had been making, and the ground was there to meet his foot. He went on; the road stayed lying down. He had been in no danger, but he had never in any danger known himself so close to death. Death was in him, under him; the earth itself was uncertain, unreliable. The enduring, the reliable, is a promise made by the human mind.
The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal. The variety seeking of the spectator, the thrill hunter, the sexually promiscuous, always ends in the same place. It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell. Outside the locked room is the landscape of time, in which the spirit may, with luck and courage, construct the fragile, makeshift, improbable roads and cities of fidelity: a landscape inhabitable by human beings. It is not until an act occurs within the landscape of the past and the future
...more
an old adviser, Ferdaz, who liked to stick his oar in even when it steered the boat off the course he wanted.
“For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.”
