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the pitfall and the providence of knowing Nico de Varona was that he could not be readily forgotten, nor easily parted from. Missing him was like missing a severed limb. Never quite complete and never whole, though on occasion the vestigial aches proved helpfully informative.
Will someone think this of me ?
(If you do not know precisely where impossibility begins and ends, then of course it cannot constrain you.)
you do not know precisely where impossibility begins and ends, then of course it cannot constrain you.)
If power is a thing to be had, it must be capable of possession. But power is not any discrete size or weight. Power is continuous. Power is parabolic. Say you are given some power, which then increases your capacity to accumulate more power. Your capacity for power increases exponentially in relation to the actual power you have gained. Thus, to gain power is to be increasingly powerless. If the more power one has, the less one has, then is it the thing or are you?
Without Libby for a counterweight, there was nothing to temper his recklessness. Nothing to anchor him at all.
They could go on without her, of course, but the loss would surely prove significant given enough time. Slow internal bleeding, the toxification of a kidney. A tiny puncture somewhere in the constitution of an otherwise healthy lung.
“Do you think they know what it really means to love?” his projection-self mused aloud to him. “That it isn’t the simple joy of fondness, I mean. In fact it’s violent, destructive. It means to cut the heart out of your chest and give it to someone else.”
“To care at all about anyone or anything means inevitably to suffer. After all, what is compassion?”
“To feel the feelings of someone else is to exhaust yourself with double the pain,”
the outcome was that Tristan’s body loved dying and clearly wanted to do it more than Tristan’s brain thought he should.
LOL
Aviditas. Appetite. Aviditas vitae, the wanting to live. The hunger for it, which drove everything.
Nobody had ever asked her what she wanted before, not really. Not in any way that mattered. People wanted her, and that was quite another thing. Still, the reality was that wanting everything was dangerous, and that seeking power for the sake of power was futile. That there was probably such a thing as too much knowledge, because having even a little bit could make a person sick for want of more.
