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THE PARADOX: 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?
other people’s view of her said far more about them than it ever did about her.
people had a maddening tendency to be precisely what they were in the most unpredictable, erratic way possible.
“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?”
We can’t help clinging to our origins, Callum said. The past always seems more ordered, Rhodes. It always seems clearer, more straightforward, easier to understand. We have a craving for it, that sense of simplicity, but only an idiot would ever chase the past, because our perception of it is false—it was never that the world was simple. Just that in retrospect it could be known, and therefore understood.
“Zealotry is an odd flavor on you. Very unsettling.” “I’m not a zealot. I’m—” A pause to consider. “Inspired.” “A lovely word for madness,” Callum remarked smoothly, “but still, madness nonetheless—” “Better mad than drunk,”
“Can you even love anyone?” Absurd. What did he think love was—pain? Was that all anyone believed love to be? That if it didn’t hurt, if no one pined, then it was as if it did not exist and had never existed—a tree brought down in the forest with no one to hear it fall?
This was just the world. You trusted people, you loved them, you offered them the dignity of your time and the intimacy of your thoughts and the frailty of your hope and they either accepted it and cared for it or they rejected it and destroyed it and in the end, none of it was up to you. This was just what you got. Heartbreak was inevitable. Disappointment assured.