Quicksilver

by Dean Koontz

Then there’s also the fact that to remain livable, the planet depends entirely on solar activity, which can decline and induce ice ages that last thousands of years, or which might one day flare violently enough to boil oceans and incinerate an entire hemisphere. Yet we humans have the hubris to think we can build eternal cities, stop the aging process, control the climate, and create utopia at the point of a gun.

“A lot of people these days are the opposite of what they say they are, and a lot of them probably don’t even realize it. They’re opposed to racism even as they act like racists. They’re opposed to fascism, even as they act like fascists. The world’s gone weird.”

When feverish politics and demented ideology entwine, those who are not well anchored to the beliefs that allow a civil society can be swept away, becoming part of the storm of madness that lays waste to everything.

To create good fiction, you have to like people enough to want to write about the human condition—but close yourself alone in a room for a large part of your life to get the job done right. It’s as if a wrestler forsook the ring in favor of getting his own head in an armlock and slamming himself into walls for a few hours every day.

Increasingly, everywhere in the world, people are not governed by those who wish to serve them, but ruled by those mad with power and determined to have total submission. They seem ever more fiercely inspired to greater ruthlessness. They call their hatred justice and see it as a virtue.

when those who govern us achieve absolute power, it always and everywhere leads to insanity and mass murder. Regardless of the numbers arrayed against us, we must resist. If we fail, then the sane among us will die in holocaust after holocaust, along with the madmen and madwomen who hate us for not sharing their delusions.”

since then, I’d been slowly robbed of my sense that I lived in a culture that still valued reason above unreason, civility above rote invective, which had once been the case. I wanted to be that naive nineteen-year-old kid crafting articles for Arizona! magazine and dreaming about writing a novel, but there was no way back to him. I

“It’s a package deal,” she said. “Free will and freedom itself require the problem of evil. People who are truly grown up, not just in years but also in their minds and hearts, understand that freedom can’t exist without the choice between right and wrong. To be free, we accept the problem of evil—and then resist it.”

I despaired that so many people, born with the knowledge of intuition and with the ability to reason, shaped their lives instead by sheer emotion. So many were swept away by boldfaced lies and swayed into currents of vicious fantasies, until they were so far from the shore of truth that they couldn’t even see it. They were everywhere in our time, controlled by those who taught them to fear what didn’t threaten them and receive with gladness those ideas and forces that would rob them of purpose, of meaning, of security—and sooner than later would take away their lives as well.

On even the most terrible occasions, good people find new strengths in themselves and rise to meet the ugliest of challenges. That is why I have hope that the worst things that we’ve foreseen can be forestalled or might never come to pass.