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February 13 - February 17, 2025
Civilization is like sunshine. Spread it about, and the world blooms with culture, innovation, and fraternity. But focus it all upon one spot, and mankind scorches the earth like a ray from a magnifying glass.
“He was a bad captain.” “But a worse bird,”
You are their historian.” “I am not!” she said sharply. She wagged her bone comb at him. “I am a recorder. A recorder takes things down. A historian makes things up.”
History is a love letter to tyrants written in the blood of the overrun, the forgotten, the expunged!”
“It is not cynical to admit that the past has been turned into a fiction. It is a story, not a fact. The real has been erased. Whole eras have been added and removed. Wars have been aggrandized and human struggle relegated to the margins. Villains are re-dressed as heroes. Generous, striving, imperfect men and women have been stripped of their flaws or plucked of their virtues and turned into figurines of morality or depravity. Whole societies have been fixed with motive and vision and equanimity where there was none. Suffering has been recast as noble sacrifice! Do you know why the history of
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We are, each of us, a multitude. I am not the man I was this morning, nor the man of yesterday. I am a throng of myself queued through time. We are, gentle reader, each a crowd within a crowd.
“I’m pretty sure that’s what hope is. Stubbornness. Refusing to go down.
But when we remove our hand from the machine, it dies.”
You just feel guilty. But guilt is not a duty, Tom, no matter how devoted you are to it,”
The gaps in a library are like footprints in the sand: They show us where others have gone before; they assure us we are not alone.
If pencils were all we had, I suspect there would be far fewer books.
