Arm of the Sphinx (The Books of Babel, #2)

by Josiah Bancroft

“The rules of engagement,” Captain Tom Mudd explained to the irate captain who’d been duped by this ruse, “were invented by men who would benefit most from them.” This philosophical pronouncement might’ve commanded more respect had it not been delivered by a man wearing a frilly bonnet.

“Which history?” “Which? The history that happened, I suppose,” he said, laughter in his voice. She was not at all amused. “History has nothing to do with what happened.”

History is a love letter to tyrants written in the blood of the overrun, the forgotten, the expunged!” Her former decorum had fallen away entirely

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.

The tradition among libraries of boasting about the number of volumes in their collection is well established, but surely, it is not aggregation that makes a library; it is dissemination. Perhaps libraries should bang on about how many volumes are on loan, are presently off crowding nightstands, and circulating through piles on the mantel, and weighing down purses. Yes, it is somewhat vexing to thread through the stacks of a library, only to discover an absence rather than the sought-after volume, but once the ire subsides, doesn’t one feel a sense of community? 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.

The Sphinx wishes to distinguish himself from Marat, who seems bent on destroying the records of our race for reasons I cannot fathom but which I presume are ignoble and shortsighted. Yet is it any better to preserve the canon of human thought by making it inaccessible and unfriendly to all? One man destroys; the other man hides. The difference seems academic.

They were like the daily crockery of a public house: They’d been broken and glued back together so many times it was a miracle they retained their shape, a miracle they could still be filled and hold anything inside of them.