Babel

by R.F. Kuang

He greatly enjoyed Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, though he could not say the same of the poems by her less talented husband, whom he found overly dramatic.

damn robin but hes right

It should have been distressing. In truth, though, Robin found it was actually quite easy to put up with any degree of social unrest, as long as one got used to looking away.

So the poor went hungry that night, but at least the lights were lovely.

‘It was so easy to forget,’ he said. ‘The cards it’s built on, I mean – because when you’re at Oxford, in the tower, they’re just words, just ideas. But the world’s so much bigger than I thought—’ ‘It’s just as big as we thought,’ Ramy said. ‘It’s just that we forgot the rest of it mattered. We got so good at refusing to see what was right in front of us.’

‘But I’m a sceptic. I think decolonization must be a violent process.’

decolonization is not a metaphor amirite

Why, he wondered, did white people get so very upset when anyone disagreed with them?

‘I think we all got good at choosing not to think about certain things.’