Babel

by R.F. Kuang

Violets cast into crucibles,

History isn’t a premade tapestry that we’ve got to suffer, a closed world with no exit. We can form it. Make it. We just have to choose to make it.’

A translation machine. And once you fail them, you’re out.’

for all of his professed allegiance to revolution, for his commitment to equality and to helping those who were without, he had no experience of true poverty at all.

it’s better to be a servant of the Empire, brutal coercion and all, than to resist. Because it’s safe. Because it’s stable, because it lets them survive. And that’s how they win, brother. They pit us against each other. They tear us apart.’

‘But realize this, brother. You fly no one’s flag. You’re free to seek your own harbour. And you can do so much more than tread water.’

She was gorgeous, gorgeous, she made Aphrodite herself jealous

Languages had to be lived to be understood, and Oxford was, after all, the opposite of real life.

But the future, vague as it was frightening, was easily ignored for now; it paled so against the brilliance of the present.

If he pretended never to notice, and if they succeeded in whatever it was they wanted, then the fragile equilibrium of their lives at Babel would not be disturbed. Then they could maintain the thin veneer of deniability Robin had lived with for years. Reality was, after all, just so malleable – facts could be forgotten, truths suppressed, lives seen from only one angle like a trick prism, if only one resolved never to look too closely.

Hampstead, Oxford, Babel – had all been a miraculous enchantment, but he had broken the rules – had broken the spell – and soon the glamour would fall away and he would be back among the poor, the sick, the dying, the dead.

that the generosities of the university should not demand his constant, unswerving loyalty to the Crown and its colonial projects, and if it did, then that was a peculiar form of bondage he had never agreed to.

He was fine with resistance as long as it didn’t hurt him. And the contradiction was fine, as long as he didn’t think too hard about it, or look too closely. But spelled out like this, in such bleak terms, it seemed inarguable that far from being a revolutionary, Robin, in fact, had no convictions whatsoever.

that this was not about Hermes, nor about Ramy or Victoire, but about self-preservation.

Hide, Ramiz. Show the world what they want; contort yourself into the image they want to see, because seizing control of the story is how you in turn control them.

for a player to believe his own stories, to be blinded by the applause.

Outside, he dazzled. Inside, he felt like a fraud, a traitor.

that history was malleable, that all that mattered were decisions of the present.

‘Survival’s not that difficult, Birdie.’ Ramy’s eyes were very hard. ‘But you’ve got to maintain some dignity while you’re at it.’

‘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 is a nation mired in superstition and antiquity, devoid of the rule of law, hopelessly behind the West on every possible register. It is a nation of semi-barbarous, incorrigibly backwards fools—’

Robin Swift was an asset, and assets should be undyingly grateful that they were treated well at all.

He had danced for years on the razor’s edge of these truths, had remained there as a means of survival, a way to cope, unable to accept either side fully because an unflinching examination of the truth was so frightening that the contradictions threatened to break him.

if he only backed down; if he only made his apologies, bent to authority, and returned to naive, ignorant luxury.

romanization of father contained the same letters for death in English.

‘We’re all foreigners returning from a foreign country on a ship with a dead white man.’ This statement excluded Letty, but no one corrected her. ‘There is no world in which you go to prison and the rest of us walk free. You see this, right? Either we protect you, or we damn ourselves.’

that even a four-horse chariot could not catch a word once uttered, that the spoken word was irrevocable. But this seemed like a great trick of time. It did not seem fair that such a minuscule action could have such reverberating consequences.

Could you intend a murder if you couldn’t remember wanting it? But what kind of question was that? What was the blasted point of sorting through whether he’d desired his father’s death or not, when his ruined corpse was incontrovertibly, irreversibly sinking to the bottom of the ocean?

Awake and asleep, he examined the same moment from a thousand different angles until he truly no longer knew what had happened.

one of them was allowed to break down at a time, but not all of them at once, for the duty of the saner heads was to talk the mad one down.

When it came down to it, they simply could not think of themselves as anything else but students, couldn’t imagine a world where they did not belong to Babel. Babel was all they knew. Babel was home.

the promise of a return to the normal and familiar was what kept them calm, a shared delusion of stability that kept them from going mad.

But it’s not really about whether we were happy at Babel. It’s about what our conscience demands.’

it would seem a great paradox, the fact that after everything they had told Letty, all the pain they had shared, she was the one who needed comfort.

‘Do you really believe that?’ Robin whispered. ‘Or is it a lie you conjure so you can sleep at night?’

‘Tùsĭhúbēi.* The rabbit dies, and the fox grieves, for they’re animals of a kind.’

And he wondered if there would ever be a day that came when all this was unnecessary, when white people would look at him and Anthony and simply listen, when their words would have worth and value because they were uttered, when they would not have to hide who they were, when they wouldn’t have to go through endless distortions just to be understood.

And the answer would elude and disturb him, for it tiptoed around a complicated tangle of love and jealousy that ensnared them all, for which they had no name or explanation, a truth they’d only been starting to wake up to and now, after this, would never acknowledge.

Grief suffocated. Grief paralysed. Grief was a cruel, heavy boot pressed so hard against his chest that he could not breathe. Grief took him out of his body, made his injuries theoretical.

Shall we leave the East in the hands of corrupt denigrates who would squander their riches on silks and concubines?’ Sterling leaned forward. His blue eyes glittered. ‘Or shall we lead? Britain hurtles towards a vast, glowing future. You could be part of that future. Why throw it all away?’

That was no favour, Sterling. It was cruelty. Don’t ask me to love my master.’

That’s one good thing about you. When you’re beaten, you don’t cry.

Restraint. Repression. Had he not practised this his entire life? Let the pain slide off you like raindrops, without acknowledgment, without reaction, because to pretend it is not happening is the only way to survive.

and he hated to see himself reflected in that cold, dead face. No, not dead – reanimated, haunting; Professor Lovell leered at him, and behind him, opium burned on Canton’s shores, hot and booming and sweet.

still suggested an idyllic scholar’s life, where ideas were abstract entertainments that could be bandied about without consequences.

You were either a part of this institution, one of the bricks that held it up, or you weren’t.

Power did not lie in the tip of a pen. Power did not work against its own interests. Power could only be brought to heel by acts of defiance it could not ignore. With brute, unflinching force. With violence.

‘I want it to crumble.’

‘I want it to burn.’

Letty? Don’t you see? No, she didn’t see. She found their principles absurd, the height of foolishness. She thought the Empire inevitable. The future immutable. And resistance pointless.