Babel

by R.F. Kuang

The whole of Europe has been feverish for reform for decades; they caught it from the French. We must simply make this a war of class instead of race. And this is, indeed, an issue of class.

‘But that’s the problem, you see. No one’s focused on how we’re all connected. We only think about how we suffer, individually. The poor and middle-class of this country don’t realize they have more in common with us than they do with Westminster.’

The original meaning of hope was ‘to desire’,

The future was only a vast expanse of black, and the only thing that gave him a shred of hope was the promise that someday, all this would end.

‘This world belongs to those who grasp.

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

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.

It was the first time he’d ever connected his brother’s abstract commitments to violence with its material effects. And they were awesome. Robin didn’t know if he feared him, or admired his sheer ability.

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.

They’d beaten the system. Why in God’s name did they want so badly to break it as well?

the obstacle was not the struggle, but the failure to imagine it was possible at all, the compulsion to cling to the safe, the survivable status quo.

Strikers in this country never won broad public support, for the public merely wanted all the conveniences of modern life without the guilt of knowing how those conveniences were procured.

‘They’re students,’ said Robin. ‘They don’t know what they want to do.’

And the grand accomplishment of the imperial project was to take only a little from so many places; to fragment and distribute the suffering so that at no point did it ever become too much for the entire community to bear. Until it did.

the prowar evangelists responded with the supposedly Christian argument that it would in fact be God’s work to expose the Chinese people to free trade.

‘Only it builds up, doesn’t it? It doesn’t just disappear. And one day you start prodding at what you’ve suppressed. And it’s a mass of black rot, and it’s endless, horrifying, and you can’t look away.’

If nothing else, surely, death meant peace.

Death is nature’s greatest good. Death is a better state. Death frees the immortal soul. Death is transcendence. Death is an act of bravery, a glorious act of defiance.

Language was just difference. A thousand different ways of seeing, of moving through the world. No; a thousand worlds within one. And translation – a necessary endeavour, however futile, to move between them.

‘That’s just what translation is, I think. That’s all speaking is. Listening to the other and trying to see past your own biases to glimpse what they’re trying to say. Showing yourself to the world, and hoping someone else understands.’

revolution is, in fact, always unimaginable. It shatters the world you know. The future is unwritten, brimming with potential. The colonizers have no idea what is coming, and that makes them panic. It terrifies them. Good. It should.

‘Robbery, butchery, and theft – they call these things empire, and where they create a desert, they call it peace.’