Matter (Culture, #8)

by Iain M. Banks

by measuring his own submerged mood, he could attempt to gauge the emotional tenor of a gathering like this.

he had learned to seek a sort of calmness in himself and then amplify what feeling was still there, and use that as his marker. So that if, after a little immersion in a social grouping, he still felt tense when he had no particular reason to, then the shared feeling amongst that group must be something similar.

greatness lay in doing the best you could with what you were given, and that greatness, that fixity of purpose, strength of resolve and decisiveness of action would be watched and noted by those far more powerful peoples

he was never one to dwell excessively on the past. Even having made a mistake, he took what he might learn from it and then dismissed it.

The truth was that he would almost welcome the opportunity to start again.

‘One hundred idiots make idiotic plans and carry them out. All but one justly fail. The hundredth idiot, whose plan succeeded through pure luck, is immediately convinced he’s a genius.’ It is an old proverb.”

He’d never been anywhere before where he was the only human. Only human on the planet; that was travelling. That was Wandering. That was exclusive. He’d like to see his fellow travellers beat that. He’d felt aloof for about a minute.

Fear lasted a week, anger a year and resentment a lifetime,

Life persists by always changing its form, and to stay in the pattern of one particular species or people is unnatural, and always deleterious.

There is a normal and natural trajectory for peoples, civilisations, and it ends where it starts, back in the ground.

those that weren’t like that were better behaved at least partly because they could afford to be.

Was it more honourable to starve than to steal? Many people would say yes, though rarely those who’d actually experienced an empty belly, or a child whimpering with its own hunger. Was it more honourable to starve than to steal when others had the means to feed you but chose not to, unless you paid with money you did not have? He thought not. By choosing to starve you became your own oppressor, keeping yourself in line, harming yourself for having the temerity to be poor, when by rights that ought to be a constable’s job.

With freedom from fear and wondering where your next meal was coming from or how many mouths you’d have to feed next year and whether you’d get sacked by your employer or thrown into jail for some minor indiscretion – with freedom from all that came choice, and you could choose a nice quiet, calm, peaceful, ordinary life and die with your nightshirt on and impatient relatives making lots of noise around you . . . Or you could end up doing something like this, and – however scared your body might feel – your brain rather appreciated the experience.

Sometimes life itself seemed like a sorry situation.