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“There is a tribe at the Cape of Good Hope,” Jacob ventures, “called the Basutos, who credit a crocodile may kill a man by snapping his reflection in the water. Another tribe, the Zulus, avoid dark pools lest a ghost seize the reflection and devour the observer’s soul.”
’Twould bend company rules on private trade, aye, but the trees what survive cruel winds are those what do bend, eh, are they not?” “A tidy metaphor does not make a wrong thing right.”
He makes a bridge for it with his left, which the insect obligingly crosses. Jacob repeats the exercise several times. The ladybird believes, he thinks, she is on a momentous journey, but she is going nowhere. He pictures an endless sequence of bridges between skin-covered islands over voids, and wonders if an unseen force is playing the same trick on him …
“Ros being ‘dew,’ and marinus meaning ‘ocean,’ rosmarinus is ‘dew of the ocean.’ Old people say that rosemary thrives—grows well—only when it can hear the ocean.”
Orito pictures the human mind as a loom that weaves disparate threads of belief, memory, and narrative into an entity whose common name is Self, and which sometimes calls itself Perception.
What prophet of commerce in, let us say, the Year 1700 could have foreseen a time when commoners consume tea by the bucket and sugar by the sack? What subject of William and Mary could have predicted the “need” of today’s middling multitudes for cotton sheets, coffee, and chocolate? Human requisites are prone to fashion; and, as clamoring new needs replace old ones, the face of the world itself changes …
Naming, thinks Jacob, even in ridicule, gives what is named substance.
the easiest way to control others is to give them the illusion of free will.
“The truth of a myth, Your Honor, is not its words but its patterns.”
“A short sleep,” the captain advises himself, “may dispel the fog.”
Power is a man’s means, thinks the captain, of composing the future …
quote Goethe: ‘Our friends show us what we can do; our enemies teach us what we must do.’
“One may make most sense of all when one makes no sense at all.”
‘Knowledge exists only when it is given.…’
