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‘Benares, also known as Varanasi or Gandhipur, Hindi Free State. Part of the Second Asian Co-prosperity Sphere after the Third Sino-Japanese War. Destroyed in the Indo-Soviet Muslim Republic Limited Exchange.’
Belief in one’s identity as a poet or writer prior to the acid test of publication is as naive and harmless as the youthful belief in one’s immortality . . . and the inevitable disillusionment is just as painful.
Besides, history viewed from the inside is always a dark, digestive mess, far different from the easily recognizable cow viewed from afar by historians.
Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings.
Example: the Chinese pictogram for ‘integrity’ is a two-part symbol of a man literally standing next to his word. So far, so good. But what does the Late English word ‘honesty’ mean? Or ‘Motherland’? Or ‘progress’? Or ‘democracy’? Or ‘beauty’? But even in our self-deception, we become gods.
‘Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.’
‘Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become.’
‘Words are the only bullets in truth’s bandolier. And poets are the snipers.’
be a true poet is to become God.
‘In twentieth-century Old Earth, a fast food chain took dead cow meat, fried it in grease, added carcinogens, wrapped it in petroleum-based foam, and sold nine hundred billion units. Human beings. Go figure.’
It was about the unthinking hubris of a race which dared to murder its homeworld through sheer carelessness and then carried that dangerous arrogance to the stars, only to meet the wrath of a god which humanity had helped to sire.
Most of us, I hope, have had some child or spouse or friend like Beatrice, someone who by his very nature, his seemingly innate goodness and intelligence, makes us uncomfortably conscious of our lies when we lie.
She had always felt that the essence of human experience lay not primarily in the peak experiences, the wedding days and triumphs which stood out in the memory like dates circled in red on old calendars, but, rather, in the unselfconscious flow of little things – the weekend afternoon with each member of the family engaged in his or her own pursuit, their crossings and connections casual, dialogues imminently forgettable, but the sum of such hours creating a synergy which was important and eternal.
any allegiance to a deity or concept or universal principle which put obedience above decent behavior toward an innocent human being was evil.
‘Considering that, all hatred driven hence. The soul recovers radical innocence And learns at last that it is self-delighting, Self-appeasing, self-affrighting, And that its own sweet will is Heaven’s will; She can, though every face will scowl And every windy quarter howl Or every bellows burst, be happy still.’
Elements of the TechnoCore had opposed Hyperion’s entry into the Hegemony for centuries. Gladstone explained that this was no longer in the interest of humanity and that a forcible annexation of Hyperion – under the guise of defending the Web itself – would allow more progressive AI coalitions in the Core to gain power. This shift of the power balance in the Core would benefit the Senate and the Web in ways not fully explained to me. The Ousters would be eradicated as a potential menace once and for all. A new era of Hegemony glory would begin.
So now the cat comes out of the bag, Holy Shiit!!!. So the hegemony underestimates the shrike?
Suffice it to say that I believe the Ousters have done what Web humanity has not in the past millennia: evolved. While we live in our derivative cultures, pale reflections of Old Earth life, the Ousters have explored new dimensions of aesthetics and ethics and biosciences and art and all the things that must change and grow to reflect the human soul.
This shows thhe importance of perspective. Left wing vs right wing, never judge a book by its cover, never trust media, it is only half the truth
Barbarians, we call them, while all the while we timidly cling to our Web like Visigoths crouching in the ruins of Rome’s faded glory and proclaim ourselves civilized.
The Ousters believed that the Time Tombs were artifacts from their future, the Shrike a weapon of redemption awaiting the proper hand to seize it. The Shrike Cult saw the monster as an avenging angel; the Ousters saw it as a tool of human devising, sent back through time to deliver humanity from the TechnoCore.
