Most Humans lose access to old memories as they acquire new ones. They know how to speak, for instance, but they don’t recall learning to speak. They keep what experience has taught them – usually – but lose the experience itself. We.
Human competitiveness and territoriality were often at the root of particularly horrible fashions in oppression.
Intelligence is ongoing, individual adaptability. Adaptations that an intelligent species may make in a single generation, other species make over many generations of selective breeding and selective dying. Yet intelligence is demanding. It is misdirected by accident or by intent, it can foster its own orgies of breeding and dying.
Entropy, the idea that the natural flow of heat is from something hot to something cool – not the other way – so that the universe itself is cooling down, running down, dissipating its energy.
The weak can overcome the strong if the weak persist. Persisting isn’t always safe, but it’s often necessary.
Why is the universe? To shape God. Why is God? To shape the universe.
We caused the problems: then we sat and watched as they grew into crises.
Yet God has been here all along, shaping us and being shaped by us in no particular way or in too many ways at once like an amoeba – or like a cancer. Chaos.
People are setting fires to get rid of whomever they dislike from personal enemies to anyone who looks or sounds foreign or racially different. People are setting fires because they’re frustrated, angry, hopeless. They have no power to improve their lives, but they have the power to make others even more miserable. And the only way to prove to yourself that you have power is to use it.
We’re survivors, Len. You are. I am. Most of Georgetown is. All of Acorn was. We’ve been slammed around in all kinds of ways. We’re all wounded. We’re healing as best we can. And, no, we’re not normal. Normal people wouldn’t have survived what we’ve survived. If we were normal we’d be dead.
A tree Cannot grow In its parents’ shadows.
You can’t come back all at once any more than you can leave all at once. It takes time. After a while, though, things will fall into place.
We’re an adaptable species,” she said, refusing to be stopped, “but it’s wrong to inflict suffering just because your victim can endure it.” “Learn.
There are times when I wish I believed in hell – other than the hells we make for one another, I mean.
I might not have believed this if a Human had said it. Humans said one thing with their bodies and another with their mouths and everyone had to spend time and energy figuring out what they really meant. And once we did understand them, the Humans got angry and acted as though we had stolen thoughts from their minds.
How could sane people like the ones he had left behind in Phoenix do such a thing – or, how could they let insane people gain control of devices that could do so much harm? If you knew a man was out of his mind, you restrained him. You didn’t give him power.
Time passed. Kevin and I became more a part of the household, familiar, accepted, accepting. That disturbed me too when I thought about it. How easily we seemed to acclimatize.
You want to know how moral she is?” His tone made me frown. “What do you mean?” “If she chases me any harder, she and I will wind up playing a scene from that Bible she reads. The scene between Potiphar’s wife and Joseph.
Human beings fear difference,” Lilith had told him once. “Oankali crave difference. Humans persecute their different ones, yet they need them to give themselves definition and status. Oankali seek difference and collect it. They need it to keep themselves from stagnation and overspecialization.
It’s too easy to follow bad but attractive leaders, embrace pleasurable but destructive habits, ignore looming disaster because maybe it won’t happen after all – or maybe it will only happen to other people. That kind of thinking is part of what it means to be adolescent.