Before Lord Anomander Rake the crowd in the street shrank back, all thoughts of festivity swept away.
Since when did ethics and morality become weapons of submission?
He is brave, this one, and not given to complaint no matter the hardship. But he weeps for dying horses.
To live simply was to evade the worries that came with complexity. This end was achieved at the expense, alas, of intelligence.
In all that is to come, think on forgiveness. Hold to it, but know too that it must not always be freely given. Sometimes forgiveness must be denied.
Even order needs freedom, lest it solidify and becomes fragile.
The doc began waving a medical Pentracorder over Hadrian. “Oh dear! Fractured ego, sprained confidence, dislocated immodesty, and broken bravado! Can this even be cured? Extensive long-term damage is the sad prognosis, alas.
The more pain you deliver to others, the more shall be visited upon you. You sow your own misery, and because of that whatever sympathy you might rightly receive is swept away.
Why, Lieutenant, are you suggesting that there are forces in the Affiliation opposed to humans evolving into post-consumers, thus freeing themselves from all the pressures of conformity, rabid acquisitiveness, endlessly destructive expansion, pointless competition, and the miserable strictures of hierarchies based on who has the most wealth?
We revert to childlike behavior as a defense mechanism against being reasonable, or even intelligent. You know, name calling, spewing hate, desperately lashing out in defense of our most cherished but utterly indefensible attitudes and opinions. It’s all part of being quasi-sentient biologicals forever teetering on the edge of suicidal extinction. Stupidity sucks, you know.
Madam, let’s not be so crass. We’re Terrans, after all, forever virtuous, eternally right in all matters of comportment, wise and clever, honest and forthright, inclined to modest errors in judgement while maintaining our heartfelt desire to do good and therefore entirely capable of sweeping under the carpet all the genocidal horrors studding our history in the galaxy.
A soul made weary longed for sordid ends. But a soul at its end longed for all that was past, and so remained trapped in a present filled with regrets.
The stupid knew better than to look into their wake. The wise could not help it and so suffered greatly. This was humanity’s great divide, and many a time, Damisk had envied the stupid and all the obstinate incomprehension he saw in their eyes and faces. In the end, it takes wisdom to scream.
Longing. Look for it, in every crowd, and you will find it. Paint it any colour you choose: grief, nostalgia, melancholy, remembrance, these are but flavours, poetic reflections.
We define adulthood as a solemn recognition of responsibility. We make the distinction when considering the acts of children, and will argue that they were not responsible, because their brains have not yet matured to make the proper connection between an act and its consequences.
Look upon him who does not waver from his cause, no matter how insipid and ultimately irrelevant, and you shall find in him the meaning of dull-witted. The bhok’aral could have stared into my eyes forever, for there was no intelligence behind them. Behind his eyes, I mean. It was proof of my superiority that I found distraction elsewhere.
Anomander sighed, and then said, ‘Sympathy is not a weakness, Ivis. To grieve for the loss of innocence is to remind yourself that yours is not the only life in this world.
I am the Bearer of Fener’s grief,′ he intoned in a whisper. ‘I am my vow incarnate. This, and in all that follows. We are not yet done here. I am not yet done. Behold, I yield to nothing.
All it needs,’ she said, memories clouding her mind, ’is the breaking of one rule, one law. A breaking that no one then calls to account. Once that happens, once the shock passes, every law shatters. Every rule of conduct, of proper behaviour, it all vanishes. Then the hounds inside each and every one of us are unleashed.
To stand in the heart of Dragnipur, to stand above the very Gate of Darkness, this was, for Anomander Rake, a most final act. Perhaps it was desperation. Or a sacrifice beyond all mortal measure.
Wisdom grows by stripping away beliefs, until the last tether is cut, and suddenly you float free.