Fiction challenges us and works its miracles by placing us in the skin of another human being and teaching us empathy.
There, on that hill, his wife could be seen. She lay like a sleeping boulder, the air and toxins wearing away at her, her arms curled under her head. Maybe.
The rats represent our imprisonment. We are our own jailors, snared by base impulses, caught in a web of pleasure-seeking. The raft is our way out. Often, we will choose to drift downwind as Thor did, moving where instinct dictates. But we will also have to learn the crucial skill of sailing to windward, like David. This means exerting our willpower and overcoming our base impulses. It means learning to fight our way against our natural currents.
What if they were all playing the same part? What if each and every one of them was concealing the same doubts, none of them talking because they all felt so completely alone?
The lives lost are of less consequence than the spoils gained.
I bang my head on a pipe. We both laugh. “This thing was not built for this,” I say.
The stories we tell ourselves to explain our actions are rarely the true reasons behind those actions. The deeper we look into this, the more we realize how much of it is going on. I said in the last part of this series that we are not rational animals – we are rationalizing animals. We act first, and then we come up with a story for why we acted.
Another thing I noticed was how quickly the human brain paired causal events. “A” leads to “B.” We love to make that link, however tenuous.
There is no uprising, not really, there’s just a gradual leak. Just the people who know, who want out.
In every wreck and crash, there is some unseen man rubbing his hands with thoughts of tidy profits.
We shouldn’t go after these people for what they did. No. We should go after them for what they’re capable of doing. Before they do it again.
Don’t leave a man behind – especially not me. It’s.
And one day, my love, you will know it, too.
That always amazed him: how centuries of bare palms and shuffling feet could wear down solid steel.
Denial is the secret sauce in this town,’ he said. ‘It’s the flavor that holds all the other ingredients together. Here’s what I tell the newly elected: the truth is going to get out – it always does – but it’s going to blend in with all the lies.
The futurist and the vagabond are the same souls – one in body and the other in thought.
Were they dead forever, like Allison?
One departs and leaves behind the gift of sustenance, of life. They make room for the next generation. We are born, we are shadows, we cast shadows of our own, and then we are gone. All anyone can hope for is to be remembered two shadows deep.
The point isn’t that we should expect moral perfection, or that we can know all objective moral truths, only that our smugness should be kept in check and our judgment of past generations should be tempered by recognition of their progress and our own failings. Too often we seem to think that barbarians are in the past and that we’ve reached some pinnacle. I think the climbing never ends.
There’s the metallic odor of blood as solders with hope cry for a medic, soldiers without hope cry for their mommas, and soldiers with guns bring tears to the other side.
It was always over the doubt, the suspicion, that things weren’t as bad out there as they seemed. You’ve felt that, right? That we could be anywhere, living a lie?