Howling Dark

Sad is like a big ocean, and you can’t breathe deep down. You can float on it, you can swim a little, but be careful. Grief is drowning. Grief is deep water.

To love is in part the attempt to become a creature worthy of love.

Always forward, always down, and never left or right.

Deep truths there may be, but none is deeper than this: Those lost to us do not return, nor the years turn back. Rather it is that we carry a piece of those lost to us within ourselves, or on our backs. Thus ghosts are real, and we never escape them.

But the ugliness of the world does not fade, and fear and grief are not made less by time. We are only made stronger. We can only float together on their tides, as otters do, hand in hand.

Funny thing about lessons: the idiot student thinks when he is given a little fact that he owns it—that two and two is always four no matter the circumstance. Just as it was not true for Orwell, it is not true for anyone. True lessons require not only knowing, but that the student practices his knowledge again and again. Thus knowledge becomes us, and we become more than the animal and the machine. That is why the best teachers are students always, and the best students are never fully educated. I had forgotten Gibson’s lesson for a moment, but stood a little straighter, shouldering as a pack my grief, my regret and self-loathing.

We are beasts of burden, Hadrian, we men. We struggle, and by that struggle are filled, and so define ourselves. That is the way.

A man is the sum of his memories—and more—he is the sum of all those others he has met, and what he learned from them.

We believe our fear destroyed by new bravery. It is not. Fear is never destroyed. It is only made smaller by the courage we find after. It is always there.

True lessons require not only knowing, but that the student practices his knowledge again and again. Thus knowledge becomes us, and we become more than the animal and the machine. That is why the best teachers are students always, and the best students are never fully educated.

You can be too free. That's chaos. To be truly free is to be like one who is adrift on a raft in the middle of the sea. One can sail anywhere in any direction. But what good is that by itself? You need a goal. You need constraints. You need to know which way to sail with whatever meagre supplies and abilities you have. The properly led life is one that draws the best path between who you could become, and who you are today. But this is accomplished by sacrificing certain freedoms. By making choices.

Joy is rare, a thing always of the now, existing without regard for time past or time future, and without depending on them.

I’ve lost control, I remember thinking. Somewhere in all this, I lost control. We are not always the authors of our own stories. Some of us never are. I think that is what we struggle for: the command of our own lives. We struggle against our families, against the state, against nature, against our own weakness. All that we might choose for ourselves, if only for a moment. If only once.

The rightly tuned mind does not deny its emotions, but floats with them. It accepts what it feels and so incorporates that feeling to itself. Thus the mind is not subject, but rules itself.

The world is filled with monsters: dragons in the wilderness, serpents in the garden. We must become monsters to fight them. Anyone who thinks otherwise has never really had to fight for anything.

The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain neutrality in a crisis.” “And if you had truly read Dante, Marlowe,” Kharn said, voice issuing once more from the drones around me. “You would know the deepest pit of hell is cold.

The poets say that one’s fears grow less with trial, that we become men without fear if tried enough. I have not found it to be so. Rather, on each occasion we are tested, we become stronger than our fears. It is all we can do. Must do. Lest we perish for our failings.

Who must stand when those whose duty is standing have gone? Those who can.

So love is not merely an emotion, but a vow made one to another. A vow renewed in each moment, until it hardly needs making at all. Or until it is not made, and death or deed does them part.

A door is many things,” Tanaran replied, speaking with the gravity of a proverb, “and once opened, many things may enter.

Sometimes we say things and do not understand them. In doing so, like Dante, we step off the path and enter into a dark and dangerous new world. There, our lies and wrong turnings swallow us like the sands of the desert. The world objects, or other people do, and we are left desolate and alone. But one need not know Truth to speak it. Truth is, and may be found as readily as disaster and by the same process. One need only put one’s finger on it, or one’s foot in it.

We are clay, shaped as the mountain is shaped: by the wind, the tramping foot, and the rain. By the world. The mark of other hands is on us, but we are ourselves alone.

Eternity is the chief quality of high art. Depending on no moment, such art belongs to every moment, and so takes us for a time from our time—allowing us to touch eternity for our fleeting instant.

There is no future,” the seer replied. “Everything already is. They have only to choose.

Soldiers don't end wars, not usually. War ends after the fighting is done, not during.

Ti abatre!” she yelled. I loved you. Loved. The hatch sealed. Our shuttle tore out past the static field and into the long and silent Dark.

Wars end,” I said coldly. “Wars end,” Kharn agreed, more coldly still. “War does not. And I am not much troubled what form our wars take. For over fifteen thousand years now your Empire has warred across the galaxy. I have watched your sun rise over half a billion worlds. And before that, before me, it was the same, only it was smaller.

Women are ever the judges of men, our jury and, though their hands seldom grasp the knife, our executioners.

For what I have done, there is no respite. Even in Death, you would pile scorn upon my grave.

Evil needs no explanation. You know it by its smell.