Tag: life

G’Kar:

There are things in the universe billions of years older than either of our races. They are vast, timeless…and if they are aware of us at all, it is as little more than ants. And we have as much chance of communicating with them as an ant has with us. We know; we’ve tried. And we’ve learned that we can either stay out from underfoot, or be stepped on.

Catherine Sakai:

That’s it? That’s all you know?

G’Kar:

Yes. They are a mystery. And I am both terrified and reassured to know that there are still wonders in the universe—that we have not yet explained everything. Whatever they are, Miss Sakai, they walk near Sigma Nine-Five-Seven, and they must walk there…alone.

— “Mind War” – Babylon 5, Season 1 (1994)

Marcus Cole:

I am a Ranger! We walk in the dark places no others will enter! We stand on the bridge, and no one may pass! We live for the One! We die for the One!

— “Grey 17 Is Missing” – Babylon 5, Season 3 (1996)

Into [European feudalism’s] backward-looking, ritualistic, rigidly structured life, the growing economic forces at work in the new towns brought stress. As the trade in surplus goods increased, merchants found that the raw materials they needed were controlled by feudal lords who neither understood nor cared about commerce. Transportation of goods through their lands was both dangerous and costly. Alternative sites for commerce had to be found and the towns seemed to offer the best alternative.

Free from the feudal bonds of the countryside, the urban dweller was envied by his peasant counterpart. ‘Stadtluft machtfrei’ (the air of the town makes you free), they said in eleventh-century Germany, because after a statutory period of residence there a serf would automatically become a freedman. Soon enough the townspeople, with their economic strength and their craftsmen supported by the general surplus, began to demand from kings and emperors those statutes which would reinforce their freedom in law. Merchants who had no place in the feudal pyramid of serf, knight, priest and king now had the money to buy social status.

As the aristocrats began to commute their serfs’ dues from service to cash, money began to weaken the old social structure. Ambition began to express itself in outward show. ‘It is too easy to change your station now’ complained the Italian, Thomasin of Zirclaria. ‘Nobody keeps his place!’ The word ‘ambition’ took on common usage for the first time.

— The Day the Universe Changed, p. 31

Emphasis mine.

In the Minoan days of Crete an unprecedented flowering of learning and the arts was cultivated by Athena. Dynamic architecture rose to four stories, pillared and finely detailed, yet always infused with the serenity of the Goddess. Patiently Her mortals charted the heavens, devised a calendar, kept written archives. In the palaces they painted striking frescoes of Her Priestesses and sculpted Her owl and ever-renewing serpent in the shrine rooms. Goddess figures and their rituals were deftly engraved on seals and amulets. Graceful scenes were cast in relief for gold vessels and jewelry. Athena nurtured all the arts, but Her favorites were weaving and pottery.

Long before there were palaces, the Goddess had appeared to a group of women gathering plants in a field. She broke open the stems of blue-flowered flax and showed them how the threadlike fibers could be spun and then woven. The woof and warp danced in Her fingers until a length of cloth was bom before them. She told them which plants and roots would color the cloth, and then She led the mortals from the field to a pit of clay. There they watched Athena form a long serpent and coil it, much like the serpents coiled around Her arms. She formed a vessel and smoothed the sides, then deftly applied a paste made from another clay and water. When it was baked in a hollow in the earth, a spiral pattern emerged clearly. The image of circles that repeat and repeat yet move forward was kept by the women for centuries.

As the mortals moved forward, Athena guided the impulse of the arts. She knew they would never flourish in an air of strife, so She protected households from divisive forces and guarded towns against aggression. So invincible was the aura of Her protection that the Minoans lived in unfortified coastal towns. Their shipping trade prospered and they enjoyed a peace that spanned a thousand years. To Athena each family held the olive bough sacred, each worshipped Her in their home. Then quite suddenly the flowering of the Minoans was slashed. Northern barbarians, more fierce than the Aegean Goddess had ever known, invaded the island and carried Athena away to Attica. There they made her a soldier.

— Lost Goddesses of Early Greece, pp. 99-101

To modern sensibility the fact of a story’s being allegorical makes it less likely to be an accurate depiction of real events. Modern writers try to drain their texts of meaning, to flatten them out in order to make them more naturalistic.

To the ancients, who believed that every single thing that happens on earth is guided by the motions of the stars and planets, the more a narrative brought out these ‘poetic’ patterns, the truer and more realistic the text.

So, it may be tempting to view the journeys into the Underworld made by Hercules, Theseus, and Orpheus as mere metaphor. It is true that on one level their adventures represent the beginning of humanity’s coming to terms with the reality of death. But, as we try to imagine the adventures underground of Hercules, Theseus, and the others, we must not conceive of them as to be purely internal or mental journeys, such as we might contemplate today. When they battled with monsters and demons, they were confronting forces that infested their own beings, the corrupted human flesh, the dark labyrinth of the human brain. But they were also fighting real monsters of flesh and blood.

— The Secret History of the World, Chapter 7

Brandon Castellano:

…We can reduce costs, reduce manpower.

Don Raphael Aiuppo:

I’ve always measured wealth in the number of people loyal to me!

— “Squeeze” – Wiseguy, Season 1 (1987)

Michael Garibaldi:

He’s lying. I can tell.

Jeffrey Sinclair:

Everyone lies, Michael. The innocent lie because they don’t want to be blamed for something they didn’t do, and guilty lie because they don’t have any other choice. Find out why he’s lying; the rest will take care of itself.

— “And the Sky Full of Stars” – Babylon 5, Season 1 (1994)

Although Vikings did not shy from diplomacy, force was inevitable. Everything conditioned them toward achieving material goals, from religion to fame. Odin, their god of war, combined fierceness and heroism on the battlefield with cunning and treachery, and so it is no surprise that stratagems were a key part of Viking warfare. All hope for future renown was conditioned on what one did while alive; good deeds, unlike in Christian beliefs, were not a prerogative for salvation. The Viking lived in a world where chaos was the reverse side of order and where order could be imposed only by physical confrontation.

— Barbarians, Marauders, and Infidels, p. 143

For a thirteenth-century [C.E.] baron life indoors was always a poor substitute for outdoor activity. Despite the great fireplace and the screens blocking the draughts, the hall was frequently damp, dark, and cheerless during the long winter. The high cost of candles and the inefficiency of rush-lights drove most to bed soon after nightfall. Life in winter was only enjoyable when a crowd gathered for a great feast, or when a minstrel’s song, and the welcome warmth of the fire, added to the pleasure of supper on a cold evening. Under the prevailing harsh and uncomfortable conditions it is little wonder that the medieval poets, and even the sober chroniclers, sang the joys of spring with such lyric intensity. It gave them back light, warmth, and their freedom of movement.

— A Baronial Household of the Thirteenth Century, p. 36

…The country [of tenth century Castile] is high and bare, though it may have been more thickly wooded in the early Middle Ages than it is today….

…Large tracts of land were still untamed, roamed by wild pigs and cattle, wolves and probably bears…. They were roamed also by voluntary or involuntary drop-outs from human society such as hermits or outlaws….

It was a rough, stark world where status mattered, justice was uncomplicated, and war never far away.

— The Quest for El Cid, chapter 5

This sounds like a great setting for a fantasy roleplaying game.

King Osric:

There comes a time, thief, when the jewels cease to sparkle. When the gold loses its luster. When the throne room becomes a prison. And all that is left…is a father’s love for his child.

— “Conan the Barbarian” (1982)

…And it’s that which made the Jedi so cool in the first three [Star Wars] movies. Not that they could kill their foes with all sorts of neat tricks, spinning light sabers, or nifty force powers. It was that they operated on a plane above the normal, physical struggle of the conflict of the day, towards the more universal conflicts that are at the heart of every person. In the realm of the Jedi, why you were doing something was vastly more important than what you did….

— Light Saber Duels – Trollsmyth

The martial arts sensei is very much like a Zen master; he has not sought out the student, nor does he prevent him from leaving. If the student wants guidance in climbing the steep path to expertise, the instructor is willing to act as guide—on the condition that the student be prepared to take care of himself along the way. The instructor’s function is to delegate to the student exactly those tasks which he is capable of mastering, and then to leave him as much as possible to himself and his inner abilities. The student may follow in the footsteps of his guide or choose an alternate path—the choice was his.

The instructor first teaching technique (waza) without discussing its significance; he simply waits for the student to discover this for himself. If the student has the necessary dedication, and the teacher provides the proper spiritual inspiration, then the meaning and essence of the martial arts will finally reveal themselves to him.

— Zen in the Martial Arts, p. 5

“Winning fistfights means being good at fistfighting,” Susan said. “Being tough means looking at something ugly, and saying ‘That’s ugly; I’ll have to find a way to deal with it.’ And doing so.”

— Robert B. Parker, Sixkill

From the last Spenser novel completed before the author’s death. 🙁

“Chaos claims the unwary or the incomplete. A true man may flinch away its embrace, if he is stalwart, and he girds himself with the armour of contempt.” — Gideon Ravenor, The Spheres of Longing

— His Last Command

[The Odyssey] is not a poem about then and there, but now and here. The poem describes the inner geography of those who hear it. Every aspect of it is grand metaphor. Odysseus is not sailing on the Mediterranean but through the fears and desires of a man’s life. The gods are not distant creators but elements within us: their careless pitilessness, their flaky and transient interests, their indifference, their casual selfishness, their deceit, their earth-shaking footfalls….

— Why Homer Matters, Chapter 1

Inside the great keep of the castle was the required minimum of living-space: a great hall; provision in the basement for supplies; a private chamber, and perhaps a solar, for the lord and lady; a chapel; a well; and privies. In large castles, the number of chambers and guardrooms would of course be multiplied to provide for a larger garrison, as well as for the household. The great hall was the centre of all social activity and the common meeting place. It usually occupied almost the full expanse of the main floor, with a dais at one end, a fireplace in one wall, and screens or “spurs” to block the draughts of cold air from the entry doors. The bed-chamber of the lord of the castle and his wife was normally on the floor above the great hall and provided a relatively private spot.

— A Baronial Household of the Thirteenth Century, p. 24

In the Middle East, carpets have generally been too highly prized to be routinely trodden underfoot: unrolling one’s prayer mat is central to daily worship, while taking off one’s shoes is a sign of respect and correspondingly, as we have seen on the news, flinging one’s shoes at someone is a powerful insult in the Middle East. Rugs cordon off a place of higher value to protect it from pollution, and their various uses carry memory traces of the nomadic makers. Carried into the countryside for picnics, and spread out beneath trees or beside springs and pools, oriental carpets become mobile pictures and ornaments as well as furnishings. They also transform somewhere that is outside into something domestic, as it were inside. When laid on rooftops on summer nights, for example, they move the salon or coffee room upstairs in order for the household members to enjoy the cooler temperatures: as recalled by Naguib Mahfouz in The Cairo Trilogy, for example, and Hanan al-Shaykh in her short story, ‘The Persian Carpet’.

There are humbler carpets; but the humbler variety also does duty as a prayer mat, a portable precinct where someone can be contained, separated from whatever is happening around. In an essay on the poetics of the carpet, the Italian art historian Sergio Bettini rejects any thought of decoration and insists instead on the architectural function of rugs laid out on the ground: for the nomadic societies who make them, carpets demarcate their home. Not in the manner of a fence or a wall, but to build the dwelling itself. ‘The true carpet,’ he writes, ‘…isn’t a garment that covers the body or a drape that adorns a house; for the simple reason that it is itself the house.’

A carpet can be hung as well; in function it can be used like an arras, a curtain, and a coverlet. Bettini censures those who blur these categories, but he is too severe: if the carpet rolls out the space of home on a plane, the nomadic tent institutes it in three dimensions by means of hangings, awnings, covers, canopies, which are also worked with intricate patterns. The fabrics create distinctive spaces, sometimes public, sometimes private. The Kaaba itself is screened by richly patterned curtains. But fabrics are suspended to screen private places of intimacy too—nooks, pavilions, alcoves. Shahrazad is depicted with the Sultan on the frontispiece of the Galland edition illustrated in Amsterdam in 1728-30 [C.E.] in such a bed-tent, and her sister Dunyazad, when her presence is invoked, is present but screened behind a curtain. Cleopatra—so famously delivered to Caesar rolled up in a rug, according to Plutarch’s entertaining account—was not improvising on the uses of carpets, unusual as her mode of delivery has generally seemed to modern readers. The carpet carves a private world for its user; it is a kind of portable sanctum, a more than usually splendid mobile home.

— Stranger Magic, pp. 66-67

Emphasis mine.

…The wine of ancient Greece did not taste anything like the wine we know today. It was thick like syrup, and was often heavily flavored with honey, thyme, aloes, and juniper berries. Most people today would find it awful. Even then they had to water it down to avoid toxic intoxication….

— The Hero and the Goddess, p. 109

A dojo is a miniature cosmos where we make contact with ourselves—our fears, anxieties, reactions, and habits. It is an arena of confined conflict where we confront an opponent who is not an opponent but rather a partner engaged in helping us understand ourselves more fully. It is a place where we can learn a great deal in a short time about who we are and how we react in the world. The conflicts that take place inside the dojo help us handle conflicts that take place outside. The total concentration and discipline required to study martial arts carries over to daily life. The activity in the dojo calls on us to constantly attempt new things, so it is also a source of learning—in Zen terminology, a source of self-enlightenment.

— Zen in the Martial Arts, p. 4