thoughts from Octavian Nothing

The world is indeed the house of the strong; and we are indeed a terrible animal. We are granted gifts of intellect almost god-like, to raise ourselves out of the burrow and ditch; and yet cannot enjoy these excellences, for no sooner does one establish the work of his hands and plow the field, than some other, deranged with greed, sweeps in to plunder or to expand their own holdings through act of law or canny dealing.
We are a foul animal poisoned in all its springs and motivations, a beast of snarling ferity that parades itself in silks and calleth itself an angel, while gnawing upon cattle, seizing upon fowls, ransacking the earth and the seas, clawing our neighbor to provide for ourselves small trinkets to lay in our nests where we curl in bloated slumber.
Do posess hope for the future? I may reply, I do have hope, in that I do not believe our race shall perish. We shall, in two hundred years, in two thousand, yet be flourishing, the strong oppressing the weak, telling tales of why they must; we shall yet be starving each other, maiming, whipping, killing, raping, sacking, burning, scorning, despoiling, savaging, and congratulating ourselves on our superior nature.
Do not speak glibly of virtue. Nothing shall change- nothing- so long as each individual awaits preferment rather than embodying beneficience in himself; so long as we wait upon the edicts of a government ruled by invested and interested men looking to their private purses; so long as we idle in expectation that all shall be healed, and that we shall somehow be stopped in our career of plunder by an eighteen-hundred-year-old mummy, scarred with the wounds of torture, falling out of the sky or stumbling out of the desert, eyes filled with the tears that we should weep ourselves. I(451)

The form (limbs, markings, fur) of Deus omnipotens is as yet unclear to me. Aristotle maintaineth that God hath no shape, being but the limit of heaven; Epicurus claimeth that it appeareth to be a man in shape, though one of such great blessedness and incorruption that it is incomprehending and indifferent to the plight of mortals. Pythagorus taught that God is a number; Xenophanes that is it a sphere, passionless and consubstantial with all things; Parmenides that it is but the confluence of earth and fire. (452)


The term libery proliferated so many meanings that, in the end, it had none. It meant at once the right to declare independence from the Crown and the right to adhere to the Crown; to some freedom to own slaves, and to others, freedom from slavery. Cast back and forth in relentless cannonades, it became evacuate of meaning.
And thus, one of the great paradoxes...Liberty was at once a quality so abstract as to be insubstantial- and yet so real in its manifestations that it was worth dying for.


History is not a pageant arrayed for our delectation.
We are all always gathered there. We have come to the riverside to fight or to flee. We are gathered at the river, upon those shores, and the water is always moving, and the president of the United States always gesticulates silently above us, his image on the water. Nothing will cease. Nothing will stop. We ourselves are history.
The moment is always now. (