Martin Seng > Recent Status Updates

"Novels are all so full of nonsense and stuff; there has not been a tolerably decent one come out since Tom Jones, except The Monk; I read that t'other day; but as for all the others, they are the stupidest things in creation."

Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey (p. 27).

"I never read novels; I have something else to do."

Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey (p. 27).

They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force--nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others. They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got.

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness (pp. 8-9). Public Domain Books. Kindle Edition.

A world without caste would set everyone free.

Wilkerson, Isabel. Caste (Oprah's Book Club) (p. 388). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

In a world without caste, being male or female, light or dark, immigrant or native-born, would have no bearing on what anyone was perceived as being capable of...We would see that, when others suffer, the collective human body is set back from the progression of our species." (pg. 388)

A retired lieutenant colonel in the Marine Corps, Richard Westmoreland, came at it from the other side. He stood up and said that Erwin Rommel was a great general, but there are no statues of Rommel in Germany. “They are ashamed,” he said. “The question is, why aren’t we?”

Wilkerson, Isabel. Caste (Oprah's Book Club) (p. 340). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

“Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying,” James Baldwin once wrote, “because it so profoundly attacks one’s sense of one’s own reality.”

Wilkerson, Isabel. Caste (Oprah's Book Club) (p. 320). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Modern medicine has long sought to attribute the higher rates of disease in African-Americans relative to white Americans to genetics. But it turns out that sub-Saharan Africans do not have high rates of high blood pressure, diabetes, and heart disease, while African-Americans have the highest rates of those conditions of all ethnic groups in the United States. (Pg. 303)

"It is much harder to look into the darkness in the hearts of ordinary people with unquiet minds, needing someone to feel better than, whose cheers and votes allow despots anywhere in the world to rise to power in the first place."

Wilkerson, Isabel. Caste (Oprah's Book Club) (p. 267). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Under the spell of caste, the majors, like society itself, were willing to forgo their own advancement and glory, and resulting profits, if these came at the hands of someone seen as subordinate.

Wilkerson, Isabel. Caste (Oprah's Book Club) (p. 260). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

In fact, the most potent instrument of the caste system is a sentinel at every rung, whose identity forswears any accusation of discrimination and helps keep the caste system humming.

Wilkerson, Isabel. Caste (Oprah's Book Club) (p. 244). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

But Ebola, and potentially planet-wide catastrophes like it, as the world would discover beyond imagining six years later, have a way of reminding human beings that we are all indeed one species, all interwoven, more alike than different, more interdependent on one another than we might otherwise want to believe. Ebola had been merely a whispered forewarning of what was to come. (Pg. 201)

"A caste system is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of ancestry and often immutable traits, traits that would be neutral in the abstract but are ascribed life-and-death meaning in a hierarchy favoring the dominant caste whose forebears designed it..."

"What humanity learned...was that an ancient and hardy virus required perhaps more than anything, knowledge of its ever-present danger, caution to protect against exposure, and alertness to the power of its longevity, its ability to mutate, survive and hibernate until reawakened."

“The room is a double, of course,” he offered...She rubbed her forehead with her fingers. “There will be only one bed.” He frowned. “No, as I said it’s a double—” “It’s not. It won’t be. There will be only one bed, for sure.” He gave her a puzzled look. “I got the booking confirmation the other day. I can forward it to you if you want; it says that—” “It doesn’t matter what it says. It’s always one bed.”

Cringe

No more to wait the twilight of the moon in this sequestered vale of star and spire, for one eternal morning of desire passes to time and earthy afternoon. Here, Heraclitus, did you find in fire and shifting things the prophecy you hurled down the dead years; this midnight my desire will see, shadowed among the embers, furled in flame, the splendor and the sadness of the world.

The last light fades and drifts across the land—the low, long land, the sunny land of spires; the ghosts of evening tune again their lyres and wander singing in a plaintive band down the long corridors of trees; pale fires echo the night from tower top to tower: Oh, sleep that dreams, and dream that never tires, press from the petals of the lotus flower something of this to keep, the essence of an hour.