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In this warfare I was on both sides… …to a great extent I was now its reluctant victim rather than its willing tool. Yet it was by my own doing that habit had become so potent an enemy, because it was by my own will that I had reached the state in which I no longer wished to stay. Who can jusly complain when just punishment overtakes the sinner.

But the new will which had come to life in me and made me wish to serve you freely and enjoy you, my God, who are our only certain joy, was not yet strong enough to overcome the old, hardened as it was by the passage of time. So these two wills within me, one old, one new, one the servant of the flesh, the other of the spirit, were in conflict and between them they tore my soul apart.

The enemy held my will in his power and from it he had made a chain and shackled me. For my will was perverse and lust had grown from it, and when I gave in to lust habit was born, and when I did not resist the habit it became a necessity. These were the links which together formed what I have called my chain, and it held me fast in the duress of servitude.

I went to Carthage, where I found myself in the midst of a hissing cauldron of lust.


In the midst of my joy I was caught up in the coils of trouble, for I was lashed with the cruel, fiery rods of jealousy and suspicion, fear, anger, and quarrels.

What is there sweeter, what more perfect in this world, than those embraces which make one single being out of two and which give to both of them at the same moment the same thought, the same expectation and the same maddening pleasure, a joy which descends upon them like a celestial and devouring fire?

Hell of an end, drowning.

‘Those creatures are parasitic.'

But what revolution can ever succeed based on the traumatic use of psychological terror? Is it not time for the Crusades to come to an end? In this sunrise age of atomic energy the psychopathic descendants of the paladins, the mystical (and greedy) Knight Templars, have abandoned the sword and the certainty of faith for the underworld certainty of darkness—for the riskless anonymity of the plastic bomb!

The aim of poetry, Pushkin asserted, is poetry itself; the poet emerges from the creative spirit to show us the world and speak of things beyond our normal ken; he is the voice of time’s fleeting and intricate fullness.

Tell them that you know your shoes are broken and that there are pimples on your face, yes, and that you have buck teeth and a club foot, but that you don't care, for tomorrow they are playing Beethoven's last quartets in Carnegie Hall and at home you have Shakespeare's plays in one volume.

dire was the noise of conflict, overhead the dismal hiss of fiery darts in flaming volleys flew

If there is any lesson to be learned from Afghanistan after 2001 and subsequent interventions in the Middle East, it is that bombing and attempting to oust unpleasant and unfriendly regimes from power, without giving serious thought to the composition of civil government, state building and the strengthening of civil society, creates more problems than it solves.

A famous student of war, Mao Tse-tung, found wisdom in Sun-tzu's Art of War: "Know your enemy and know yourself, and you can fight a hundred battles without disaster." Mao wrote that war, the highest form of struggle, is the most difficult social phenomenon to understand cor-rectly. Yet man inevitably goes to war and when he does, his mistakes arise from ignorance of the enemy and himself.

The Imperial Army march into Manchuria was presented as an act of self-defense… North China and Inner Mongolia had to be controlled to guard Manchuria. Protecting these areas required further advances into the heartland of China.
This pattern of ever-expanding military operations confirmed a truism about international conflict: once started, a war escalates uncontrollably in the quest for elusive victory.

It was a viscous cycle: the weakness of democracy was one cause of the war, and the war further eroded freedom.

Before marriage… one should keep one’s eyes open, but after marriage, one should keep them half shut for fear of what he should see, it had always been her unbiased judgment, though she could not speak from the narrow experience which others experienced, for she was single and single-minded, no man looking at her a second time or perhaps even a first, her life being almost over and the battle perhaps already lost

p.375 Edward Granville Browne The Persian Revolution of 1905-1909

She had taken the girl simply because no one else would have her, and because she had the kind of moral mauvaise honte which makes the public display of selfishness difficult, though it does not interfere with its private indulgence. It would have been impossible for Mrs. Peniston to be heroic on a desert island, but with the eyes of her little world upon her she took a certain pleasure in her act.

The commander of the Army of Northern Virginia never aspired to be an innovator (unlike the man to whom he would eventually surrender, Ulysses
S. Grant, who understood that "War is progressive, because all the instruments and elements of war are progressive"). Whenever Robert E. Lee found a tactical trick that worked, he liked to keep using it until it broke.

The Minié rifle musket system had actually made its debut in the Crimea in 1854 in the form of both the Minié rifle and its British-made counterpart, the Pattern 1853 Enfield rifle musket, and from there, the rifle musket become the weapon of choice for both the British infantry in the Indian Mutiny in 1857 and the French and Austrian infantry in the North Italian War in 1859

Metafictional nonfiction

“It is hope that preserves life, not fear. Fear only preserves survival. You wanted to preserve art historically when poetry preserves history artistically. And what have you achieved? Losing the classical world and your love, what you wanted to preserve and what you believed you had started. You have fallen into what you intended to avoid, and you have behaved barbarously,

The book is speckled with such observations as

“The wind knows well that the sail is more powerful than the wall, even if the sea gives it more runway than the land. The rain knows well that thin grass is more powerful than a thick dam. And so, Attila's tent crackled with more wisdom than rage.”

Part II descriptions are insane

p.42 Fleeces of amethyst gas, ripped from green chaparral by the western blush, pirouetted gracelessly in their ascent toward the rust, where an oscillating breath vaporized old blood clots. In its insoluble sulfur, the turquoise-toned sky acted as broiler, which heightened the bitterness of that mired opal.

White supremacy does not demand deep conviction. Ruthless self interest, not sincere belief, is the signature feature of the doctrine. It finds its greatest expression, and most devastating effect, in the determination to state, live by, and act on the basis of ideas one knows are untrue when doing so will yield important benefits and privileges that one does not care to relinquish.

Vyasas Mahabharata boasts that 1.6 billion people died on the battlefield of Kurukshetra in northern India, an unimaginable death toll in premodernity designed to highlight the clash's catastrophic nature. The globe did not support this population until maybe 1900 CE, and humanity's bloodiest historical war to date, World War II, resulted in the deaths of about one-third that grotesque number.

Umm… excuse me?

South India, for instance, gets left out when we fixate on political dynasties but comes into focus when we explore trade routes and even fashion around 2,500 years ago. By surveying a mix of topics, we glimpse a layered picture of Indian experiences in different areas of the subcontinent during the dynamic sixth-fourth centuries BCE.

p.119

His café life and all the newspaper articles he had read without understanding them had turned him into a terrible ranter. He spouted the strangest political ideas. You need to have heard one of those malcontents, who have little understanding of what they read, haranguing an audience in some provincial taproom to have any conception of the degree of spite and idiocy Macquart displayed.

Feels like he’s writing an impressionist painting - a focus on lighting.