Lucas > Recent Status Updates

"Il lavoro pesante, la cura della casa e dei bambini, le futili questioni coi vicini, il cinema, il calcio, la birra e soprattutto le scommesse, riempivano le loro menti. Tenerli sotto controllo non era difficile. Agenti della Psicopolizia s'infiltravano fra loro, diffondevano false notizie e individuavano quei pochi che davano l'impressione di poter diventare pericolosi, per poi eliminarli."

"Era proprio questa la sottigliezza estrema: essere pienamente consapevoli nell'indurre l'in- consapevolezza e diventare poi inconsapevoli della pratica ipnotica che avevate appena posto in atto."

"Già, terribile: se il Partito poteva manipolare il passato e stabilire che un avvenimento o l'altro non era mai accaduto, non era forse ancor più spaventoso della tortura o della morte? [...] 'Chi controlla il passato' diceva lo slogan del Partito 'controlla il futuro. Chi controlla il presente controlla il passato.' "

"Già, terribile: se il Partito poteva manipolare il passato e stabilire che un avvenimento o l'altro non era mai accaduto, non era forse ancor più spaventoso della tortura o della morte?"

"La cosa più terribile dei Due Minuti d'Odio era che nessuno era obbligato a prendervi parte ma, allo stesso tempo, era anche impossibile non farsi coinvolgere. [...] Trasformava il singolo individuo, anche contro la sua volontà, in un folle urlante con il volto contorto."

"For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead Kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward."

"Sometimes when she spoke of the strength of Urras, and the danger of bargaining with the strong from a position of weakness, he believed her."

"So, looking back on the last four years [apart], Shevek saw them not as wasted, but as part of the edifice that he and Takver were building with their lives. The thing about working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts."

"We came, she thought, from a great distance to each other. We have always done so. Over great distances, over years, over abysses of chance. It is because he comes from so far away that nothing can separate us. Nothing, no distances, no years, can be greater than the distance that's already between us, the distance of our sex, the difference of our being, our minds; that gap, that abyss which we bridge with a look."

"Little children are stoical. They cry over bumps, but they take the big things as they come, they don't whine like so many adults."

"You cannot take what you have not given, and you must give yourself. You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere."

"To him a thinking man's job was not to deny one reality at the expense of the other, but to include and to connect. It was not an easy job."

"The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognises no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself."

"The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognises no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself."

"This was probably why the letters went unsealed: you had no right to ask people to carry a message that they couldn't read."

"A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of [...] anyone doing needed work and doing it well, this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole."

Because our sense of time involves our ability to separate cause and effect, means and end. [...] Seeing the difference between now and not now, we can make the connection. And there morality enters in. Responsibility. To break a promise is to deny the reality of the past; therefore it is to deny the hope of a real future.

"The Odonian society called itself anarchistic, he said, but they were in fact mere primitive populists, whose social order functioned without an apparent government because there were so few of them and because they had no neighbour states. When their property was threatened by an aggressive rival, they would either wake up to reality, or be wiped out."

"If you can see a thing whole," he said, "it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives.... But close up, a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance - interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death."

This concern, feebly called "love of nature", seemed to Shevek to be something much broader than love. There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turring into humus. It was strange to see Takver take a leaf into her hand, or even a rock. She became an extension of it: it of her.