Gerhard’s Reviews > The Atheist in the Attic > Status Update

I turned to Isaac Asimov (whom I’d met for the first time at the banquet the year before), sitting on the other side and now pulling me toward him. With a large smile, wholly saturated with evident self-irony, he leaned toward me to say: “You know, Chip, we only voted you those awards because you’re Negro … !” (This was 1968; the term “black” was not yet common parlance.)

Is the ink itself, the sea itself, the Great Mind of God that carries the message? If not, then the message moves through the minds of men with all its terrors, with all its horrors, and I don’t know if we can bear that.

… If only I could free myself from hunger as easily as from desire! … I’ve seen Plato’s cups and tables, but not his cupness and his tableness! To yell about freedom from desire with your cock in your fist, is that enough to start a revolution? Perhaps not.

Some people think philosophers can’t know the passions. Ha! Might does not make right. Still, sometimes it even wins when on the side of compassion. And it gave me time to think: ‘One must speak the truth.’ Especially when there is nothing else one has to give.

What happens if there are no streets as such on which to greet each other … ? Is that a good enough reason to think that China and India, Africa and the Americas, whether at pole or equator, are simply uncivilized because they are different? Or that anyone from them, unto their greatest and most powerful rulers, is not worthy to clean up our shit?

Washing your 'smallclothes' and the 'water closet' are among the highest emblems of civilisation ... Could this be covert SF? Anything's possible with Delany.

Delany writing about Spinoza? How cool is that!