Damon’s Reviews > The Luminaries > Status Update

He possessed a fault common to those of high intelligence, which was that he tended to regard the gift of his intellect as a license of a kind, by whose rarefied authority he was protected, in all circumstances, from ever behaving ill. He considered his moral obligations to be of an altogether different class than those of lesser men, and so rarely felt shame or compunction, except in very general terms.

When he was with her, a pure and liquid adoration filled the chambers of his heart. Reason is no match for desire: when desire is purely and powerfully felt, it becomes a kind of reason of its own.

He pampered her in all the ways that he was able, but became very hurt when she did not notice the efforts he had made -- and when she did not notice his hurt, he became angry. His anger was both unsustainable and unsustaining; it did not nourish him, as men are sometimes nourished by their own rage. Instead the emotion only diminished him, leaving him all the emptier -- and, therefore, all the more ready to love.

How silently the world revolves, when one is brooding, and alone.

A belief for him was a thirst. Whenever the subterranean waters of his mind were disturbed, he plunged inward, and struggled downward -- kicking strongly, purposefully, as if he wished to touch the mineral depths of his own dark fantasies, as if he wished to drown.

For although a man is judged by his actions, by what he has said and done, a man judges himself by what he is willing to do, by what he might have said, or might have done -- a judgement that is necessarily hampered, not only by the scope and limits of his imagination, but by the ever-changing measure of his doubt and self-esteem.

For one could not put a price upon a treasure, just as one could not purchase mana, and one could not make a bargain with god. Gold was not a treasure -- this he knew. Gold was like all capital in that it had no memory: it's drift was always onward, away from the past.