Words&Dirt

“‘It is all right for a clock to run fast or slow at times, so long as it is calibrated against the sun, and set right.  The sun may come out only once in a fortnight.  It is enough.  A few minutes’ light around noon is all that you need to discover the error, and re-set the clock––provided that you bother to go up and make the observation.  My parents somehow knew this, and did not become overly concerned with my strange enthusiasms.  For they had confidence that they had taught me how to know when I was running awry, and to calibrate my behavior.’

‘Now I think I understand,’ Eliza said.  ‘It remains only to apply this principle to me, I suppose.’

‘If I come down in the morning to find you copulating on my table with a foreign deserter, as if you were some sort of Vagabond,’ Huygens said, ‘I am annoyed.  I admit it.  But that is not as important as what you do next.  If you posture defiantly, it tells me that you have not learned the skill of recognizing when you are running awry, and correcting yourself.  And you must leave my house in that case, for such people only go further and further astray until they find destruction.  But if you take this opportunity to consider where you have gone wrong, and to adjust your course, it tells me that you shall do well enough in the end.’

‘It is good counsel and I thank you for it,’ Eliza said.  ‘In principle.  But in practice I do not know what to make of this Bob.’

‘There is something that you must settle with him, or so it would appear to me,’ Huygens said.

‘These is something I must settle with the world.’

‘Then by all means apply yourself to it.  Then you are welcome to stay.  But from now on please go to your bedchamber if you want to roger someone.’”

––Quicksilver, by Neal Stephenson, pg. 715-6

“One of the great misunderstandings about evolved human nature is that people are sheep; that, because we evolved amid social hierarchy (true), we are designed to slavishly accept low status and blindly follow the leader (false).  People by nature seek the highest status they can attain, under the circumstances, and they accept leadership only so long as it seems to serve their interests.  When it doesn’t, they start to grumble.”

––Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, by Robert Wright, pg. 83