Words&Dirt

“Conceptions of possibility, progress, free movement and infinitely diversified opportunity have been suggest by modern science.  But until they have displaced from imagination the heritage of the immutable and the once-for-all ordered and systematized, the ideas of mechanism and matter will lie like a dead weight upon the emotions, paralyzing religion and distorting art.  When the liberation of capacity no longer seems a menace to organization and established institutions, something that cannot be avoided practically and yet something that is a threat to conservation of the most precious values of the past, when the liberating of human capacity operates as a socially creative force, art will not be a luxury, a stranger to the daily occupations of making a living.  Making a living economically speaking, will be at one with making a life that is worth living.  And when the emotional force, the mystic force one might say, of communication, of the miracle of shared life and shared experience is spontaneously felt, the hardness and crudeness of contemporary life will be bathed in the light that never was on land or sea.”

––Reconstruction in Philosophy, by John Dewey, pg. 211

“‘It is the choice that is important.’  He rearranged the curtains more symmetrically.  ‘These people control their terrors.  They can choose to sample them, repeat them or avoid them.  That is not the same as living beneath the volcano when you’ve just invented the wheel, or wondering whether your levee will break and drown your entire village.  Again, this applies to all societies which have matured beyond the age of barbarism.  There is no great mystery here.’

‘But the Culture is so insistent in its utopianism,’ Ziller said, sounding, Kabe thought, almost bitter.  ‘They are like an infant with a toy, demanding it only to throw it away.’

Kabe watched Ziller puff at his pipe for a while, then walked through the cloud of smoke and sat trefoil on the finger-deep carpet near the other male’s couch.

‘I think it is only natural, and a sign that one has succeeded as a species, that what used to have to be suffered as a necessity becomes enjoyed as a sport.  Even fear can be recreational.’

Ziller looked into the Homomdan’s eyes.  ‘And despair?’

Kabe shrugged.  ‘Despair?  Well, only in the short term, as when one despairs of completing a task, or winning at some game or sport, and yet later does.  The earlier despair makes the victory all the sweeter.’

‘That is not despair,’ Ziller said quietly.  ‘That is temporary annoyance, the passing irritation of foreseen disappointment.  I meant nothing so trivial.  I meant the sort of despair that eats your soul, that contaminates your senses so that every experience, however pleasant, becomes saturated with bile.  The sort of despair that drives you to thoughts of suicide.’

Kabe rocked back.  ‘No,’ he said.  ‘No.  They might hope to have put that behind them.’”

––Look to Windward, by Iain M. Banks, pg. 114-5