Commander Ponds Quotes

Along with the lives and memories of hundreds of marid. Rain spirits who danced in the clouds to shatter themselves upon the ground, seeping deep into the earth to join aquifers. Shy stream guardians, darting through quiet ponds and underground springs with webbed hands and turtlelike beaks. Merpeople with shimmering skin and seaweed hair, caught in the nets of humans, hunted and speared. For every lethal marid—ones like Sobek and others who commanded sharks, who lived on the blood of the drowned and warred with the daevas—there seemed twenty gentle ones, protectors not hunters, content with seeing to the tiny aquatic creatures who called their realms home and urging their life-giving waters to sate the surrounding lands and make them flourish.

Which brings me back to Ecclesiastes, his search for happiness, and mine. I spoke in chapter 4 about my first meeting, as a student, with Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneersohn, the Lubavitcher Rebbe. As I was waiting to go in, one of his disciples told me the following story. A man had recently written to the Rebbe on something of these lines: ‘I need the Rebbe’s help. I am deeply depressed. I pray and find no comfort. I perform the commands but feel nothing. I find it hard to carry on.’ The Rebbe, so I was told, sent a compelling reply without writing a single word. He simply ringed the first word in every sentence of the letter: the word ‘I’. It was, he was hinting, the man’s self-preoccupation that was at the root of his depression. It was as if the Rebbe were saying, as Viktor Frankl used to say in the name of Kierkegaard, ‘The door to happiness opens outward.’23 It was this insight that helped me solve the riddle of Ecclesiastes. The word ‘I’ does not appear very often in the Hebrew Bible, but it dominates Ecclesiastes’ opening chapters. I enlarged my works: I built houses for myself, I planted vineyards for myself; I made gardens and parks for myself and I planted in them all kinds of fruit trees; I made ponds of water for myself from which to irrigate a forest of growing trees. I bought male and female slaves and I had homeborn slaves. Also I possessed flocks and herds larger than all who preceded me in Jerusalem. Also, I collected for myself silver and gold and the treasure of kings and provinces. (Ecclesiastes 2:4–8) Nowhere else in the Bible is the first-person singular used so relentlessly and repetitively. In the original Hebrew the effect is doubled because of the chiming of the verbal suffix and the pronoun: Baniti li, asiti li, kaniti li, ‘I built for myself, I made for myself, I bought for myself.’ The source of Ecclesiastes’ unhappiness is obvious and was spelled out many centuries later by the great sage Hillel: ‘If I am not for myself, who will be? But if I am only for myself, what am I?’24 Happiness in the Bible is not something we find in self-gratification. Hence the significance of the word simchah. I translated it earlier as ‘joy’, but really it has no precise translation into English, since all our emotion words refer to states of mind we can experience alone. Simchah is something we cannot experience alone. Simchah is joy shared.

When we got to the base of the hills, we slowed our horses to a walk. “The Block commands us to locate some water for our horses to drink. The Block suspects there is a small pond near the summit of the hills.” Winter giggled. “Why don’t you chill with all that ‘The Block’ stuff?” I looked at Winter as though her words had wounded me to the depths of my soul. “The Block is eternal. The Block is everywhere. The Block has no chill.” “You know your girlfriend’s pretty nice, but I’m not,” said Zainab with a scowl. “Stop talking about The Block or I will beat you.” I held up my hands. “Quiet, please. I am receiving a revelation from The Block. It says that … what’s that? Ah, it says that it needs privacy and does not wish me to disturb it.” I heaved a sigh. “I believe that is the final communication I will receive from The Block for quite some time.” The others in the group laughed,

Namely, the Indians had access to a valuable interior commodity that commanded high prices in Europe: beaver skins. Universally desired by the wealthy in their target markets, beaver skins quickly became the commercial link between New England and the Old World. At the same time, the transatlantic trade created symbiotic economic bonds between the Native Americans and the early colonists. Rather than becoming alarmed at sharing territory, as the colonists seemed ill equipped to venture inland, the Indians looked at the English settlements as trading posts. Adept at hunting beaver over the ages as part of their own winter clothing, the Native Americans had a competitive advantage in procuring a valuable commodity that the colonists were willing to trade for. Tracking the remote beaver in distant ponds and rivers was a labor-intensive task that the colonists left to experts.