Empire Of The Sun Quotes

Give me a shot to remember And you can take all the pain away from me A kiss and I will surrender The sharpest lives are the deadliest to lead A light to burn all the empires So bright the sun is ashamed to rise and be And I'm in love with all of those vampires So you can leave like the sane abandoned me

Adults...struggle desperately with fiction, demanding constantly that it conform to the rules of everyday life. Adults foolishly demand to know how Superman can possibly fly, or how Batman can possibly run a multibillion-dollar business empire during the day and fight crime at night, when the answer is obvious even to the smallest child: because it's not real.

And this is the east shore?" Sadie asked. "You said something about that in London--my grandparents living on the east shore." Amos smiled. "Yes. Very good, Sadie. In ancient times, the east bank of the Nile was always the side of the living, the side where the sun rises. The dead were buried west of the river. It was considered bad luck, even dangerous, to live there. The tradition is still strong among... our people." Our people?" I asked, but Sadie muscled in with another question. So you can't live in Manhattan?" she asked. Amos's brow furrowed as he looked across at the Empire State Building. "Manhattan has other problems. Other gods. It's best we stay separate.

Empires and churches are born under the sun of death.

Released, I am a spear in the hands of the sun.

Spectacle is the sun that never sets over the empire of modern passivity

The sun never set on the British empire, an Indian nationalist later sardonically commented, because even God couldn’t trust the Englishman in the dark

A cruel queen does not mean an unsuccessful one. Under her guidance, Kenettra changed from a glittering gem into a clouded stone, and her empire became one to rule all others, a darkness that stretched from sun, to sea, to sky. - The Empire of the Wolf, translation by Tarsa Mehani

A system is corrupt when it is strictly profit-driven, not driven to serve the best interests of its people.

Night will always be a time of fear and insecurity, and the heart will sink with the sun.

We each have our lives... What matters is not how long those lives last, but what we do with them.

My memory is to the world as a drawing is to the photograph. Imperfect. More perfect. We remember what we must, what we choose to, because it is more beautiful and real than the truth.

The sun's glow had given way to a brilliant twilight that colored the great mountains with violet and orange rivers.

It is a mistake to believe we must know a thing to be influenced by it. It is a mistake to believe the thing must even be real.

Your fussy nursemaid of a wyvern is fine, by the way. I don't know how you wound up with a sweet thing like that for a mount, but he's content to sprawl in the sun on the foredeck. Can't say it makes the sailors particularly happy - especially cleaning up after him." Find somewhere safe, she'd told Abraxos. Had he somehow found the queen? Somehow known this was the only place she might stand a chance of surviving?

There will come a time of fire and night, when enemies rise and empires fall, when the stars themselves begin to die.

The man who hopes for the future delays its arrival, and the man who dreads it summons it to his door.

Who said the British empire was gone?! When I travel around the world and see and hear the English language everywhere, I know that the empire on which the sun never sets, is still alive. It never died. It continued to exist, but in a different shape, its language, English, which has become the global language.

The Nelazan believed that there was beauty in darkness, and that the daylight was more profane. They saw the stars as the Thousand Eyes of Trell watching them. The sun was the single, jealous eye of Trell’s brother, Nalt. Since Nalt only had one eye, he made it blaze brightly to outshine his brother. The Nelazan, however, were not impressed, and preferred to worship the quiet Trell, who watched over them even when Nalt obscured the sky.

Constantine saw with his own eyes the trophy of a cross of light in the heavens, above the sun, and bearing this inscription: conquer by this. At the sight, he himself was struck with amazement and his whole army also.

Jim knew that he was awake and asleep at the same time, dreaming of the war and yet dreamed of by the war.

So I pulled the sun screen down and squinted and put the throttle to the floor. And kept on moving west. For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the oldfield pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. IT is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and see the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you hear that thar's gold in them-thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go.

After a few minutes Jim was forced to admit that he could recognize none of the constellations. Like everything else since the war, the sky was in a state of change. For all their movements, the Japanese aircraft were its only fixed points, a second zodiac above the broken land.

The flies festered over the bodies, in some way aware that the war had ended and determined to hoard every morsel of flesh for the coming famine of the peace.

Any government that places profit before people is pure evil.

MY MOTHER GETS DRESSED It is impossible for my mother to do even the simplest things for herself anymore so we do it together, get her dressed. I choose the clothes without zippers or buckles or straps, clothes that are simple but elegant, and easy to get into. Otherwise, it's just like every other day. After bathing, getting dressed. The stockings go on first. This time, it's the new ones, the special ones with opaque black triangles that she's never worn before, bought just two weeks ago at her favorite department store. We start with the heavy, careful stuff of the right toes into the stocking tip then a smooth yank past the knob of her ankle and over her cool, smooth calf then the other toe cool ankle, smooth calf up the legs and the pantyhose is coaxed to her waist. You're doing great, Mom, I tell her as we ease her body against mine, rest her whole weight against me to slide her black dress with the black empire collar over her head struggle her fingers through the dark tunnel of the sleeve. I reach from the outside deep into the dark for her hand, grasp where I can't see for her touch. You've got to help me a little here, Mom I tell her then her fingertips touch mine and we work her fingers through the sleeve's mouth together, then we rest, her weight against me before threading the other fingers, wrist, forearm, elbow, bicep and now over the head. I gentle the black dress over her breasts, thighs, bring her makeup to her, put some color on her skin. Green for her eyes. Coral for her lips. I get her black hat. She's ready for her company. I tell the two women in simple, elegant suits waiting outside the bedroom, come in. They tell me, She's beautiful. Yes, she is, I tell them. I leave as they carefully zip her into the black body bag. Three days later, I dream a large, green suitcase arrives. When I unzip it, my mother is inside. Her dress matches her eyeshadow, which matches the suitcase perfectly. She's wearing coral lipstick. "I'm here," she says, smiling delightedly, waving and I wake up. Four days later, she comes home in a plastic black box that is heavier than it looks. In the middle of a meadow, I learn a naked more than naked. I learn a new way to hug as I tighten my fist around her body, my hand filled with her ashes and the small stones of bones. I squeeze her tight then open my hand and release her into the smallest, hottest sun, a dandelion screaming yellow at the sky.

After a heavy snowfall one night in early December the snow formed a thick quilt from which the old man's face emerged like a sleeping child's above an eiderdown. Jim told himself that he never moved because he was warm under the snow.

In the trenches between the burial mounds hundreds of dead soldiers sat side by side with their heads against the torn earth, as if they had fallen asleep together in a deep dream of war.

To His Coy Mistress Had we but world enough and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime. We would sit down, and think which way To walk, and pass our long love’s day. Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide Of Humber would complain. I would Love you ten years before the flood, And you should, if you please, refuse Till the conversion of the Jews. My vegetable love should grow Vaster than empires and more slow; An hundred years should go to praise Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze; Two hundred to adore each breast, But thirty thousand to the rest; An age at least to every part, And the last age should show your heart. For, lady, you deserve this state, Nor would I love at lower rate. But at my back I always hear Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near; And yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast eternity. Thy beauty shall no more be found; Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound My echoing song; then worms shall try That long-preserved virginity, And your quaint honour turn to dust, And into ashes all my lust; The grave’s a fine and private place, But none, I think, do there embrace. Now therefore, while the youthful hue Sits on thy skin like morning dew, And while thy willing soul transpires At every pore with instant fires, Now let us sport us while we may, And now, like amorous birds of prey, Rather at once our time devour Than languish in his slow-chapped power. Let us roll all our strength and all Our sweetness up into one ball, And tear our pleasures with rough strife Thorough the iron gates of life: Thus, though we cannot make our sun Stand still, yet we will make him run.

For all his youth, he seemed to be willing himself to the edge of an adult despair.

Atrocity is writ by quiet men in council chambers over crystal glasses of cool water. Strange little men with ashes in their hearts. Sans passion, sans hope… sans everything. Everything but fear.

Alternative Anthem. Put the kettle on Put the kettle on It is the British answer to Armageddon. Never mind taxes rise Never mind trains are late One thing you can be sure of and that’s the kettle, mate. It’s not whether you lose It’s not whether you win It’s whether or not you’ve plugged the kettle in. May the kettle ever hiss May the kettle ever steam It is the engine that drives our nation’s dream. Long live the kettle that rules over us May it be limescale free and may it never rust. Sing it on the beaches Sing it from the housetops The sun may set on empire but the kettle never stops.

They drove south with the night falling soft and blue around them. Away to their right the Front Range stood out against the last red ribbon of the dying day like ramparts of some dread empire. Through the open windows came the smell of cooling earth and sage long baked by the sun.

All around them were the bodies of dead Chinese soldiers. They lined the verges of the roads and floated in the canals, jammed together around the pillars of the bridges. In the trenches between the burial mounds hundreds of dead soldiers sat side by side with their heads against the torn earth, as if they had fallen asleep together in a deep dream of war.

Neither is it the acme of excellence if you fight and conquer and the whole Empire says, “Well done!

Far back in the mists of ancient time, in the great and glorious days of the former Galactic Empire, life was wild, rich and largely tax free. Mighty starships plied their way between exotic suns, seeking adventure and reward among the furthest reaches of Galactic space. In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri. And all dared to brave unknown terrors, to do mighty deeds, to boldly split infinitives that no man had split before--and thus was the Empire forged. ...In these enlightened days, of course, no one believes a word of it.

In the talcum on the floor around him he could see the imprints of his mother's feet. She had moved from side to side, propelled by an over-eager partner, perhaps one of the Japanese officers to whom she was teaching to tango. Jim tried out the dance steps himself, which seemed far more violent than any tango he had ever seen, and managed to fall and cut his hand on the broken mirror.

Augustine once said that if there are such things as the past and the future, they do not exist as such but are only the present in their own times. The past, he says, exists only in memory and the future only in expectation. Neither is real.

You're not like other Wasps." "Aren't I?" Aagen smiled, but it was a painful smile. "No doubt you've killed my kinsmen by the score." "A few," Salma allowed. "Well, next time you shed my kinden's blood, think on this: we are but men, no less nor more than other men, and we strive and feel joy and fail as men have always done. We live in the darkness that is the birthright of us all, that of hurt and ignorance, only sometimes... sometimes there comes the sun." He let the bowl fall from his fingers to the floor, watching it spin and settle, unbroken.

His mother and father were agnostics, and Jim respected devout Christians in the same way that he respected people who were members of the Graf Zeppelin Club or shopped at the Chinese department stores, for their mastery of an exotic foreign ritual. Besides, those who worked hardest for others, like Mrs. Philips and Mrs. Gilmour and Dr. Ransome, often held beliefs that turned out to be correct.

Already a sizable traffic jam blocked the Bund. Once again the crush and clutter of Shanghai had engulfed its invaders.

But the truth is poor poetry

To his surprise he felt a moment of regret, of sadness that his quest for his mother and father would soon be over. As long as he searched for them he was prepared to be hungry and ill, but now that the search had ended he felt saddened by the memory of all he had been through, and of how much he had changed. He was closer now to the ruined battlefields and this fly-infested truck, to the nine sweet potatoes in the sack below the driver's seat, even in a sense to the detention center, than he would ever be again to his house in Amherst Avenue.

The dead were buried above ground, the loose soil heaped around them. The heavy rains of the monsoon months softened the mounds, so that they formed outlines of the bodies within them, as if this small cemetery beside the military airfield were doing its best to resurrect a few of the millions who had died in the war. Here and there an arm or a foot protruded from the graves, the limbs of restless sleepers struggling beneath their brown quilts.

The world’s soft the way the ocean is. Ask any sailor what I mean. But even when it is at its most violent, Hadrian . . . focus on the beauty of it. The ugliness of the world will come at you from all sides. There’s no avoiding it. All the schooling in the universe won’t stop that.

I was headed out down a long bone-white road, straight as a string and smooth as glass and glittering and wavering in the heat and humming under the tires like a plucked nerve. I was doing seventy-five but I never seemed to catch up with the pool which seemed to be over the road just this side of the horizon. Then, after a while, the sun was in my eyes, for I was driving west. So I pulled the sun screen down and squinted and put the throttle to the floor. And kept on moving west. For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you hear that thar's gold in them-thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go. It was just where I went.

As the ancient sea was cruel, so too is that blacker sea, vaster by far, that fills the void between the suns like water.

That’s what an empire is,” he said, “an orchestrator of gravity, a sun around which all weaker things spin.

The sun had been so much brighter then, in his memories. It had shone every day.

The practiced ear could hear the calculation behind every word like fishhooks in the mind.

A single death, wrote one ancient king, is a tragedy, but a genocide can only be understood through statistics.

I will go home and much of what I will have to say will seem strange to the people of my village... But I will teach and work and things will happen, slowly and swiftly. At times it will seem that nothing changes at all... and then again... the sudden dramatic events which make history leap into the future. And then quiet again. Retrogression even. Guns, murder, revolution. And I even will have moments when I wonder if the quiet was not better than all that death and hatred. But I will look about my village at the illiteracy and disease and ignorance and will not wonder long. And perhaps... perhaps I will be a great man... I mean perhaps I will hold on to the substance of truth and find my way always with the right course... and perhaps for it I will be butchered in my bed some night by the servants of empire... ...perhaps the things I believe now for my country will be wrong and outmoded, and I will not understand and do terrible things to have things my way or merely to keep my power. Don't you see that there will be young men and women, not British soldiers then, but my own black countrymen... to step out of the shadows some evening and slit my then useless throat? Don't you see they have always been there... that they always will be. And that such a thing as my own death will be an advance? They who might kill me even... actually replenish me!

I was born in a house with a million rooms, built on a small, airless world on the edge of an empire of light and commerce that the adults called the Golden Hour, for a reason I did not yet grasp.

Every night, around midnight GMT, the Sun sets on the Cayman Islands, and doesn’t rise over the British Indian Ocean Territory until after 1:00 a.m. For that hour, the little Pitcairn Islands in the South Pacific are the only British territory in the Sun. The Pitcairn Islands have a population of a few dozen people, the descendants of the mutineers from the HMS Bounty. The islands became notorious in 2004 when a third of the adult male population, including the mayor, were convicted of child sexual abuse. As awful as the islands may be, they remain part of the British Empire, and unless they’re kicked out, the two-century-long British daylight will continue.

She put her hand on his shoulder and gave a soft squeeze. She did not know what else to do. First her mother, then her father and Fanen, and finally Hilfred—they were all gone. Mauvin was slipping away as well. The boy who loved his sword more than Wintertide presents, sweet chocolate cake, or swimming on a hot day refused to touch it anymore. The eldest son of Count Pickering, who had once challenged the sun to a duel because it had rained on the day of a hunt, spent his days watching ducks.

Because we cannot discover God's throne in the sky with a radiotelescope or establish (for certain) that a beloved father or mother is still about in a more or less corporeal form, people assume that such ideas are "not true." I would rather say that they are not "true" enough, for these are conceptions of a kind that have accompanied human life from prehistoric times, and that still break through into consciousness at any provocation. Modern man may assert that he can dispose with them, and he may bolster his opinion by insisting that there is no scientific evidence of their truth. Or he may even regret the loss of his convictions. But since we are dealing with invisible and unknowable things (for God is beyond human understanding, and there is no means of proving immortality), why should we bother about evidence? Even if we did not know by reason our need for salt in our food, we should nonetheless profit from its use. We might argue that the use of salt is a mere illusion of taste or a superstition; but it would still contribute to our well-being. Why, then, should we deprive ourselves of views that would prove helpful in crises and would give a meaning to our existence? And how do we know that such ideas are not true? Many people would agree with me if I stated flatly that such ideas are probably illusions. What they fail to realize is that the denial is as impossible to "prove" as the assertion of religious belief. We are entirely free to choose which point of view we take; it will in any case be an arbitrary decision. There is, however, a strong empirical reason why we should cultivate thoughts that can never be proved. It is that they are known to be useful. Man positively needs general ideas and convictions that will give a meaning to his life and enable him to find a place for himself in the universe. He can stand the most incredible hardships when he is convinced that they make sense; he is crushed when, on top of all his misfortunes, he has to admit that he is taking part in a "tale told by an idiot." It is the role of religious symbols to give a meaning to the life of man. The Pueblo Indians believe that they are the sons of Father Sun, and this belief endows their life with a perspective (and a goal) that goes far beyond their limited existence. It gives them ample space for the unfolding of personality and permits them a full life as complete persons. Their plight is infinitely more satisfactory than that of a man in our own civilization who knows that he is (and will remain) nothing more than an underdog with no inner meaning to his life.

The fool believes the iniquities of the world are the fault of other men. Gibson’s voice, dry as old manuscript pages, had never been more clear. The truly wise try to change themselves, which is the more difficult and less grand task.

That public men publish falsehoods Is nothing new. That America must accept Like the historical republics corruption and empire Has been known for years. Be angry at the sun for setting If these things anger you. Watch the wheel slope and tum. They are all bound on the wheel, these people, those warriors, This republic, Europe, Asia. Observe them gesticulating, Observe them going down. The gang serves lies, the passionate Man plays his part; the cold passion for truth Hunts in no pack. You are not CatulIus, you know, To lampoon these crude sketches of Caesar. You are far From Dante’s feet, but even farther from his dirty Political hatredS. Let boys want pleasure, and men Struggle for power, and women perhaps for fame, And the servile to serve a Leader and the dupes to be duped. Yours is not theirs.

The Emperor is dead! So too his right hand - now cold, now severed! But mark these dying shadows, twinned and flowing bloody and beaten, down and away from mortal sight... From sceptre's rule dismissed, from gild candelabra the light now fled, from a hearth ringed in hard jewels seven years this warmth has bled... The Emperor is dead. So too his master'd companion, the rope cut clean. But mark this burgeoning return - faltering dark, the tattered shroud - embracing children in Empire's dying light. Hear now the dirge faint reprised, before the sun's fall, this day spills red on buckled earth, and in obsidian eyes vengeance chimes seven times..." ―Call to Shadow, Felisin (I.i. 1-18)

and if any conclusion was reached, it was that there are no simple lessons in history, that it is human nature that repeats itself, not history.

If you do nothing - or worse, if you help them - they will win. There is no middle ground in this. You must choose. Either the empire or those who fight them.

There will come a time of fire and night, when enemies rise and empires fall, when the suns themselves begin to die.

human nature that repeats itself, not history

Indeed, the Mughal women will be better educated than most of their contemporaries anywhere in the world.

With his forces intact he will dispute the mastery of the Empire, and thus, without losing a man, his triumph will be complete. This is the method of attacking by stratagem. 8.

The sun doesn’t wait for approval before gassing itself up and setting itself on fire. It’s too busy bringing it’s desire to spread love, light and sight to earth’s entire empire.

The honour of Mughal men was not as irretrievably bound to the sexual chastity of their women.

Because the Mughals did not follow a system of primogeniture, any Mughal prince, sufficiently ambitious and talented, could hope to ascend the throne one day.

Dangerous things, names. A kind of curse, defining us that we might live up to them, or giving us something to run away from.

Civilization is a kind of prayer: that by right action we might bring to pass the peace and quiet that is the ardent desire of every decent heart.

Although signs may be found in everything that comes to us, as though a river at our doorstep carried these messages on its surface, the Quran (like other sacred books) speaks in terms of empirical experience, since it is intended to endure through the ages and cannot bind itself to the ‘scientific’ theories of any particular time. Its images are the phenomena of nature as they appear to us in our experience — the rising and setting of the sun, the domed sky above and the mountains, which are like weights set upon the earth. Scientific observations change according to the preconceptions of the observer and the instruments at his disposal, and the speculations which blinkered human minds construct on the basis of these observations change no less swiftly. But man’s experience of the visual universe does not change. The sun ‘rises’ for me today as it ‘rose’ for the man of ten thousand years ago.

The Sun Tzu School (which wrote the Art of War) surely never imagined that their antiwar, pro-empire treatise would become known and accepted after the fall of the first empire as a text on military tactics. Likewise, they would have been surprised to see the Ping-fa military metaphor—an inspired teaching device—come to be seen as the message and not the medium.

We live in stories, and in stories, we are subject to phenomena beyond the mechanisms of space and time. Fear and love, death and wrath and wisdom, these are as much part of our universe as light and gravity.

A little while ago, I stood by the grave of the old Napoleon—a magnificent tomb of gilt and gold, fit almost for a dead deity—and gazed upon the sarcophagus of rare and nameless marble, where rest at last the ashes of that restless man. I leaned over the balustrade and thought about the career of the greatest soldier of the modern world. I saw him walking upon the banks of the Seine, contemplating suicide. I saw him at Toulon—I saw him putting down the mob in the streets of Paris—I saw him at the head of the army of Italy—I saw him crossing the bridge of Lodi with the tri-color in his hand—I saw him in Egypt in the shadows of the pyramids—I saw him conquer the Alps and mingle the eagles of France with the eagles of the crags. I saw him at Marengo—at Ulm and Austerlitz. I saw him in Russia, where the infantry of the snow and the cavalry of the wild blast scattered his legions like winter's withered leaves. I saw him at Leipsic in defeat and disaster—driven by a million bayonets back upon Paris—clutched like a wild beast—banished to Elba. I saw him escape and retake an empire by the force of his genius. I saw him upon the frightful field of Waterloo, where Chance and Fate combined to wreck the fortunes of their former king. And I saw him at St. Helena, with his hands crossed behind him, gazing out upon the sad and solemn sea. I thought of the orphans and widows he had made—of the tears that had been shed for his glory, and of the only woman who ever loved him, pushed from his heart by the cold hand of ambition. And I said I would rather have been a French peasant and worn wooden shoes. I would rather have lived in a hut with a vine growing over the door, and the grapes growing purple in the kisses of the autumn sun. I would rather have been that poor peasant with my loving wife by my side, knitting as the day died out of the sky—with my children upon my knees and their arms about me—I would rather have been that man and gone down to the tongueless silence of the dreamless dust, than to have been that imperial impersonation of force and murder, known as 'Napoleon the Great.

No!” The word was a roar, a plea, and silver and green flashed in her vision. A name. A name clanged through her as he hurled himself in the path of that fist, that moonfire, not just to save those innocents in the city, but to spare her soul from the agony if she destroyed them all— Rowan. And as his face became clear, his tattoo stark in the sun, as that fist full of unimaginable power now opened toward his heart— There was no force in any world that could keep her contained. And Aelin Galathynius remembered her own name as she shattered through the cage that goddess had shoved her into, as she grabbed that goddess by the damned throat and hurled her out, out, out through that gaping hole where she had infiltrated her, and sealed it— Aelin snapped into her body, her power.

They were pragmatic about women who ‘fell’ to an enemy, unlike their contemporaries, the Rajputs, who invested so heavily in their women’s sexual chastity that death, through sati, was preferred to ‘loss of honour’ to an enemy.

A child can accept all kinds of weird-looking creatures and bizarre occurrences in a story because the child understands that stories have different rules that allow for pretty much anything to happen. Adults, on the other hand, struggle desperately with fiction, demanding constantly that it conform to the rules of everyday life. Adults foolishly demand to know how Superman can possibly fly, or how Batman can possibly run a multibillion-dollar business empire during the day and fight crime at night, when the answer is obvious even to the smallest child: because it’s not real.

It was ironic that the same people who had enacted nuclear war on the Homeworld, who presided over the refugee camps and rotted the ecosphere, had balked in the face of blood sport. Would they call us barbarians, those men of ancient days?

And he sent the gentle sun of his smile upon the land; whereupon to a bud, the hosts of blossoms unfolded their glory, from one end of his empire unto the other, creating a single rainbowed carpet woven from myriad precious capsules of fragrance.

All of the myths of mankind are nothing but show business,' the other man said to me during our initial meeting. 'Everything that we supposedly live by and supposedly die by — whether it's religious scriptures or makeshift slogans — all of it is show business. The rise and fall of empires — show business. Science, philosophy, all of the disciplines under the sun, and even the sun itself, as well as all those other clumps of matter wobbling about in the blackness up there —' he said to me, pointing out the window beside the coffee-shop booth in which we sat, 'show business, show business, show business.' 'And what about dreams?' I asked, thinking I might have hit upon an exception to his dogmatic view, or at least one that he would accept as such. 'You mean the dreams of the sort we are having at this moment or the ones we have when we're fortunate enough to sleep?

That place, called the heliopause, is one definition of the outer boundary of the Empire of the Sun. But the Voyager spacecraft will plunge on, penetrating the heliopause sometime in the middle of the twenty-first century, skimming through the ocean of space, never to enter another solar system, destined to wander through eternity far from the stellar islands and to complete its first circumnavigation of the massive center of the Milky Way a few hundred million years from now. We have embarked on epic voyages.

Jim watched them eat, his eyes fixed on every morsel that entered their mouth. When the oldest of the four soldiers had finished he scraped some burnt rice and fish scales from the side of the cooking pot. A first-class private of some forty years, with slow, careful hands, he beckoned Jim forward and handed him his mess tin. As they smoked their cigarettes the Japanese smiled to themselves, watching Jim devour the shreds of fatty rice. It was his first hot food since he had left he hospital, and the heat and greasy flavour stung his gums. Tears swam in his eyes. The Japanese soldier who had taken pity on Jim, recognising that this small boy was starving, began to laugh good-naturedly, and pulled the rubber plug from his metal water-bottle. Jim drank the clear, chlorine-flavoured liquid, so unlike the stagnant water in the taps of the Columbia Road. He choked, carefully swallowed his vomit, and tittered into his hands, grinning at the Japanese. Soon they were all laughing together, sitting back in the deep grass beside the drained swimming-pool.

There are also some moving sections about World War II in Anthony Burgess’s Any Old Iron, Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman, Kit Reed’s At War As Children, Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life, Empire of the Sun by J. G. Ballard, and Nancy Willard’s Things Invisible to See.

The Louis XIII style in perfumery, composed of the elements dear to that period - orris-powder, musk, civet and myrtle-water, already known by the name of angel-water - was scarcely adequate to express the cavalierish graces, the rather crude colours of the time which certain sonnets by Saint-Amand have preserved for us. Later on, with the aid of myrrh and frankincense, the potent and austere scents of religion, it became almost possible to render the stately pomp of the age of Louis XIV, the pleonastic artifices of classical oratory, the ample, sustained, wordy style of Bossuet and the other masters of the pulpit. Later still, the blase, sophisticated graces of French society under Louis XV found their interpreters more easily in frangipane and marechale, which offered in a way the very synthesis of the period. And then, after the indifference and incuriosity of the First Empire, which used eau-de-Cologne and rosemary to excess, perfumery followed Victor Hugo and Gautier and went for inspiration to the lands of the sun; it composed its own Oriental verses, its own highly spiced salaams, discovered intonations and audacious antitheses, sorted out and revived forgotten nuances which it complicated, subtilized and paired off, and in short resolutely repudiated the voluntary decrepitude to which it had been reduced by its Malesherbes, its Boileaus, its Andrieux, its Baour-Lormians, the vulgar distillers of its poems.

This was one of those odd thoughts that came out of the blue and struck me as both clever and logical. Hot chocolate wouldn’t be something desert people would naturally gravitate toward. (There are cold deserts, of course, but with two suns I always assumed Tatooine is mostly pretty warm. Now, of course, the Star Wars Essential Atlas and other official material backs up that assumption.) I also caught way more grief for this than I ever expected. Quite a few people took me to task for putting an Earth-based drink into the Star Wars universe. Of course, those same people apparently weren’t bothered by the Millennium Falcon, or lightsabers. It was, though, a reminder that you never know what word or image might jolt someone out of their suspension of disbelief. Anyway, why would anyone want to live in that Galaxy Far, Far Away if they don’t have chocolate? Inconceivable …

One of the special forces asked Skippy whether we could see the Sun from there, and Skippy enhanced the image in our helmet visors, so we could see the faint light of our home star. I remember Skippy reminding us that the light we were seeing then left the sun eighteen hundred years ago. The Roman Empire ruled the Mediterranean back then. Under that perspective, the authority of Earth begins to seem thin after we pass through a couple wormholes.

QUALITIES There is a sun-star rising outside form. I am lost in that other. It's sweet not to look at two worlds, to melt in meaning as honey melts in milk. No one tires of following the soul. I don't recall now what happens on the manifest plane. I stroll with those I have always wanted to know, fresh and graceful as a water lily, or a rose. The body is a boat; I am waves swaying against it. Whenever it anchors somewhere, I smash it loose, or smash it to pieces. If I get lazy and cold, flames come from my ocean and surround me. I laugh inside them like gold purifying itself. A certain melody makes the snake put his head down on a line in the dirt....Here is my head, brother: What next! Weary of form, I come into qualities. Each says, "I am a blue-green sea. Dive into me!" I am Alexander at the outermost extension of empire, turning all my armies in toward the meaning of armies, Shams.

Get the hell out of—” Aelin let out a low whistle. “Allow me to introduce to you, Captain Rolfe, the incomparable, the beautiful, and the absolutely and all-around flawless Queen of Terrasen.” Dorian’s brows creased. But footsteps sounded, and then—The males shifted as Aelin Galathynius indeed strode into the room, clad in a dark green tunic of equal wear and dirt, her golden hair unbound, her turquoise-and-gold eyes laughing as she strode past a slack-jawed Rolfe and perched on the arm of Aelin’s chair. Dorian couldn’t tell—without a Fae’s sense of smell, he couldn’t tell. “What—what devilry is this,” Rolfe hissed, yielding a single step. Aelin and Aelin looked at each other. The one in black grinned up at the newcomer. “Oh, you are gorgeous, aren’t you?” The one in green smiled, but for all its delight, all its wicked mischief … It was a softer smile, made with a mouth that was perhaps less used to snarling and teeth-baring and getting away with saying hideous, swaggering things. Lysandra, then. The two queens faced Rolfe. “Aelin Galathynius had no twin,” he growled, a hand on his sword. Aelin in black—the true Aelin, who had been among them all along—rolled her eyes. “Ugh, Rolfe. You ruin my fun. Of course I don’t have a twin.” She jerked her chin at Lysandra, and the shifter’s flesh glowed and melted, hair becoming a heavy, straight fall of dark tresses, her skin sun-kissed, her uptilted eyes a striking green.

Long ago Napoleon had sounded the warning that China was but a sleeping giant: “Let him sleep! For when he wakes he will move the world.

It is easier to start a war than end one.

The Rahimi is one of the largest vessels of any kind to sail the Indian seas.

The worlds have enough of tyrants, enough of murderers and genocides.

They warned of taints lingering from the Builders’ war, stains from their poisons, or shadows from the Day of a Thousand Suns.

For a people who honored the ascent and descent of the sun, marking the first and last glimpse of its burning orb with quiet gratitude to their Creator, this time farthest from its presence was meant for being safe and asleep with their loved ones, a fire altar burning to keep the demons out. But Dara had no loved ones and was a demon himself, so here he was.

Dr. Ransome marked the exercises in the algebra textbook and gave him two strips of rice-paper bandage on which to solve the simultaneous equations. As he stood up, Dr. Ransome removed the three tomatoes from Jim's pocket. He laid them on the table by the wax tray. 'Did they come from the hospital garden?' 'Yes.' Jim gazed back frankly at Dr. Ransome. Recently he had begun to see him with a more adult eye. The long years of imprisonment, the constant disputes with the Japanese had made this young physician seem middle-aged. Dr. Ransome was often unsure of himself, as he was of Jim's theft. 'I have to give Basie something whenever I see him.' 'I know. It's a good thing that you're friends with Basie. He's a survivor, though survivors can be dangerous. Wars exist for people like Basie.' Dr. Ransome placed the tomatoes in Jim's hand. 'I want you to eat them, Jim. I'll get you something for Basie.

But folk ain’t that different, one-to-one, no matter what’s on the outside. Doesn’t even matter where you been. Hurt the same, need the same. Need someone to remind them they’re human.

Focus blurs, Gibson used to say. Focus blinds. You must take in all of a thing by seeing the totality of it, not by focusing on minutiae. This is as important for a ruler as it is for a painter.

A poet, yes, but an Englishman too. Do you know what is the pride of the English? Do you know what is the proudest word you will ever hear from an Englishman's mouth? The seas' ruler. His seacold eyes looked on the empty bay: it seems history is to blame: on me and on my words, unhating. —That on his empire, Stephen said, the sun never sets. —Ba! Mr Deasy cried. That's not English. A French Celt said that.

It is through Gulbadan’s account, and only hers, that we can see Babur as a loving father, a tempestuous family man and a devoted husband. The fiery warrior or the marauding opportunist is for the other biographers.

And in the east, slipping over the mountains like molten gold, the sun began to rise. A hundred years she'd had with Asterin. She'd always thought they'd have a hundred more. Manon said softly to Sorrel, "Turn her around. My Second shall see the dawn one last time." Sorrel obediently stepped forward, pivoting Asterin to face the High Witches, the crowd by the rail--and the rare sunrise piercing through Morath's gloom. Blood stack through the back of her Second's leathers. And yet Asterin knelt, shoulders square and head high, as she looked not at the dawn--but at Manon herself while she stalked around her Second to take a place few feet before the Matrons.

In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography. Suárez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lérida, 1658

Sift the sand of every world and sort the dust of space between them, and you will find not one atom of fear, nor gram of love nor dram of hatred. Yet they are there, unseen and uncertain as the smallest quanta and just as real.

The Empire is a thug, a bully. It’s no better than Surat Nuat, or Black Sun, or the syndicate of Hutts. The Empire pretends it’s about law and order, but at the end of the day, it’s about dressing up oppression in the costume of justice.

The British did little, very little, of such things. They basked in the Indian sun and yearned for their cold and fog-ridden homeland; they sent the money they had taken off the perspiring brow of the Indian worker to England; and whatever little they did for India, they ensured India paid for it in excess. And at the end of it all, they went home to enjoy their retirements in damp little cottages with Indian names, their alien rest cushioned by generous pensions supplied by Indian taxpayers. The

Why are you here?” “Oh— I came to tell the chieftain we’re going to die.” The girl said it quickly and with the same casual indifference as if she were announcing that the sun sets in the evening. Persephone narrowed her eyes. “Excuse me? What did you say? Who’s going to die?” “All of us.” “All of whom?” “Us.” The girl looked puzzled, but this time Persephone wasn’t certain if it was the tattoos or not. “You and I?” Suri sighed. “Yes— you, me, the funny man with the horn at the gate, everyone.

There are empires upon which the sun will never set, railways that cross continents, rivers of wealth that will never run dry, machines that never grow tired. It’s a system too vast and ravenous to ever be dismantled, like a deity or an engine, which swallows men and women whole and belches black smoke into the sky. Its name is Modernity, I am told, and it carries Progress and Prosperity in its coal-fired belly—but I see only rigidity, repression, a chilling resistance to change. I believe I already know what happens to a world without doors.

And under all this vast illusion of the cosmopolitan planet, with its empires and its Reuter's agency, the real life of man goes on concerned with this tree or that temple, with this harvest or that drinking-song, totally uncomprehended, totally untouched. And it watches from its splendid parochialism, possibly with a smile of amusement, motor-car civilization going its triumphant way, outstripping time, consuming space, seeing all and seeing nothing, roaring on at last to the capture of the solar system, only to find the sun cockney and the stars suburban.

In the most high and palmy state of Rome, A little ere the mightiest Julius fell, The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets; 130 As, stars with trains of fire and dews of blood, Disasters in the sun; and the moist star, Upon whose influence Neptune’s empire stands, Was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse: And even the like precurse of fierce events,— 135 As harbingers preceding still the fates, And prologue to the omen coming on,— Have heaven and earth together demonstrated Unto our climature and countrymen.

Every night in Shanghai those Chinese too poor to pay for the burial of their relatives would launch the bodies from the funeral piers at Nantao, decking the coffins with paper flowers. Carried away on the tide, they came back on the next, returning to the waterfront of Shanghai with all the other debris abandoned by the city. Meadows of paper flowers drifted on running tide and clumped in miniature floating gardens around the old men and women, the young mothers and small children, whose swollen bodies seemed to have been fed during the night by the patient Yangtze.

The Spanish and Portuguese empires proclaimed that it was not riches they sought in the Indies and America, but converts to the true faith. The sun never set on the British mission to spread the twin gospels of liberalism and free trade. The Soviets felt duty-bound to facilitate the inexorable historical march from capitalism towards the utopian dictatorship of the proletariat. Many Americans nowadays maintain that their government has a moral imperative to bring Third World countries the benefits of democracy and human rights, even if these goods are delivered by cruise missiles and F-16s.

Back to 1815, this is the year Nathan Mayer Rothschild makes his famous statement, “I care not what puppet is placed upon the throne of England to rule the Empire on which the sun never sets. The man who controls Britain’s money supply controls the British Empire, and I control the British money supply.

Gwen found herself in possession, coolly palmed in her thoughts like a dollar coin, of the idea that she was about to bring another abandoned son into the world, the son of an abandoned son. The heir to a history of disappointment and betrayal, violence, and loss. Centuries of loss, empires of disappointment. All the anger that Gwen had been feeling, not just today or over the past nine months but all her life--feeding on to it like a sun, using it to power her engines, to fund her stake in the American dream--struck her for the first time as a liability. As purely tragic. There was no way to partake of it without handing it on down the generations.

Unlike his studious father, fascinated by the occult, Akbar can never be made to sit and study, preferring by far the company of his racing pigeons, dogs, horses and companions in arms. He never will learn to read and will remain effectively illiterate, the only Mughal padshah to be so, possibly due to his hyperactive nature exacerbated by extreme dyslexia.

As stars with trains of fire and dews of blood, Disasters in the sun; and the moist star Upon whose influence Neptune's empire stands Was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse: And even the like precurse of fierce events, As harbingers preceding still the fates And prologue to the omen coming on, Have heaven and earth together demonstrated Unto our climatures and countrymen.

The Roman Empire invented snacks, right after the aqueducts. Irrigation flowed, food plentiful, people munching between meals in the city-states. They ate these little, sun-dried meaty things, highly distasteful and falling out of favor until olive oil. I just made all that up. The key to life is making shit up. Everyone does it or society would unravel, like, Gee, your hair looks great! Or: God told me you’re wrong

In the years following daysdeath, most of the green places of the empire had withered, starved of the sun that had once gifted them life. But that wasn’t to say nothing grew in Elidaen anymore. There’s no end of successors waiting for old monarchs to fall, and in the breach left by those towering giants in their robes of whispering green, a new king had risen. “Fungus. “Luminous flowers of maryswort. Long, strangling tendrils of asphyxia. Bloated pustules of beggarbelly and jagged, crawling runs of shadespine. These were the new sovereigns of the forest, the grand lords of decay, building castles on the rotting tombs of the kings who’d come before. Mushroom and toadstool, moldweave and whitespore, running thick across the ground or flowering on the still-standing corpses, so thick you could barely see the shape of the tree beneath.

When the sun sets on the American empire, as it will, as it must, Noam Chomsky's work will survive. It will point a cool incriminating finger at a merciless Machiavellian empire as cruel, self-righteous and hypocritical as the ones it has replaced. (The only difference is that it is armed with technology that can visit the kind of devastation on the world that history has never known and the human race cannot begin to imagine.)

You are young to talk of dying," said the Emperor, looking at Jester. "Learn rather to live, to enjoy the gifts lavished so prodigally by an unknown god: the heat of the sun, the cool of the sea at noon, the scent of the forest in the evening, horses galloping across the plain. You are rich because you are alive. Even unhappiness is still life. Learn to love and enjoy, and learn also to suffer. And, when the time comes, you will learn to die.

What then shall be said of those scholars of our time, blind to all great issues, and without any appreciation of relative values, who can only bark out their stale formulas about “virtue” and “civilization,” condemning the use of military weapons? They will surely bring our country to impotence and dishonor and the loss of her rightful heritage; or, at the very least, they will bring about invasion and rebellion, sacrifice of territory and general enfeeblement. Yet they obstinately refuse to modify the position they have taken up. The truth is that, just as in the family the teacher must not spare the rod, and punishments cannot be dispensed with in the State, so military chastisement can never be allowed to fall into abeyance in the Empire. All one can say is that this power will be exercised wisely by some, foolishly by others, and that among those who bear arms some will be loyal and others rebellious.

I do not consider myself a great artist, though she made me wish I was. I could not have known at this first meeting how many times I would fail to capture her, in charcoal and in life. The brazen declaration of her; the pride in that upturned chin, the pointed nose, and the tidy carelessness that put her above the opinions of lesser men. There's little sign of her wit-so close to cruelty-in any of the drawings I made of her, and this poor prose cannot contain her beauty, body or soul. They are only echoes, as is this.

It’s too bad some of you are old enough to remember the peaceful buccaneer days, because those days are long gone—the summer’s over and empire season is here, and in a few more years it probably won’t be possible anywhere in the Caribbean to just sit in the sun and cook scavenged Spanish livestock over the buccan fires. It’s a new world, right enough, a world for the taking, and we’re the ones who know how to live in it without having to pretend it’s a district of England or France or Spain. All that could hold us back is laziness.

Muhammad Iqbal, who had spent three rewarding years as a student in Europe in the first decade of the twentieth century, now wrote of it in the satirical tradition of the Illahabadi: The West develops wonderful new skills In this as in so many other fields Its submarines are crocodiles Its bombers rain destruction from the skies Its gases so obscure the sky They blind the sun’s world-seeing eye Dispatch this old fool to the West To learn the art of killing fast- and best On his previous trips to the West, Liang, like Tagore and Iqbal, had been a qualified admirer. During his longest sojourn there, he began to develop grave doubts about the civilization that had so blithely thrown away the fruits of progress and rationalism and sunk into barbarism. The ‘materialist’ West had managed to subdue nature through science and technology and created a Darwinian universe of conflict between individuals, classes and nations. But to what effect? Its materialistic people, constantly desiring ever-new things and constantly being frustrated, were worn out by war, were afflicted with insecurity, and were as far from happiness as ever.

The world is completely out of control. Life comes, life goes. Empires rise, empires fall. And it’s just a matter of time that planet earth vanishes because the Sun swallows it. The house we live in, the money we have in the bank, the people we love, they’re all going down the drain someday. From this perspective, we may see that it’s kind of crazy to spend our lives attaching ourselves (sometimes painfully) to the world around us. The world changes all the time. The things we attach ourselves to never last. This is yet another reason why it’s better to let go of them.

Wynter's Pass was a picturesque region in the north of Vohlfhein, where the Bleak Hills eventually collapsed into the Frozen Sea. From the back of Mr. Buckles, who had been on a slow trot since sunrise, Monch watched the light glisten off of the frozen branches of the evergreens. As the sun warmed the frozen ground, sending the evening's frost into retreat, Monch absorbed the splendor of it all and wondered how expensive the local real estate must be around here. He then contemplated attempting to find an agent that would represent his interests well. "This land is such a spectacular wonder," the Lion of Ahriman declared. "It would be very much sought after if they could just do something about the bears, the White Orts, the wolves, the bloodthirsty cannibals, the snow manapés, the frost wizards, the northern bandit gangs, the dire lynxes, the similarly sounding but not related pygmy bloodthirsty cannibals, the demon possessed yaks, the dead-soul animated trees, the..." Monch paused for a moment. "It just occurred to me that this land is really not safe at all. It seems almost everything in it wants to kill me," the Templar admitted.

Diogenes, the Greek philosopher who founded the Cynical school, lived in a barrel. When Alexander the Great once visited Diogenes as he was relaxing in the sun, and asked if there were anything he might do for him, the Cynic answered the all-powerful conqueror, ‘Yes, there is something you can do for me. Please move a little to the side. You are blocking the sunlight.’ This is why cynics don’t build empires and why an imagined order can be maintained only if large segments of the population – and in particular large segments of the elite and the security forces – truly believe in it.

The main barrier between East and West today is that the white man is not willing to give up his superiority and the colored man is no longer willing to endure his inferiority.… The white man is a century behind the colored man. The white man is still thinking in terms of colonies and colonial government. The colored man knows that colonies and colonial-mindedness are anachronisms. The colonial way of life is over, whether the white man knows it or not, and all that remains is to kick off the shell of the chrysalis. The man of Asia today is not a colonial and he has made up his mind he will never be a colonial again.

Just as summer-killed meat draws flies, so the court draws spurious sages, philosophists, and acosmists who remain there as long as their purses and their wits will maintain them, in the hope (at first) of an appointment from the Autarch and (later) of obtaining a tutorial position in some exalted family. At sixteen or so, Thecla was attracted, as I think young women often are, to their lectures on theogony, thodicy, and the like, and I recall one particularly in which a phoebad put forward as an ultimate truth the ancient sophistry of the existence of three Adonai, that of the city (or of the people), that of the poets, and that of the philosophers. Her reasoning was that since the beginning of human consciousness (if such a beginning ever was) there have been vast numbers of persons in the three categories who have endeavored to pierce the secret of the divine. If it does not exist, they should have discovered that long before; if it does, it is not possible that Truth itself should mislead them. Yet the beliefs of the populace, the insights of the rhapsodists, and the theories of the metaphysicians have so far diverged that few of them can so much as comprehend what the others say, and someone who knew nothing of any of their ideas might well believe there was no connection at all between them. May it not be, she asked (and even now I am not certain I can answer), that instead of traveling, as has always been supposed, down three roads to the same destination, they are actually traveling toward three quite different ones? After all, when in common life we behold three roads issuing from the same crossing, we do not assume they all proceed toward the same goal. I found (and find) this suggestion as rational as it is repellent, and it represents for me all that monomaniacal fabric of argument, so tightly woven that not even the tiniest objection or spark of light can escape its net, in which human minds become enmeshed whenever the subject is one in which no appeal to fact is possible. As a fact the Claw was thus an incommensurable. No quantity of money, no piling up of archipelagoes or empires could approach it in value any more than the indefinite multiplication of horizontal distance could be made to equal vertical distance. If it was, as I believed, a thing from outside the universe, then its light, which I had seen shine faintly so often, and a few times brightly, was in some sense the only light we had. If it were destroyed, we were left fumbling in the dark.

But first: Kip Mdang, I would like you to have this, as a token of my esteem, a promise of my affection, an affirmation of my readiness to follow your star wherever you wander with it, an acknowledgement of my willingness to raise an island for you whenever you need one, and…” Fitzroy took a deep breath. “And a statement of something I have never quite dared say in its full simplicity before, which is that I love you.” Before Cliopher could say anything—before Cliopher could do anything—Fitzroy tugged off his signet ring and placed it on the palm of Cliopher’s hand. Cliopher looked at his fanoa. “That’s the Imperial Seal,” he said, but even without looking down he had closed his hand around the ring. It was warm in his hand from Fitzroy’s body-heat, his inner fire. “It is,” said Fitzroy. “And you know very well that there is not another person in all the Nine Worlds and the lands beyond whom I would trust with it.” “I don’t know what to say,” Cliopher said, knowing his face and his heart were both open as the proverbial shell on the beach. Now Fitzroy smiled, a curving, splendid smile, a Fitzroy Angursell smile. “‘Thank you’ will be quite sufficient, my dear Kip. Seeing as you’ve already done all the hard work of taking down the empire and creating a home for me.

What were Hank and Atticus up to? What was going on? She did not know, but before the sun went down she would find out. It had something to do with that pamphlet she found in the house—sitting there before God and everybody—something to do with citizens’ councils. She knew about them, all right. New York papers full of it. She wished she had paid more attention to them, but only one glance down a column of print was enough to tell her a familiar story: same people who were the Invisible Empire, who hated Catholics; ignorant, fear-ridden, red-faced, boorish, law-abiding, one hundred per cent red-blooded Anglo-Saxons, her fellow Americans—trash.

What I have heard of Bramins sitting exposed to four fires and looking in the face of the sun; or hanging suspended, with their heads downward, over flames; or looking at the heavens over their shoulders "until it becomes impossible for them to resume their natural position, while from the twist of the neck nothing but liquids can pass into the stomach"; or dwelling, chained for life, at the foot of a tree; or measuring with their bodies, like caterpillars, the breadth of vast empires; or standing on one leg on the tops of pillars—even these forms of conscious penance are hardly more incredible and astonishing than the scenes which I daily witness

. . . waves of desert heat . . . I must’ve passed out, because when I woke up I was shivering and stars wheeled above a purple horizon. . . . Then the sun came up, casting long shadows. . . . I heard a vehicle coming. Something coming from far away, gradually growing louder. There was the sound of an engine, rocks under tires. . . . Finally it reached me, the door opened, and Dirk Bickle stepped out. . . . But anyway so Bickle said, “Miracles, Luke. Miracles were once the means to convince people to abandon reason for faith. But the miracles stopped during the rise of the neocortex and its industrial revolution. Tell me, if I could show you one miracle, would you come with me and join Mr. Kirkpatrick?” I passed out again, and came to. He was still crouching beside me. He stood up, walked over to the battered refrigerator, and opened the door. Vapor poured out and I saw it was stocked with food. Bickle hunted around a bit, found something wrapped in paper, and took a bottle of beer from the door. Then he closed the fridge, sat down on the old tire, and unwrapped what looked like a turkey sandwich. He said, “You could explain the fridge a few ways. One, there’s some hidden outlet, probably buried in the sand, that leads to a power source far away. I figure there’d have to be at least twenty miles of cable involved before it connected to the grid. That’s a lot of extension cord. Or, this fridge has some kind of secret battery system. If the empirical details didn’t bear this out, if you thoroughly studied the refrigerator and found neither a connection to a distant power source nor a battery, you might still argue that the fridge had some super-insulation capabilities and that the food inside had been able to stay cold since it was dragged out here. But say this explanation didn’t pan out either, and you observed the fridge staying the same temperature week after week while you opened and closed it. Then you’d start to wonder if it was powered by some technology beyond your comprehension. But pretty soon you’d notice something else about this refrigerator. The fact that it never runs out of food. Then you’d start to wonder if somehow it didn’t get restocked while you slept. But you’d realize that it replenished itself all the time, not just while you were sleeping. All this time, you’d keep eating from it. It would keep you alive out here in the middle of nowhere. And because of its mystery you’d begin to hate and fear it, and yet still it would feed you. Even though you couldn’t explain it, you’d still need it. And you’d assume that you simply didn’t understand the technology, rather than ascribe to it some kind of metaphysical power. You wouldn’t place your faith in the hands of some unknowable god. You’d place it in the technology itself. Finally, in frustration, you’d come to realize you’d exhausted your rationality and the only sensible thing to do would be to praise the mystery. You’d worship its bottles of Corona and jars of pickled beets. You’d make up prayers to the meats drawer and sing about its light bulb. And you’d start to accept the mystery as the one undeniable thing about it. That, or you’d grow so frustrated you’d push it off this cliff.” “Is Mr. Kirkpatrick real?” I asked. After a long gulp of beer, Bickle said, “That’s the neocortex talking again.

La Dicha He who embraces a woman is Adam. The woman is Eve. Everything happens for the first time. I have seen a white thing in the sky. They tell me it's the moon, but what can I do with a word and a mythology. The trees frighten me a bit. They are so beautiful. The calm animals come near for me to tell them their names. The books in the library have no letters. When I open them, they come up. When I peruse the atlas I project the shape of Sumatra. He who lights a match in the dark is inventing fire. In the mirror there's someone else lurking. He who looks at the sea sees England. He who utters a verse by Liliencron has entered the battle. I have dreamed Carthage and the legions that devastated Carthage. I have dreamed the sword and the scales. Praised be the love in which there is no possessor or possessed, but the two surrender themselves. Praised be the nightmare, which reveals to us that we can create hell. He who comes down to a river comes down to the Ganges. He who watches a sand clock sees the dissolution of an empire. He who plays with a knife foretells the death of Caesar. He who sleeps is all men. In the desert I saw the young Sphinx, that they just finished carving. There's nothing old under the sun. Everything happens for the first time, but in an eternal fashion. He who reads my words is inventing them.

The Nile acted as a principle of order and centralization, necessitated collective work, created solidarity, imposed organizations on the people, and cemented them in a society. In turn the Nile was the work of the Sun, the supreme author of the universe. Ra — the Sun — the demiurge was the founder of all order human and divine, the creator of gods themselves. Its power was reflected in an absolute monarch to whom everything was subordinated. It has been suggested that such power followed the growth of astronomical knowledgeb by which the floods of the Nile could be predicted, notably a discovery of the sidereal year in which the rising of Sirius coincided with the period of floods.

There were a few ships at anchor, mostly single-sailed coastal traders. The Empire didn’t encourage its subjects to go far away, in case they saw things that might disturb them. For the same reason it had built a wall around the entire country, patrolled by the Heavenly Guard whose main function was to tread heavily on the fingers of any inhabitants who felt they might like to step outside for five minutes for a breath of fresh air. This didn’t happen often, because most of the subjects of the Sun Emperor were quite happy to live inside the Wall. It’s a fact of life that everyone is on one side or other of a wall, so the only thing to do is forget about it or evolve stronger fingers.

The Scientific Revolution proposed a very different formula for knowledge: Knowledge = Empirical Data × Mathematics. If we want to know the answer to some question, we need to gather relevant empirical data, and then use mathematical tools to analyse the data. For example, in order to gauge the true shape of the earth, we can observe the sun, the moon and the planets from various locations across the world. Once we have amassed enough observations, we can use trigonometry to deduce not only the shape of the earth, but also the structure of the entire solar system. In practice, that means that scientists seek knowledge by spending years in observatories, laboratories and research expeditions, gathering more and more empirical data, and sharpening their mathematical tools so they could interpret the data correctly. The scientific formula for knowledge led to astounding breakthroughs in astronomy, physics, medicine and countless other disciplines. But it had one huge drawback: it could not deal with questions of value and meaning. Medieval pundits could determine with absolute certainty that it is wrong to murder and steal, and that the purpose of human life is to do God’s bidding, because scriptures said so. Scientists could not come up with such ethical judgements. No amount of data and no mathematical wizardry can prove that it is wrong to murder. Yet human societies cannot survive without such value judgements.

Anyone with an adequate education will easily acknowledge that in the mythology of the Eddas itself the essential element does not correspond to the pathos of the emerging and unleashing of elementary forces and of the struggle against them...the essential, in the tradition in question, is to be found in what are ultimately ‘Olympian’ meanings. These are implied, for instance, by the idea of Miðgarðr, which reflects the general idea of a supreme centre and fundamental order of the world, and which, in a way, may be considered the metaphysical basis of the idea of empire; by the symbolism of Valhalla as a mountain whose frozen and bright peak shines of an eternal light beyond all clouds; and, connected to this, the motif of the so called Light of the North in its many variants. In relation to this, I should recall the symbolism of the golden realm of Glaðsheimr, ‘brighter than the sun’...and the image of the celestial place of Gimlé, ‘more magnificent than any other and brighter than the sun,’ which ‘will endure even when the heavens and the earth pass away.’ In this and many other motifs...a trained eye is bound to detect a testimony to a higher dimension in ancient Nordic mythology...According to Völuspá and Gylfaginning, after Ragnarök a ‘new sun’ and ‘new race’ will arise, the ‘divine heroes’... will return to Iðavöllr and find gold, which symbolises the primordial tradition of luminous Asgard and the original state.

The first to overcome the problem were the ancient Sumerians, who lived in southern Mesopotamia. There, a scorching sun beating upon rich muddy plains produced plentiful harvests and prosperous towns. As the number of inhabitants grew, so did the amount of information required to coordinate their affairs. Between the years 3500 BC and 3000 BC, some unknown Sumerian geniuses invented a system for storing and processing information outside their brains, one that was custom-built to handle large amounts of mathematical data. The Sumerians thereby released their social order from the limitations of the human brain, opening the way for the appearance of cities, kingdoms and empires. The data-processing system invented by the Sumerians is called ‘writing’.

In our five thousand years of civilization, our history has often been the handmaid of geography. We lie exactly midway between the North Pole and the Equator. We are the gateway between the Fertile Crescent and Europe, between landlocked Central Asia and the Mediterranean world and beyond that, the Atlantic. Peoples and empires have ebbed and flowed across this land. Even today sixty per cent of Europe’s gas supply either passes down the Bosphorus or runs under our very feet through pipelines. We have always been the navel of the world. Yet our favoured location by its very nature surrounded us with historical enemies; to the north, Russia to the south, the Arabs; to the east, Persia and to the west, the Red Apple itself, Europe.’ The Red Apple, the myth of Ottoman imperialism. When Mehmet the Conqueror looked out from the parapets of his fortress of Europe at Constantinople, the Red Apple had been the golden globe in the open palm of Justinian’s statue in the Hippodrome, the symbol of Roman power and ambition. Mehmet rode through the crumbling Hippodrome, the decaying streets of dying Byzantium and the Red Apple became Rome itself. The truth of the Red Apple was that it would always be unattainable, for it was the westering spirit, the globe of the setting sun itself. ‘Now we find ourselves caught between Arab oil, Russian gas and Iranian radiation and we found that the only way we could take the Red Apple was by joining it.’ This is poor stuff, Georgios thinks. You would not insult undergraduates’ intelligence with this.

She balanced on a point between rage and its relief. Amid the layers of conscious thought and the involuntary actions of her body, Gwen found herself in possession, coolly palmed in her thoughts like a dollar coin, of the idea that she was about to bring another abandoned son into the world, the son of an abandoned son. The heir to a history of disappointment and betrayal, violence and loss. Centuries of loss, empires of disappointment. All the anger that Gwen had been feeling, not just today or over the past nine months but all her life—feeding on it like a sun, using it to power her engines, to fund her stake in the American dream—struck her for the first time as a liability. As purely tragic. There was no way to partake of it without handing it on down the generations.

Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made, by Jason Schreier; Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture, by David Kushner; Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (specifically the section on Sierra On-Line), by Steven Levy; A Mind Forever Voyaging: A History of Storytelling in Video Games, by Dylan Holmes; Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter, by Tom Bissell; All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Video Games Conquered Pop Culture, by Harold Goldberg; and the documentaries Indie Game: The Movie, directed by James Swirsky and Lisanne Pajot, and GTFO, directed by Shannon Sun-Higginson. I read Indie Games by Bounthavy Suvilay after I finished writing, and it’s a beautiful book for those looking to see how artful games can be.

A supernova occurs when a giant star, one much bigger than our own Sun, collapses and then spectacularly explodes, releasing in an instant the energy of a hundred billion suns, burning for a time more brightly than all the stars in its galaxy. “It’s like a trillion hydrogen bombs going off at once, supernovae are extremely rare. A star can burn for billions of years, but it dies just once and quickly, and only a few dying stars explode. Most expire quietly, like a camp fire at dawn. In a typical galaxy, consisting of a hundred billion stars, a supernova will occur on average once every two or three hundred years. Looking for a supernova, therefore, was a little like standing on the observation platform of the Empire State Building with a telescope and searching windows around Manhattan in the hope of finding, let us say, someone lighting a twenty-first birthday cake.

Perhaps the best example for the continuing power and importance of traditional religions in the modern world comes from Japan. In 1853 an American fleet forced Japan to open itself to the modern world. In response, the Japanese state embarked on a rapid and extremely successful process of modernisation. Within a few decades, it became a powerful bureaucratic state relying on science, capitalism and the latest military technology to defeat China and Russia, occupy Taiwan and Korea, and ultimately sink the American fleet at Pearl Harbor and destroy the European empires in the Far East. Yet Japan did not copy blindly the Western blueprint. It was fiercely determined to protect its unique identity, and to ensure that modern Japanese will be loyal to Japan rather than to science, to modernity, or to some nebulous global community. To that end, Japan upheld the native religion of Shinto as the cornerstone of Japanese identity. In truth, the Japanese state reinvented Shinto. Traditional Shinto was a hodge-podge of animist beliefs in various deities, spirits and ghosts, and every village and temple had its own favourite spirits and local customs. In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, the Japanese state created an official version of Shinto, while discouraging many local traditions. This ‘State Shinto’ was fused with very modern ideas of nationality and race, which the Japanese elite picked from the European imperialists. Any element in Buddhism, Confucianism and the samurai feudal ethos that could be helpful in cementing loyalty to the state was added to the mix. To top it all, State Shinto enshrined as its supreme principle the worship of the Japanese emperor, who was considered a direct descendant of the sun goddess Amaterasu, and himself no less than a living god.

Perhaps the best example for the continuing power and importance of traditional religions in the modern world comes from Japan. In 1853 an American fleet forced Japan to open itself to the modern world. In response, the Japanese state embarked on a rapid and extremely successful process of modernisation. Within a few decades, it became a powerful bureaucratic state relying on science, capitalism and the latest military technology to defeat China and Russia, occupy Taiwan and Korea, and ultimately sink the American fleet at Pearl Harbor and destroy the European empires in the Far East. Yet Japan did not copy blindly the Western blueprint. It was fiercely determined to protect its unique identity, and to ensure that modern Japanese will be loyal to “Japan rather than to science, to modernity, or to some nebulous global community. To that end, Japan upheld the native religion of Shinto as the cornerstone of Japanese identity. In truth, the Japanese state reinvented Shinto. Traditional Shinto was a hodge-podge of animist beliefs in various deities, spirits and ghosts, and every village and temple had its own favourite spirits and local customs. In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, the Japanese state created an official version of Shinto, while discouraging many local traditions. This ‘State Shinto’ was fused with very modern ideas of nationality and race, which the Japanese elite picked from the European imperialists. Any element in Buddhism, Confucianism and the samurai feudal ethos that could be helpful in cementing loyalty to the state was added to the mix. To top it all, State Shinto enshrined as its supreme principle the worship of the Japanese emperor, who was considered a direct descendant of the sun goddess Amaterasu, and himself no less than a living god.

What treaty that the whites have kept has the red man broken? Not one. What treaty that the whites ever made with us red men have they kept? Not one. When I was a boy the Sioux owned the world. The sun rose and set on their lands. They sent ten thousand horsemen to battle. Where are the warriors today? Who slew them? Where are our lands? Who owns them? What white man can say that I ever stole his lands or a penny of his money? Yet they say I am a thief. What white woman, however lonely, was ever captive or insulted by me? Yet they say I am a bad Indian. What white man has ever seen me drunk? Who has ever come to me hungry and gone unfed? Who has ever seen me beat my wives or abuse my children? What law have I broken? Is it wrong for me to love my own? Is it wicked in me because my skin in red; because I am a Sioux; because I was born where my fathers lived; because I would die for my people and my country?32

Seasons had come and gone; presidents in Kabul had been inaugurated and murdered; an empire had been defeated; old wars had ended and new ones had broken out. But Mariam had hardly noticed, hardly cared. She had passed these years in a distant corner of her mind. A dry, barren field, out beyond wish and lament, beyond dream and disillusionment. There, the future did not matter. And the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and its accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion. And whenever those twin poisonous flowers began to sprout in the parched land of that field, Mariam uprooted them. She uprooted them and ditched them before they took hold. But somehow, over these last months, Laila and Aziza - a harami like herself, as it turned out - had become extensions of her, and now, without them, the life Mariam had tolerated for so long suddenly seemed intolerable. We're leaving this spring, Aziza and I. Come with us, Mariam.

Diogenes, the Greek philosopher who founded the Cynical school, lived in a barrel. When Alexander the Great once visited Diogenes as he was relaxing in the sun, and asked if there were anything he might do for him, the Cynic answered the all-powerful conqueror, ‘Yes, there is something you can do for me. Please move a little to the side. You are blocking the sunlight.’ This is why cynics don’t build empires and why an imagined order can be maintained only if large segments of the population – and in particular large segments of the elite and the security forces – truly believe in it. Christianity would not have lasted 2,000 years if the majority of bishops and priests failed to believe in Christ. American democracy would not have lasted almost 250 years if the majority of presidents and congressmen failed to believe in human rights. The modern economic system would not have lasted a single day if the majority of investors and bankers failed to believe in capitalism.

And now at last the Earth was dead. The final pitiful survivor had perished. All the teeming billions; the slow aeons; the empires and civilizations of mankind were summed up in this poor twisted form—and how titanically meaningless it had all been! Now indeed had come an end and climax to all the efforts of humanity—how monstrous and incredible a climax in the eyes of those poor complacent fools in the prosperous days! Not ever again would the planet know the thunderous tramping of human millions—or even the crawling of lizards and the buzz of insects, for they, too, had gone. Now was come the reign of sapless branches and endless fields of tough grasses. Earth, like its cold, imperturbable moon, was given over to silence and blackness forever. The stars whirled on; the whole careless plan would continue for infinities unknown. This trivial end of a negligible episode mattered not to distant nebulae or to suns newborn, flourishing, and dying. The race of man, too puny and momentary to have a real function or purpose, was as if it had never existed. To such a conclusion the aeons of its farcically toilsome evolution had led.

You can't believe in the Great A'Tuin," he said. "Great A'Tuin exists. There's no point in believing in things that exist." "Someone's put up their hand," said Urn. "Yes?" "Sir, surely only things that exist are worth believing in?" said the enquirer, who was wearing a uniform of a sergeant of the Holy Guard. "If they exist, you don't have to believe in them," said Didactylos. "They just are." He sighed. "What can I tell you? What do you want to hear? I just wrote down what people know. Mountains rise and fall, and under them the Turtle swims onward. Men live and die, and the Turtle Moves. Empires grow and crumble, and the Turtle Moves. Gods come and go, and still the Turtle Moves. The Turtle Moves." From the darkness came a voice, "And that is really true?" Didactylos shrugged. "The Turtle exists. The world is a flat disc. The sun turns round it once every day, dragging its light behind it. And this will go on happening, whether you believe it is true or not. It is real. I don't know about truth. Truth is a lot more complicated than that. I don't think the Turtle gives a bugger whether it's true or not, to tell you the truth.

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After years of fighting, the war was a complete stalemate and would have ended almost immediately in a negotiated settlement (as had most other European conflicts) had not the U.S. declared war on Germany.   As soon as Wilson's re-election had been engineered through the "he kept us out of war" slogan, a complete reversal of propaganda was instituted. In those days before radio and television, public opinion was controlled almost exclusively by newspapers. Many of the major newspapers were controlled by the Federal Reserve crowd. Now they began beating the drums over the "inevitability of war." Arthur Ponsonby, a memebr of the British parliament, admitted in his book Falsehood In War Time (E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., New York, 1928): "There must have been more deliberate lying in the world from 1914 to 1918 than in any other period of the world's history." Propaganda concerning the war was heavily one-sided. Although after the war many historians admitted that one side was as guilty as the other in starting the war, Germany was pictured as a militaristic monster which wanted to rule the world. Remember, this picture was painted by Britain which had its soldiers in more countries around the world than all other nations put together. So-called "Prussian militarism" did exist, but it was no threat to conquer the world. Meanwhile, the sun never set on the British Empire! Actually, the Germans were proving to be tough business competitors in the world's markets and the British did not approve.

The Jewel in Her Crown, which showed the old Queen (whose image the children now no doubt confused with the person of Miss Crane) surrounded by representative figures of her Indian Empire: princes, landowners, merchants, moneylenders, sepoys, farmers, servants, children, mothers, and remarkably clean and tidy beggars. The Queen was sitting on a golden throne, under a crimson canopy, attended by her temporal and spiritual aides: soldiers, statesmen and clergy. The canopied throne was apparently in the open air because there were palm trees and a sky showing a radiant sun bursting out of bulgy clouds such as, in India, heralded the wet monsoon. Above the clouds flew the prayerful figures of the angels who were the benevolent spectators of the scene below. Among the statesmen who stood behind the throne one was painted in the likeness of Mr. Disraeli holding up a parchment map of India to which he pointed with obvious pride but tactful humility. An Indian prince, attended by native servants, was approaching the throne bearing a velvet cushion on which he offered a large and sparkling gem. The children in the school thought that this gem was the jewel referred to in the title. Miss Crane had been bound to explain that the gem was simply representative of tribute, and that the jewel of the title was India herself, which had been transferred from the rule of the British East India Company to the rule of the British Crown in 1858, the year after the Mutiny when the sepoys in the service of the Company (that first set foot in India in the seventeenth century) had risen in rebellion, and attempts had been made to declare an old Moghul prince king in Delhi, and that the picture had been painted after 1877, the year in which Victoria was persuaded by Mr. Disraeli to adopt the title Empress of India.

Somewhere Across the Universe, This Intergalactic Fairytale Is Being Told In the far corner of the Virgo supercluster, a small galaxy called the Milky Way exists, and in one of the further spirals of that galaxy there is said to be a tiny planet called Earth. At a cursory glance, there is nothing seemingly unique about this planet, even though it is simply beautiful, cloaked in calypso blue with an oscillating belt of green. It is, in fact, one of millions like it that live in just this universe.   The extraordinary thing about this planet though, are the beings that exist on it. They have been through war after war. Empires that promised to burn brighter than their resident star, the sun, and disappeared in the blink of an eye. Savage rulers, dictators have destroyed entire portions of it, and yet … they simply refuse to stop existing, it is like they have this treasured thing within them to keep them surviving, and to keep knowing.   Look closer now, oh passer-by, look closer at these beings. They are survivors with a sense of awe and curiosity at everything around them. Sometimes they have lost their way, but this is a thing they never seem to lose, because they are so full of potential.   Promise. This planet may be called Earth, but it should have been called Promise.   If you do not believe this little story, and dismiss it as a silly old wives’ tale, a thing which cannot possibly exist, then I hope you come upon their legendary message. You see, 40 years ago, these beings sent out a message on a space probe that has travelled 20.5 billion kilometres, hoping to meet one of us in space. In it lies a message, the definition of this entire species, and it reads simply:   ‘This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.’   The Voyager is still out there, waiting for someone to come upon it. Maybe that someone is you. Maybe you will remind that species of the greatness that lies in their potential, their promise. Maybe you will be the being that turns that fairytale planet of promise into an intergalactic legend of green and blue.

We are the music makers, And we are the dreamers of dreams, Wandering by lone sea-breakers, And sitting by desolate streams; — World-losers and world-forsakers, On whom the pale moon gleams: Yet we are the movers and shakers Of the world for ever, it seems. With wonderful deathless ditties We build up the world's great cities, And out of a fabulous story We fashion an empire's glory: One man with a dream, at pleasure, Shall go forth and conquer a crown; And three with a new song's measure Can trample a kingdom down. We, in the ages lying, In the buried past of the earth, Built Nineveh with our sighing, And Babel itself in our mirth; And o'erthrew them with prophesying To the old of the new world's worth; For each age is a dream that is dying, Or one that is coming to birth. A breath of our inspiration Is the life of each generation; A wondrous thing of our dreaming Unearthly, impossible seeming — The soldier, the king, and the peasant Are working together in one, Till our dream shall become their present, And their work in the world be done. They had no vision amazing Of the goodly house they are raising; They had no divine foreshowing Of the land to which they are going: But on one man's soul it hath broken, A light that doth not depart; And his look, or a word he hath spoken, Wrought flame in another man's heart. And therefore to-day is thrilling With a past day's late fulfilling; And the multitudes are enlisted In the faith that their fathers resisted, And, scorning the dream of to-morrow, Are bringing to pass, as they may, In the world, for its joy or its sorrow, The dream that was scorned yesterday. But we, with our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see, Our souls with high music ringing: O men! it must ever be That we dwell, in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. For we are afar with the dawning And the suns that are not yet high, And out of the infinite morning Intrepid you hear us cry — How, spite of your human scorning, Once more God's future draws nigh, And already goes forth the warning That ye of the past must die. Great hail! we cry to the comers From the dazzling unknown shore; Bring us hither your sun and your summers; And renew our world as of yore; You shall teach us your song's new numbers, And things that we dreamed not before: Yea, in spite of a dreamer who slumbers, And a singer who sings no more.

I am speaking of the evenings when the sun sets early, of the fathers under the streetlamps in the back streets returning home carrying plastic bags. Of the old Bosphorus ferries moored to deserted stations in the middle of winter, where sleepy sailors scrub the decks, pail in hand and one eye on the black-and-white television in the distance; of the old booksellers who lurch from one ϧnancial crisis to the next and then wait shivering all day for a customer to appear; of the barbers who complain that men don’t shave as much after an economic crisis; of the children who play ball between the cars on cobblestoned streets; of the covered women who stand at remote bus stops clutching plastic shopping bags and speak to no one as they wait for the bus that never arrives; of the empty boathouses of the old Bosphorus villas; of the teahouses packed to the rafters with unemployed men; of the patient pimps striding up and down the city’s greatest square on summer evenings in search of one last drunken tourist; of the broken seesaws in empty parks; of ship horns booming through the fog; of the wooden buildings whose every board creaked even when they were pashas’ mansions, all the more now that they have become municipal headquarters; of the women peeking through their curtains as they wait for husbands who never manage to come home in the evening; of the old men selling thin religious treatises, prayer beads, and pilgrimage oils in the courtyards of mosques; of the tens of thousands of identical apartment house entrances, their facades discolored by dirt, rust, soot, and dust; of the crowds rushing to catch ferries on winter evenings; of the city walls, ruins since the end of the Byzantine Empire; of the markets that empty in the evenings; of the dervish lodges, the tekkes, that have crumbled; of the seagulls perched on rusty barges caked with moss and mussels, unϩinching under the pelting rain; of the tiny ribbons of smoke rising from the single chimney of a hundred-yearold mansion on the coldest day of the year; of the crowds of men ϧshing from the sides of the Galata Bridge; of the cold reading rooms of libraries; of the street photographers; of the smell of exhaled breath in the movie theaters, once glittering aϱairs with gilded ceilings, now porn cinemas frequented by shamefaced men; of the avenues where you never see a woman alone after sunset; of the crowds gathering around the doors of the state-controlled brothels on one of those hot blustery days when the wind is coming from the south; of the young girls who queue at the doors of establishments selling cut-rate meat; of the holy messages spelled out in lights between the minarets of mosques on holidays that are missing letters where the bulbs have burned out; of the walls covered with frayed and blackened posters; of the tired old dolmuşes, ϧfties Chevrolets that would be museum pieces in any western city but serve here as shared taxis, huϫng and puϫng up the city’s narrow alleys and dirty thoroughfares; of the buses packed with passengers; of the mosques whose lead plates and rain gutters are forever being stolen; of the city cemeteries, which seem like gateways to a second world, and of their cypress trees; of the dim lights that you see of an evening on the boats crossing from Kadıköy to Karaköy; of the little children in the streets who try to sell the same packet of tissues to every passerby; of the clock towers no one ever notices; of the history books in which children read about the victories of the Ottoman Empire and of the beatings these same children receive at home; of the days when everyone has to stay home so the electoral roll can be compiled or the census can be taken; of the days when a sudden curfew is announced to facilitate the search for terrorists and everyone sits at home fearfully awaiting “the oϫcials”; CONTINUED IN SECOND PART OF THE QUOTE

Everyone likes coffee—it makes the earth spin, the sun rise, and the general population function without killing too many people.

Our souls are an empire, and this is our legacy.

Kelsier forced himself onward. This wasn’t Hathsin. The crack wouldn’t go down for hours, and there would be no crystal-lined holes to reach through with torn, bleeding arms—stretching, seeking the atium geode hidden within. One geode; that bought one more week of life. Life beneath the taskmasters’ lashes. Life beneath the rule of a sadistic god. Life beneath the sun gone red.

The environmentalist notion about a “Mother Earth” or “delicate balance in nature” is no more sophisticated or based on empirical evidence than is a belief in the “Garden of Eden”. All evidence points to a violently chaotic universe, where our “Mother Earth” is nothing buy a piece of phlegm spat out and being whirled around by our Sun. We are at the mercy of whatever catastrophe is unleashed upon our little piece of Sun hocker, and by no means living in some utopian conception of Eden.

If you’ve been here since the beginning, thanks for sticking with me. I love doing what I do, and to know that at every hour of every day someone, somewhere in the world is reading one of my books is truly an amazing feeling. The sun never sets on the Jason Trapp Empire… Okay, it’s more of a fiefdom. But it’s mine!

Before the battle, he had a famous vision—he claimed to see a shining cross standing above the sun.

and he chose to champion the ancient cult of the sun god.

The British were especially good at complaining, something the Dutch and Americans never did.

But the journey to the building of the Taj Mahal is not straightforward. It involves monstrous egos, a flawless aesthetic vision, profligacy and also, fragile as the bulbul’s song, love.

Across desiccated wasteland, a parched throat Burning sandals, brains baking beneath countless helms Spearheads melting under an unblinking sun The clangour of armour, endless cries for water So end all empires, one way or the other, under the witnessing rage of a sweltering sun, or the ice-cold regard of a withering moon So end all empires, one way or the other.

I do not consider myself a great artict, though she made me wish I was. I could not have known at this first meeting how many times I would fail to capture her, in charcoal and in life. The brazen declaration of her; the pride in that upturned chin, the pointed nose, and the tidy carelessness that put her above the opinions of lesser men. There's little sign of her wit-so close to cruelty-ain any of the drawings I made of her, and this poor prose cannot contain her beauty, body or soul. They are only echoes, as is this.

It was like waiting for the sunrise and a chicken to hatch—if the sun marked the end of the world and the chicken was an all-devouring demon. —THE BOOK OF BRIN

China and Russia, the two leading empires of the Sun-tzu legacy (and the legacy of Lenin), are awash in corruption and gangsterism. They are degenerate empires. The power they have accumulated can only be used for destruction, since they have no intrinsic moral worth. They will be damned by history, even as they attempt to deceive the historians. If the legacy of Sun-tzu takes hold throughout the world, then history will everywhere conform to the laws and patterns of Chinese history. The West will then lie buried in its own rubble. Humanity will suffer a dark age — an age of blood and ignorance. Perhaps the human race will die of shame; for such an outcome would be, in truth, unendurably shameful.

AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION: More than twenty-five years ago while researching the fourth Saint-Germain book, Path of the Eclipse, I ran across references to the Year of the Yellow Snow, sometimes called the Year of the Dark Sun, in Western reckoning A.D. 535-36, which was characterized by catastrophic drops in temperature, crop failures, and famine throughout Asia and Europe, with disruption of trade and movements of populations resulting from these losses—just the sort of event to set the speculative juices, flowing, but not the object of my research, nor the period with which I was dealing, promising though it appeared. Then, about ten years ago, other researchers did some serious scholarship on those disastrous events and tried to determine the cause of what turned out to be a worldwide famine and, after considering a number of different scenarios from meteor collisions to a mini-ice age—which indeed occurred—at last identified the probable source of the trouble as an eruption of that all-time bad-boy volcano, Krakatoa; this eruption was more overwhelming than many of its others, for, according to records in Indonesia, this eruption broke Sumatra off from Java—Krakatoa is at the hinge position of those two islands—and opened the Sundra Strait to a deep-water sea passage instead of only the shallowest-draft boats, which it had been for centuries. The eruption occurred in late February or early March of A.D. 535, and its explosion was heard all the way to Beijing. It had been heralded by many months of regional instability, earthquakes, and drastic variations in ocean temperatures in and around what was becoming the Sundra Strait, making the shipping lanes more treacherous than they had been in the past. Many ships' captains reported dangerous sailing in and around Indonesia, and over time, merchant ships avoided the region. ¶ In April, following the eruption, the ash from the volcano had spread all around the world, and disaster followed after it, impacting global weather patterns and lowering the average temperatures sufficiently to keep crops from growing in most of Asia and Europe, as well as large portions of Africa and Americas. Although every part of the world was affected, there were regions that bore more of the brunt of the tragedy than others. Many of the nomadic people of the Central Asian Steppes were driven out of their traditional grazing lands when their herds began to die because of lack of food as the grasslands became arid plains, and their struggle to find new pastureland was made much more difficult by the impact of the colder weather; the significant westward migration from Central Asia began as an attempt to find grass for their herds. In China and Tibet, the snow that continued to fall all the way into June and July was yellow due to the high levels of sulfur in the upper atmosphere. Closer to the eruption site, actual flakes of sulfur fell from the sky, burning people, animals, and fields alike and contaminating wells, springs, and rivers; the devastation of the Indonesian Islands was calamitous, with tens of thousands of people killed in tsunamis spawned by the eruption, by gaseous emanations, and by sulfur contamination, records of which still exist in the royal archives of the Srivijava Empire, which comprised most of modern Indonesia. For months afterward, the remains of humans, animals, trees, sea-life, and buildings washed up on the shores of what are now Indonesia, the Malay Peninsula, the Philippines, China, and India.

Sirhind (or Lahore), Rajputana, Gujrat, Malwa, Audh (including Rohilkand, strictly Rohelkhand, the country of the Rohelas, or "Rohillas" of the Histories), Agra, Allahabad, and Dehli: and the political division was into subahs, or divisions, sarkars or districts; dasturs, or sub-divisions; and parganahs, or fiscal unions. The Deccan, Panjab (Punjab), and Kabul, which also formed parts of the Empire in its widest extension at the end of the seventeenth century, are omitted, as far as possible, from notice, because they did not at the time of our narration form part of the territories of the Empire of Hindustan, though included in the territory ruled by the earlier and greater Emperors. Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa also formed, at one time, an integral portion of the Empire, but fell away without playing an important part in the history we are considering, excepting for a very brief period. The division into Provinces will be understood by reference to the map. Most of these had assumed a practical independence during the first quarter of the eighteenth century, though acknowledging a weak feudatory subordination to the Crown of Dehli. The highest point in the plains of Hindustan is probably the plateau on which stands the town of Ajmir, about 230 miles south of Dehli. It is situated on the eastern slope of the Aravalli Mountains, a range of primitive granite, of which Abu, the chief peak, is estimated to be near 5,000 feet above the level of the sea; the plateau of Ajmir itself is some 3,000 feet lower. The country at large is, probably, the upheaved basin of an exhausted sea which once rendered the highlands of the Deccan an island like a larger Ceylon. The general quality of the soil is accordingly sandy and light, though not unproductive; yielding, perhaps, on an average about one thousand lbs. av. of wheat to the acre. The cereals are grown in the winter, which is at least as cold as in the corresponding parts of Africa. Snow never falls, but thin ice is often formed during the night. During the spring heavy dews fall, and strong winds set in from the west. These gradually become heated by the increasing radiation of the earth, as the sun becomes more vertical and the days longer. Towards the end of May the monsoon

Communists. People who don’t want to know the war is over. Remember that, Jim.” “Right . . .” Trying to distract the cabin steward with some more cheerful topic, Jim asked: “Basie, did you see the atom bomb go off? I saw the flash over Nagasaki from Nantao Stadium.” “Say, kid . . .” Basie peered at Jim, puzzled by the calm voice of this bloody-nosed boy. He took a gun rag from the rear windowsill and wiped Jim’s nose. “You saw the atom bomb?” “For a whole minute,

Constantine wanted to establish a world or universal religion, with himself at the head. During this council, he declared his divinity by stating that the God of Christians was his personal sponsor. He then replaced certain Christian religious practices of the time with familiar Roman Empire practices of sun worship along with other Pagan teachings from Syria and Persia.

The main barrier between East and West today is that the white man is not willing to give up his superiority and the colored man is no longer willing to endure his inferiority.… The white man is a century behind the colored man. The white man is still thinking in terms of colonies and colonial government. The colored man knows that colonies and colonial-mindedness are anachronisms.

The skillful leader subdues the enemy's troops without any fighting; he captures their cities without laying siege to them; he overthrows their kingdom without lengthy operations in the field. With his forces intact he will dispute the mastery of the Empire, and thus, without losing a man, his triumph will be complete.

I wanted to someday know the code of her elegance and precision and genius, the prose I admired so much, but I wanted to read about my dreamers in their smog-shrouded pale asphalt streets, in their orange groves where the white blossoms fell around us like stars when the sun was going down, in their canyons where the gods of the mountains, like Tahquitz, waited for revenge, in their silver-hot vineyards and the date groves of Mecca where dark men cut grapes and put paper bags around the date clusters. And now it is here. Inlandia.

The Delhi Sultans and the Mughals may have arrived from abroad, and their progenitors might initially have harked back to distant cities in the Ferghana Valley as their idea of ‘home’, but they settled in India and retained no extraterritorial allegiance. They married women from India and diluted their foreign blood to the point that in a few generations no trace remained of their foreign ethnicity. Akbar’s son Jehangir was half-Rajput; Jehangir’s son Shah Jehan also came from an Indian bride; Aurangzeb was only one-eighth non-Indian. Of course, the Mughal emperors were all deeply aware of their connections to Ferghana; they would ask emissaries from there about the conditions of their ancestors’ Chingisid tombs and donate money for their upkeep. The past was part of the Mughal identity, but their conceptions of themselves in the present and for the future became more rooted and embedded in India. The British, in contrast, maintained racial exclusivity, practised discrimination against Indians and sneered at miscegenation. Yes, the Mughal emperors taxed the citizens of India, they claimed tributes from subordinate princes, they plundered the treasuries of those they defeated in battle—all like the British—but they spent or saved what they had earned in India, instead of ‘repatriating’ it to Samarkand or Bukhara as the British did by sending their Indian revenues to London. They ploughed the resources of India into the development of India, establishing and patronizing its industries and handicrafts; they brought painters, sculptors and architects from foreign lands, but they absorbed them at their courts and encouraged them to adorn the artistic and cultural heritage of their new land. The British did little, very little, of such things. They basked in the Indian sun and yearned for their cold and fog-ridden homeland; they sent the money they had taken off the perspiring brow of the Indian worker to England; and whatever little they did for India, they ensured India paid for it in excess. And at the end of it all, they went home to enjoy their retirements in damp little cottages with Indian names, their alien rest cushioned by generous pensions provided by Indian taxpayers.

The brown ant had already forgotten its home. To the twilight Earth and the stars that were just coming out, the span of time may have been negligible, but, for the ant, it was eons. In days now forgotten, its world had been overturned. Soil had taken flight, leaving a broad and deep chasm, and then soil had come crashing down to fill it back in. At one end of the disturbed earth stood a lone black formation. Such things happened frequently throughout this vast domain, the soil flying away and returning, chasms opening up and being filled, and rock formations appearing like visible markers of each catastrophic change. Under the setting sun, the ant and hundreds of its brethren had carried off the surviving queen to establish a new empire. Its return visit was only a chance passing while searching for food.

dreary industry and even with dreary festivity. It was the end of the world, and the worst of it was that it need never end. A convenient compromise had been made between all the multitudinous myths and religions of the Empire; that each group should worship freely and merely live a sort of official flourish of thanks to the tolerant Emperor, by tossing a little incense to him under his official title of Divus. Naturally there was no difficulty about that; or rather it was a long time before the world realised that there ever had been even a trivial difficulty anywhere. The members of some Eastern sect or secret society or other seemed to have made a scene somewhere; nobody could imagine why. The incident occurred once or twice again and began to arouse irritation out of proportion to its insignificance. It was not exactly what these provincials said; though of course it sounded queer enough. They seemed to be saying that God was dead and that they themselves had seen him die. This might be one of the many manias produced by the despair of the age; only they did not seem particularly despairing. They seem quite unnaturally joyful about it, and gave the reason that the death of God had allowed them to eat him and drink his blood. According to other accounts God was not exactly dead after all; there trailed through the bewildered imagination some sort of fantastic procession of the funeral of God, at which the sun turned black, but which ended with the dead omnipotence breaking out of the tomb and rising again like the sun. But it was not the strange story to which anybody paid any particular attention; people in that world had seen queer religions enough to fill a madhouse. It was something in the tone of the madmen and their type of formation. They were a scratch company of barbarians and slaves and poor and unimportant people; but their formation was military; they moved together

The New World was like a vast, tinder-dry forest waiting to burn—and Columbus brought the fire. That European diseases ran rampant in the New World is an old story, but recent discoveries in genetics, epidemiology, and archaeology have painted a picture of the die-off that is truly apocalyptic; the lived experience of the indigenous communities during this genocide exceeds the worst that any horror movie has imagined. It was disease, more than anything else, that allowed the Spanish to establish the world’s first imperio en el que nunca se pone el sol, the “empire on which the sun never sets,” so called because it occupied a swath of territory so extensive that some of it was always in daylight.

They say that the sun never set on the British Empire. I mean it did, but it was hard to see behind the huge pile of dead Indians.

John J. Raskob was likewise floundering. Although he had enough money to do nothing more than laze about in the Palm Beach sun, he was not happy unless his time was fully occupied.

Once you’re a butterfly it’s impossible to go back to being a caterpillar, even if you want to. You’re stuck with those wings, and you have to fly away, and life stops being a simple thing of inching happily along leaves and eating in the sun. Life becomes something else entirely. You don’t get to stay in the Hawthorn glen beside the gurgling brook. You’re forced to go away, away from the forest that had been your home, away from everything you’ve known and loved. You have to be something different and give up everything. There’s always a cost. And I can’t imagine those pretty wings come cheap. Nothing has so far.

It was disease, more than anything else, that allowed the Spanish to establish the world’s first imperio en el que nunca se pone el sol, the “empire on which the sun never sets,” so called because it occupied a swath of territory so extensive that some of it was always in daylight.

The sun will never set on the empire of human beings, so long as they are humans and not colonial creeplings.

He remembered being blinded by his father's light. He remembered refusing to abandon his brothers and sisters, beneath a blue sky at high-sun, far from the city of Desh'ea. He remembered the mechanical thunder of absolute betrayal, when he was stolen from the death he'd so richly earned. He remembered the cold moment of truth as he stood in the dark, his hurting eyes healing, that every day he breathed was an unwanted gift. He was walking another man's destiny now. His destiny was to be with the men and women who needed him, who called for him, who followed him into the mountains, and died without him. A destiny denied. He was Angron of Desh'ea. After that, nothing mattered. He'd listened to the others that begged him, that needed it all to matter. He'd played their games, living another man's life. He'd led his fleets, he'd embraced his sons, he'd told himself that blood was thicker than water, and that the Eaters of Worlds were the army he wanted and the horde he deserved. He'd sustained himself on lies, letting none see how he starved. And he served in his cold-hearted father's empire, enduring the silent sneers of brothers he despised.

Kelsier had heard stories. He had heard whispers of times when once, long ago, the sun had not been red. Times when the sky hadn’t been clogged by smoke and ash, when plants hadn’t struggled to grow, and when skaa hadn’t been slaves. Times before the Lord Ruler. Those days, however, were nearly forgotten. Even the legends were growing vague

the United States is structurally an imperial project, it’s in our political DNA. We’re always looking for a frontier to expand into, we can’t back down, anyone who admits we’re overmatched gets sidelined and booted out of office by an upstart who insists that we can never be defeated, only betrayed.

Which meant gait metrics were unavailable, and facial recognition was notoriously bad at handling skin tones darker than a typical whitebread silicon valley bro. (It went all the way back to the color cards used to optimize photographic film stock for white-skinned targets in the 1950s: algorithms embodied the prejudices and biases of their designers.)

For many reasons—economic, political, military, and religious—the great powers of Europe and the United States began to carve up the world between them, conquering many of the territories, kingdoms, and ancient states of Asia, Africa, and the Pacific. The leaders in this “race” were Great Britain and France, although Belgium, Italy, Holland, and Russia all took part. Japan was also a participant in Asia, having developed a modern economy in an amazing amount of time between 1870 and the late 1890s. As we have seen, Germany had been divided into many states before 1864, and while the Germans were busy fighting for unification and then attempting to build a nation, the other powers of Europe were busy conquering much of the world. This was why von Bülow and the Kaiser wanted “a place in the sun” for Germany, which meant one thing—an empire.

If you learn any three lessons from me, they are these. You never know a person until you see them angry. You never know a weapon until it fails you. And you never know a city until the sun goes down.

The interval between the first and second wars in Iraq (1991 and 2003) has seen a remarkable shift from Clausewitz to Sun Tzu in the discourse about contemporary warfare. Clausewitz enjoyed an undreamed of renaissance in the USA after the Vietnam War and seemed to have attained the status of master thinker. On War enabled many theorists to recognize the causes of America’s traumatic defeat in Southeast Asia, as well as the conditions for gaining victory in the future. More recently, however, he has very nearly been outlawed. The reason for this change can be found in two separate developments. Firstly, there has been an unleashing of war and violence in the ongoing civil wars and massacres, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, in the secessionist wars in the former Yugoslavia, and in the persistence of inter-communal violence along the fringes of Europe’s former empires. These developments seemed to indicate a departure from interstate wars, for which Clausewitz’s theory appeared to be designed, and the advent of a new era of civil wars, non-state wars, and social anarchy. Sun Tzu’s The Art of War seemed to offer a better understanding of these kinds of war, because he lived in an era of never-ending civil wars. Secondly, the reason for the change from Clausewitz to Sun Tzu is connected with the ‘revolution in military affairs’. The concepts of Strategic Information Warfare (SIW) and fourth generation warfare have made wide use of Sun Tzu’s thought to explain and illustrate their position. The ‘real father’ of ‘shock and awe’ in the Iraq War of 2003 was Sun Tzu, argued one commentator in the Asia Times. Some pundits even claimed triumphantly that Sun Tzu had defeated Clausewitz in this war, because the US Army conducted the campaign in accordance with the principles of Sun Tzu, whereas the Russian advisers of the Iraqi army had relied on Clausewitz and the Russian defence against Napoleon’s army in 1812. The triumphant attitude has long been abandoned.

The mountains had exploded and for three days darkness covered the land. When the sun returned at last, it was not the same golden sun which had shone down on the Roman Empire a week before. It was a counterfeit, gleaming dully in a colourless sky above a blasted world.

Galileo also wanted to avoid the error of his colleague Johannes Kepler (1571–1630). For all his brilliant work, Kepler had insisted on making the five Platonic solids the basis for his model of the solar system, rendering it useless for further empirical research. It was a bizarre example of carrying the faith in the perfection of mathematics too far.35 By contrast, Galileo understood that even a divinely ordered cosmos could not be perfect. There were craters on the moon and spots on the sun. Kepler himself had shown that the planetary orbits were not perfect circles as Aristotle and even Copernicus had assumed, but ellipses.

Weather and climates build empires over aeons, but microclimates create the wondrous moment. Why are there so many vineyards in this cool valley? Ah, the sun is bouncing off the river and giving the vines a double dose of its light. Who could not feel a wave of joy in such a discovery? How many delights are hidden under our noses? Will we ever notice that rainbows are a tiny bit smaller at the coast, because of the salt in the rain? The answer is not as important as the question. The act of looking brings wonder.

In the opening paragraphs of the first chapter, the narrator is speaking casually to Mirdath the Beautiful, a maiden of the gentry of the English rural countryside. A more comfortable and bucolic setting cannot be imagined. Then, when he says, 'It is an elf night; the Towers of Sleep rise' she answers by speaking of the Moon-Garden, the City of Twilight, and the Tree with the Great Painted Head. By that word she reveals that she is like him: a soul that is more than mortal, that has lived other lives in other cycles of reincarnation, dimly half-forgotten. She and he are both travelers from moon-lit elfin lands or empires of cloudy nightmare, and they hail from places far beyond the little fields we know, older than human history: they have seen the light of other suns, other days. They dance to music we cannot hear. No one of their own time will understand them.

She sighed, settling back into her wicker chair. A cool early-spring breeze blew through the lower gardens, passing over the petite fountain brook to her left. The air was comfortably moist, and the tress overhead shaded her from the afternoon sun. Being nobility - even fake nobility - certainly did have its perks.

Rapunzel woke up to the dazzling, sparkling, gently chiming display with more cheer than anyone really should who had spent the last six thousand and approximately nine hundred days in a lonely tower. "This birthday is going to be great. I just know it!" She only really knew about birthdays because she had read about them in one of the thirty-seven books she owned: Book #3: Stories from Rome and Other Great Empires. Marc Antony apparently had splendid birthdays, and Cleopatra gave him the most cunning gifts. Anyway, they seemed like a marvelous idea, and she had adopted this time of year as her own. Had there been anyone around, they would have been amazed at the hermit's beauty. For one thing, her cheeks were surprisingly rosy for a girl who had been indoors her whole life. (This was because on sunny Wednesday and Saturday afternoons she carefully followed the window-shaped spot of sun around her room, lying down and soaking in the warm rays.) Her eyes were large and green because of parents she had never known. Her lips were usually set in an expectant smile because she was Rapunzel; good-natured, lighthearted, with a quick mind that constantly refused to be crushed by her circumstances.

Tracing the career of the Teuton through mediaeval and modern history, we can find no possible excuse for denying his actual biological supremacy. In widely separated localities and under widely diverse conditions, his innate racial qualities have raised him to preeminence. There is no branch of modern civilization that is not of his making. As the power of the Roman empire declined, the Teuton sent down into Italy, Gaul, and Spain the re-vivifying elements which saved those countries from complete destruction. Though now largely lost in the mixed population, the Teutons are the true founders of all the so-called Latin states. Political and social vitality had fled from the old inhabitants; the Teuton only was creative and constructive. After the native elements absorbed the Teutonic invaders, the Latin civilizations declined tremendously, so that the France, Italy, and Spain of today bear every mark of national degeneracy. In the lands whose population is mainly Teutonic, we behold a striking proof of the qualities of the race. England and Germany are the supreme empires of the world, whilst the virile virtues of the Belgians have lately been demonstrated in a manner which will live forever in song and story. Switzerland and Holland are veritable synonyms for Liberty. The Scandinavians are immortalized by the exploits of the Vikings and Normans, whose conquests over man and Nature extended from the sun-baked shores of Sicily to the glacial wastes of Greenland, even attaining our own distant Vinland across the sea. United States history is one long panegyric of the Teuton, and will continue to be such if degenerate immigration can be checked in time to preserve the primitive character of the population.

There are empires upon which the sun will never set, railways that cross continents, rivers of wealth that will never run dry, machines that never grow tired. It’s a system too vast and ravenous to ever be dismantled, like a deity or an engine, which swallows men and women whole and belches black smoke into the sky. Its name is Modernity, I am told, and it carries Progress and Prosperity in its coal-fired belly—but I see only rigidity, repression, a chilling resistance to change.

It was time for Constantine to make a decisive intervention of his own. He cast aside his invincible sun god without a second thought. From this point on, he would consider himself a Christian in belief and deed. A month or two later, he issued his imperial Edict of Milan, which brought religious toleration to everyone in the empire, including Christians.

Eve Merrion had developed from a kindly, light-hearted girl into a mature woman of wide information and generous mind. Her sister, Emmeline, had married an officer in the Indian Army, and her environment since her marriage had crystallized all that was conventional in her. “Empire, Prestige, Dignity”—these were Emmeline’s values, described laughingly by Eve as “E.P.D.” In the narrow sphere of army life and thought, Emmeline had grown into what her sister ruefully described as “a perfect lady, perfect within the limitations of social convention.” Emmeline, at thirty-three, was a beautiful woman, still slender, her fine skin unspoiled by tropical suns, though there were wrinkles around her fine dark eyes, and something in her expression told of weariness and disillusionment.