Centennial
But when he saw that the enemy had no
weapons, that even their bows and arrows were
not at hand, and that he was supposed to chop
down little girls and old women, he rebelled
on the spot, taking counsel with no one but
his own conscience. . . . He held his horse
reined tight, tears of rage in his eyes. He
knew that he was doing an unforgivable
thing--he was disobeying an understood command
in the face of the enemy--but he could not
permit his men to participate in this dreadful
massacre, not so long as they were his men. .
. . And they looked, and there were men who
sat their horses at that moment who would all
the rest of their lives give thanks that on
this day they were under the command of
Captain Reed and not Captain Tanner, for the
Indians who slipped past them to safety in the
hills were old, they were young, they were
crippled, they were young men with their arms
shot off by cannonballs--and among them all,
there was not one gun, not one arrow.
-p 495
This manipulation had been made possible by
one of the finest laws ever passed in the
American Congress, the Homestead Act of 1862,
whereby the western lands once owned by
Indians but now owned by the United States
government, were given away in
one-hundred-and-sixty-acre parcels to anyone
who seriously intended living on the land and
cultivating it. Proof of this intention was
simple: a man had to build a habitation on his
land, live in it for certain months each year,
and farm forty of his acres for a period of
five years. At the end of that time he got
title, and the land was his in perpetuity. In
the years following the Civil War, when
rootless families threatened to menace
stabilized society, they were adroitly
converted into self-respecting citizens by the
Homestead Act, and much of the greatness of
states like Kansas and Minnesota and Colorado
stemmed from the application of this wise
law.
-p 523
But she was laughter and a bright breeze and
the dip of a bird's wing.
-p 676
The only task big enough for an honorable man
is the restructuring of his world.
-p 683
For the first time in all the years that Jim
had known him, Calender touched another
person.
-p 713
top
The Drifters
They whistled at her [Britta] and made sly
suggestions, and as she passed them she
thought: If you clowns only knew how easy it
would be if you had any guts. One proper word.
One decent invitation.
It was Saturday night and she was stricken
with lonliness, made no less oppressive by the
fact that she had brought it upon herself: she
could have stayed with the drunken Americans
or she could have picked up the Spaniard, but
she felt that these were not honest options,
and she would not delude herself with them.
Often she [Monica] reminded me of the impalas
that roamed the plains of southern Vwarda,
animals of grace and poetry who could leap far
into the air and land on their small feet,
looking startled at having traversed such
distances.
He was ruining his whole project because the
labor was so cheap. Wherever I went in Asia
after that I looked at the work force and
found the same thing. In Japanese steel mills
before the war they used hundreds of workmen
instead of one machine, because they got the
workmen cheap, and they also got a cheap
product that couldn't compete in the world
market. In China they used thousands of
workmen where ten would suffice, because they
got them cheap, and the results suffered. I
concluded that the most expensive product in
the world is cheap labor, because it lures you
away from rational operations. You pay a man a
high wage, you demand a high return, and from
high returns you pick up a good profit. So
ever since, I've believed in paying a man high
wages, then taxing him like hell for the
welfare of the state.
In Israel the two Pams would have served in
the army and acquired a functional education.
They would not escape being dragged into lives
of maximum service.
It's the good minds that find difficulty in
committing themselves. A lesser girl would
have felt obliged to plod ahead.
Upon inspecting it in situ, she found
it wasn't her thing, as they say. She had the
guts to drop it. Just drop it. And now she's
looking for something else.
And as she sang she wondered if that was not
really the essence of life, to serve at the
source of power, to do what had to be done,
and if the gallows became the logical end of
your behavior, to accept it... but above all
else, to participate, to be at the center of
life as a participant.
In her [Britta] evaluation of herself she was
harsh: "Mr. Fairbanks, if I'd had a
first-class brain, do you think I'd have
dropped out of education at seventeen? I'd
have gone on to become a doctor... or a" --
she hesitated, casting about for the precise
word and ending her sentence with one I had
least expected -- "or a philosopher".
"You can go back," I said. "At eighteen your
education's just beginning."
"Yes, but what I also lack is a first-class
imagination. I have no originality... I'm not
an artist."
"Why can't you just be an educated person?"
"I'd want to make a contribution... something
constructive."
They were intelligent; they were beautiful;
they were grimly determined not to be sucked
back into a routine; and they were a challenge
to all who met them.
"When you get really stoned and have sex, it
can go on forever. You feel as if God was
plowing a field."
...they were with the two young Germans
somewhere else in the lavish quarters, so that
I was left with the older group, and as I
watched them gliding gracefully toward
oblivion, continuing to drink when they had no
further need or desire for alcohol, I
reflected that every age produces its
dropouts, every nation. The percentage remains
constant; it is only the manifestation that
varies.
It was not these inevitable dropouts that I
referred to in my estimate of forty per cent;
it was, rather, that constant group of
Americans who avoid difficult tasks and and
grab onto the first job offered, clinging to
it like frightened leeches for the remainder
of their unproductive lives. It was the girls
who marry the first man who asks them,
building families without meaning or
inspiration, producing the next cycle of
dropouts. It was the adults who surrender
young and make a virtue of their
unproductivity, the miserable teachers who
learn one book and recite it for the next
forty years, the pathetic ministers who build
a lifetime of futility on one moment of
inspiration entertained at the age of
nineteen. These were the dropouts that
concerned me most.
Again she [Gretchen] looked at her hands.
"What I need is a vision of the world -- a
consistent vision in which things fall into
place. I can't devise it by myself." She
fought to choke back a catch in her throat.
"By myself, I simply can't do it."
But the neat trick is not to negotiate the
years from seventeen to twenty-five. Anyone
can do that, and apparently it's a lot easier
than I once thought. The problem is to build
something that will sustain you from
thirty-five to sixty. Finding some kind of
work that gives you pleasure. Finding someone
of the opposite sex you can live with through
the tough years. Finding a way to rear
children. Most of all, keeping your sanity and
your dedication.
The frontier is never where we think it is,
but able men had better be guarding that
frontier.
We agreed that a young person's years of
indecision were not wasted if they provided
thinking space fortified by relevant data,
even though some of the latter might not be
understood at the moment, so that when the
lucky moment of inspiration struck, it found
tinder to ignite, but Joe asked, "What if you
just keep on drifting, not knowing what tinder
to collect because you don't know what's going
to ignite you?"
top
The Source
... but this was a slow process, for Ur and
his neighbors were extremely cautious and the
utterance of a new word might upset the
balance of nature and call into being strange
forces that were better left at rest, so words
tended to be restricted to the same sounds
that time had made familiar.
-p 91
On fleeting occasions in his life Ur had
caught the inner spirit of the cave, that
closed community which embraced its members
and excluded all others. The cave lent
strength to those who lived within it and the
preposterous idea of his wife and son, to
build a separate house for one small family by
the well, was instinctively repugnant to him.
Men should live together, smelling each other
and bringing honey home to all.
-p 95
but if he planted his grains in some spot
lower down on the sides of the wadi, where the
rain was free to wash down, bringing with it
each year bits of new earth to add to the old,
the soil would be replenished and such a field
could be used season after season. So in an
age when fertilizer was unknown Ur had
stumbled upon the flooding-principle that
would later operate along the Nile and the
Euphrates: allow the rivers to overflow and
bring fresh soil to rebuild the old.
-p 105
And she leaped at him with an anguish which
only the bereaved can know, and began beating
him and driving him from the rock.
-p 109
Or discover in the high places a god was
standing.
-p 111
Long ago the town of Makor had learned that if
its gate were wide and forthright, opening
directly into the heart of the town, any enemy
who succeeded in rushing that gate found
himself comfortably inside the town, which he
could then despoil. The entrance to Makor
provided no such opportunity; as soon as a
would-be invader passed through the main gate
he had to make a sharp turn to the left, and
before he could gain speed an equally sharp
turn to the right, all in such tight compass
that he stood exposed to the spears and arrows
of the defenders who crouched above him.
-p 131
For they were judicious men, and when Makor
was at last destroyed a surviving priest had
explained to the stragglers, "Disaster came
because for the past years you have sacrificed
to Melak only the sons of poor families, or
boys defective." They blamed the burning of
the town on this slackening of dedication and
reasoned, "If the respectable families of
Makor refused Melak their first-born, why
should he bother to protect them?" The logic
was self-evident, so in the reconstructed town
only the sons of leading families were offered
to the god, and from the moment that Timna had
born her child, Urball had known that it must
go to the fire.
-p 136
In that strange mixture of death and
eroticism which marked so much of the thinking
in that age...
-p 136
When a community like Makor dedicated
itself to a god of death like Melak and to a
goddess of life like Astarte, the believers
entered unknowingly upon a pair of spirals
which spun them upward or downward--as one
judged the matter--to rites that were bound to
become ever more bizarre. For example, during
the long centuries when the town confined
itself to worshipping the original monolith
El, the priests were satisfied if the town
praised its god with libations of oil or food
set out on wooden trays, for the inherent
nature of El was such that he demanded only
modest honors. And, when the three additional
monoliths were added, their natures required
no extraordinary honors; as for the humble
baals of the olive grove and oil press, they
were satisfied with simple rites: a kiss, a
wreath of flowers draped over the pillar, or a
genuflection.
But when the god Melak was imported from
the coastal cities of the north, a new problem
arose. The citizens of Malor were eager to
adopt him, partly because his demands upon
them were severe, as if this proved his power,
and partly because they had grown somewhat
contemptuous of their local gods precisely
because they were not demanding. Melak, with
his fiery celebrations, had not been forced
upon the town; the town had sought him out as
the fulfillment of a felt need, and the more
demanding he became, the more they respected
him. No recent logic in Makor was so
persuasive as that of the priests after the
destruction of the town: "You were content to
give damaged sons to Melak and in return he
gave you damaged protection." Equally
acceptable was the progression whereby Melak's
appetite had expanded from the blood of a
pigeon to the burning of a dead sheep to the
immolation of living children, for with each
extension of his appetite he became more
powerful and therefore more pleasing to the
people he tyrannized. What he might next
require in way of sacrifice no one could
predict, least of all the priests, for when
the new demands were announced they would not
be something forced down upon the people by
the priests: they would be rites insisted upon
by the people, who within limits received the
kinds of gods they were able to imagine.
Furthermore, the cult of human sacrifice
was of itself not abominable, nor did it lead
to the brutalization of society: lives were
lost which could have been otherwise utilized,
but the matter ended in death and excessive
numbers were not killed, nor did the rites in
which they died contaminate the mind. In fact,
there was something grave and stately in the
picture of a father willing to sacrifice his
first-born son as his ultimate gift for the
salvation of a community; and in later years,
not far from Makor, one of the world's great
religions would be founded upon the spiritual
idealization of such a sacrifice as the
central, culmination act of faith. At Makor,
it was not death that corrupted, but life.
For in the case of Astarte things were
different. To begin with, she was a much older
deity than fiery Melak and perhaps even older
than El himself, for when the first farmer
planted wheat intentionally he bound himself
like a slave to the concept of fertility.
Without the aid of some god to fructify the
earth the farmer was powerless. It was not
what he did that insured prosperity, but what
the god chose to do; and it required only a
moment's reflection to convince men that the
force behind fertility must be feminine...Once
men took the cultivation of their fields
seriously the worship of such a goddess was
inevitable. In principle it was a gentle
religion, paralleling man's most profound
experience, regeneration through the mystery
of sex...
But ingrained in this enchanting concept
was a spiral more swift and sickening than any
which operated in the case of Melak, the god
of death...The spiral of Astarte was a
succession of the loveliest things man knows,
except that any sensible man could see where
it must end, for once Makor gave itself over
to worshipping the principle of fertility it
became inevitable that the rites must finally
be celebrated in the only logical way. And
sooner or later the citizens would insist that
this be done publicly.
-p 139
"It does not matter at what age a male dies
to defend his community. The infant of
months...is as notable a hero as the general
of forty. Men are born to die gloriously, and
those who do so as children achieve greatness
earlier than we who grow older. For them we do
not grieve. They have fulfilled the destiny of
males and their mothers shall feel pride."
-p 142
She recognized Joktan's explanation as the
concept she had been groping for: a solitary
god of no form, residing in no monolith, with
no specific voice.
-p 169
The Hebrews insisted upon the circumcision of
their men for a logical reason: it not only
formed a covenant between the man and
El-Shaddai, an unbreakable allegiance whose
mark remained forever, but it also had the
practical value of indicating without question
or quibble the fact that the man so marked was
a Hebrew. In war against the uncircumcised the
coward might want to run away and later on
deny that he had been a Hebrew. His captors
had only to inspect him to prove he was a
liar, so the circumcised man had better fight
to the death because for him there was no
masking his identity. The Hebrews were
therefore strong warriors who were sometimes
defeated but rarely demoralized, and for much
of this cohesive spirit the desert rite of
circumcision was responsible.
-p 183
in the original version of the Bible the word
virgin was not mentioned. It had been
introduced by Christian scholars as a device
for proving that the Old Testament prophesied
the New and that the New should therefore
supersede the Old.
-p 196
So now Makor was governed by a benign
trinity: El, the unseen father of the gods
whose characteristics grew ever more vague as
the centuries passed; Baal the omnipotent; and
Astarte his wife, who was both forever virgin
and forever pregnant as the mother of all. The
trinity had one additional peculiarity:
Astarte both loved and hated Baal, and it was
this conflict that explained the world's
confusion, the contest between female and
make, the warfare between night and day,
between winter and summer, between death and
life.
-p 200
Being townspeople, they captured El and make
him prisoner inside their walls; they
fragmented him into Baal and Astarte and a
host of lesser gods. They deemed determined to
drag him down to their level, where they could
know him personally and give him specific jobs
to do until he dissipated his force. The
Hebrews, on the other hand, beginning with the
same god having the same attributes, had freed
him of limiting characteristics, launching a
process that would transform him into an
infinite god of infinite power.
-p 217
And for the better part of an hour he prayed,
an engineer seeking guidance from the tool he
was about to use.
-p 217
This was a custom which the Hebrews of the
desert had had to adopt when they moved into
settled land, for blood feuds had ravaged the
tribes, continuing through generations and
causing the loss of many men who were needed
as herdsmen and husbands. Moses himself had
proposed a system whereby cities of refuge
would be established to which accidental
murderers could flee, achieving sanctuary
merely by entering the city gates, but nothing
had so far been accomplished in this respect.
In the meantime, in any town, refuge was
assured those who succeeded in grasping the
horns of the altar, as Gershom now did.
-p 304
Of course, the Levites, those assigned to
tend the temple, were required to provide him
with water and privy accommodations, which
they did by means of clay pots, but
townspeople were responsible for the
feeding...
-p 306
But the builder had early found himself
trapped between Baal, whom he knew to exist in
the earth, and Yahweh, whom he was willing to
accept as the unseen deity; and it is
impossible for any man to vacillate between
two gods: if he tries, he is slowly
eroded.
-p 329
so when the first of the repressive laws
arrived in Makor it was Tarphon who reasoned
with he Jews, proposing the concessions that
make the laws endurable. By force of his
generous personality he diminished the initial
impact of the restrictions and thus prevented
them from having the effect they should have
had.
-p 384
:the old gods were dead; there was only one
God; He had been discovered by the Jews; He
sent the great prophet Jesus Christ to reveal
His views; and now He had sent the final
prophet, Muhammed, to complete them.
-p 609
She listened not to the rabbi but to the
rain, and from its insistent fall she gained
the courage she required to support her
resolution. She felt the cold grayness of this
November day seeping into her heart, making
iron of what had once been blood.
-p 631
Like most men from the desert he held in
contempt any man who would tie himself to a
piece of land instead of remaining free to
roam wherever trade or battle took him.
-p 640
...but some fourteen were left standing
alone, the orphans of the town.
Abd Umar now dismounted and walked among the
fourteen as if they were his sons and
daughters. Of each one he asked, "Where is
your father," and when none could reply he
said, "These children are from this moment the
children of Allah, for Muhammad has said that
all children are born in our faith. It is only
their parents who lead them astray." And he
kissed the children, one by one, and they were
his.
-p 642
No square corners would be allowed, no neatly
squared-off towers, for those he had found
susceptible to assault. "With a battering ram
you can always knock out the corner stones,"
he explained to Luke, "But with a rounded
tower where do you start your attack?" He also
insisted that throughout the castle each rock
be fitted snugly to the next, so that grapples
could find no purchase to support scaling
ladders. Each wall was sloped and situated so
that all parts could be protected by
interlocking arrow fire from two towers. "And
the bottom of each wall," he explained, "must
slope sharply outward...at this angle...so
that when a rock is dropped from the
battlements it will ricochet sharply forward,
crushing any men trying to hide under
protecting cover."
-p 694
Inside the cramped town no more than three
hundred peasants could now live...but since
the fortified town brought peace to the area,
more than fifteen hundred villagers and
farmers could live in security outside the
walls, knowing that in time of trouble they
could retreat to safety within the
battlements.
-p 695
"A Jew believes in God. That He is one
alone, has no physical form, and is eternal..
Only God may be worshipped, but the words of
His prophets are to be obeyed. Of these
prophets Moses our Teacher was greatest, and
the laws which came to him at Sinai came
directly from God. ... You believe that God is
three, that in the body of Jesus He took human
form, and that in such form God can be
worshipped. We don't."
"Why do we hate you Jews so deeply?"
"Because we bear testimony that God is
one. We were placed among you by God to serve
as that reminder."
-p 739
What theology could construct a theory that a
new Church could be built upon the destruction
of all which had made that Church morally
strong?
-p 812
"My thought is that in those critical years
Judaism went back to the basic religious
precepts by which men can live together in a
society, whereas Christianity rushed forward
to a magnificent personal religion which never
in ten thousand years will teach men how to
live together. You Christians will have
beauty, passionate intercourse with God,
magnificent buildings, frenzied worship and
exaltation of the spirit. But you will never
have that close organization of society,
family life and the little community that is
possible under Judaism.
-p 822
There was an evil in the world which God was
powerless to combat without the men...
-p 862
For religion was not a solid basis upon which
to construct either a nation or a congeries of
nations...
-p 888
You know the maxim we Arabs are taught. 'A
man who gains his revenge after forty years is
acting in haste.'
-p 916
Yet it was apparent to him that Ilana had
come to identify God with the land, not
differentiating between the two, and as the
truck bounced along he thought: This must be
the way people believed five thousand years
ago when the long progression to monotheism
started.
-p 948
top
Space
Rachel Lindquist believed that one test of a
woman was how she organized space: 'Whether it
controls you, or you control it.'
-p 124
"The ablative absolute," his Latin teacher
had explained, "is used by men of action who
don't want to waste words. Ponte facto
Caesar transit. The bridge built, Caesar
crossed it. Consider how effective this is. No
bothering with who built the bridge or at what
cost. The bridge was built, as a bridge should
be, and Caesar crossed it."
Like many successful men, Pope believed that
was required of him to do at the moment
represented the happiest experience of his
life.
...Joseph Louis Lagrange . . . deduced that
when one massive object orbited another, five
points developed in remote space at which very
small celestial bodies could find refuge and
remain stable despite the pull of the larger
bodies.
-p 265
He had charisma, as carefully nurtured as
delicate plantings in a spring garden, and his
problem now was how to best capitalize on it.
"I'm the one who's sorry, but I work in a
tough world where any challenge to honor must
be met... right then."
"You got it backwards, Penny. He isn't willing
to use nefarious means. He prefers using them.
Same thing happens when you launch a person
with ideas at a target with emotional content.
Who can anticipate?
I work like a Korean potter. I underpaint,
ridiculously. I must know how you felt about
Jensen's death, and a thousand other things,
so that when in my book you present you as my
scientist -- for give me, my engineer -- the
underpainting will be so generous that your
portrait will vibrate for five hundred years.
"I guessed you'd like him. I find him too
sentimental. My type is more "Bang-bang let's
atomize the planet Oom."
"But why the 31,000-odd tiles?"
"Because the Shuttle will be a living,
breathing, moving thing. It's various parts
will interact, and if you simply plaster our
new material over its face, hundreds of feet
wide, inches thick, the first creaking motion
in the structure would crack the protection
and make it break off in huge chunks. By using
the tiles, we build in 4 X 31,000 joints...
well, somewhat less because the edge of one
tile makes its joint with the edge of another.
You figure it out. But one hell of a lot of
joints. And they give, not the whole fabric."
The NASA scientists, bloated by one success
after another -- the Moon, Mars, Jupiter --
had come to believe that they could do
anything, and they saw nothing preposterous in
a plan which called for the hand manufacture
and hand application of 31,689 different
tiles.
With television and our good magazines, a few
people will know about our visit to Saturn,
but of one thing you can be sure. As in the
case of Copernicus and Newton, everyone who
ought to know will know, and the
reverberations of these next few days will
echo through eternity, reappearing from time
to time in manifestations that would astonish
you.
-p 747
And he concluded that all persons are
obligated to wrestle with the universe as they
perceive it, and those who are terrified by
the prospect retreat to little corners from
which they seek to destroy the machines doing
the outward probing and the men who manage
them.
-p 760
top
Texas
Because good-hearted men like Jubal Quimper
honestly believed that their freedom could be
ensured only by their right to enslave
others.
-p 262
And he spoke with such reverence for the
simple act of knowing that Macnab began to
consider this curious possibility: that a son
of the glen could attend the university and
become a better man for having done so,
regardless of that occupation he followed
thereafter.
-p 304
They kept to the road, this stubborn father
and his son nearing six, and it was then that
the little boy fixed in his mind the image
which would live with him for the rest of his
life: a cabin secure in the wilderness, refuge
from the lonely, shadow-filled road.
-p 304
He has his own special definition of honor,
of propriety. Men with their own definitions
always mean trouble for other men.
-p 420
You can say I was faithful, because I was.
And you can say I come back when I could of
run away, because I did. And you can say, I
was respectful, because I liked the way you
handled this plantation with the men gone,
Miss Prue. I tried to be a good slave, but
don't never say I liked it.
-p 709
He said this so forcefully that the Cobbs
were stunned; they could not imagine that a
black man would surrender such an obvious
financial advantage in defense of a
principle.
-p 709
With the ability she had acquired to suffer
anything, she kept her chin high and looked
right at Earnshaw Rusk, and when he saw her he
gasped. Trying to speak, he could not, and for
a long moment these two stared at each
other--the near-crazed child of torture and
the near-godlike believer in the goodness of
man.
-p778
