There’s a time and place for everything, and I believe it’s called ‘fan fiction’.
—Joss Whedon (via excessivebookshelf)
We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.
—Kurt Vonnegut (via excessivebookshelf)
A philosopher/mathematician named Bertrand Russell, who lived and died in the same century as Gass, once wrote: ‘Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.’ Here is the essence of mankind’s creative genius: not the edifices of civilization nor the bang-flash weapons which can end it, but the words which fertilize new concepts like spermatozoa attacking an ovum. It might be argued that the Siamese-twin infants of word/idea are the only contribution the human species can, will, or should make to the reveling cosmos. (Yes, our DNA is unique but so is a salamander’s. Yes, we construct artifacts but so have species ranging from beavers to the architect ants whose crenellated towers are visible right now off the port bow. Yes, we weave real-fabric things from the dreamstuff of mathematics, but the universe is hardwired with arithmetic. Scratch a circle and π peeps out. Enter a new solar system and Tycho Brahe’s formulae lie waiting under the black velvet cloak of space/time. But where has the universe hidden a word under its outer layer of biology, geometry, or insensate rock?) Even the traces of other intelligent life we have found – the blimps on Jove II, the Labyrinth Builders, the Seneschai empaths on Hebron, the Stick People of Durulis, the architects of the Time Tombs, the Shrike itself – have left us mysteries and obscure artifacts but no language. No words.
—Dan Simmons, ‘Hyperion’ (via maybeandroid)
(via derekaustinjohnson)
Words are the only bullets in truth’s bandolier. And poets are the snipers.
—Dan Simmons
Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos)
(via kerina)
(Source: kindlequotes, via derekaustinjohnson)
J.R.R. Tolkein on escape
“Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisioned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape?… If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!”—
J.R.R. Tolkien
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, on the trivialization of the Haitian Revolution
The search for external influences on the Haitian Revolution provides a fascinating example of archival power at work, not because such influences are impossible but because of the way the same historians treat contrary evidence that displays the internal dynamics of the revolution. Thus, many historians are more willing to accept the idea that slaves could have been influenced by whites or free mulattoes, with whom we know they had limited contacts, than they are willing to accept the idea that slaves could have convinced other slaves that they had the right to revolt. The existence of extended communication networks among slaves, of which we have only a glimpse, has not been a “serious” subject of historical research.
Similarly, historians otherwise eager to find evidence of “external” participant in the 1791 uprising skip the unmistakable evidence that the rebellious slaves had their own program. In one of their earliest negotiations with representatives of the French government, the leaders of the rebellion did not ask for an abstractly couched “freedom.” Rather, their most sweeping demands included three days a week to work on their own gardens and the elimination of the whip. These were not Jacobinist demands adapted to the tropics, nor royalist claims twice creolized. These were slave demands with the strong peasant touch that would characterize independent Haiti. But such evidence of an internal drive, although known to most historians, is not debated – not even to be rejected or interpreted otherwise. It is simply ignored, and this ignorance produces a silence of trivialization.
— Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, on the history of the unthinkable
If some events cannot be accepted even as they occur, how can they be assessed later? In other words, can historical narratives convey plots that are unthinkable in the world within which these narratives take place? How does one write a history of the impossible?
— Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, on the palace Sans Souci, desolation, and glory
In the northern mountains of the Republic of Haiti, there is an old palace called Sans Souci that many urbanites and neighboring peasants revere as one of the most important historical monuments of their country. The palace – what remains of it – stands on a small elevation between the higher hills surrounding the town of Milot. It is impressive if only because of its size – or what one can now guess to have been its size. It was built to instill a long lasting deference, and it still does. One does not stumble upon these ruins; they are both too remote and too often mentioned within Haiti for the encounter to be fully accidental. Anyone who comes here, enticed by the posters of Haiti’s Department du Tourisme or by one or another narrative of glory, is at least vaguely familiar with Haiti’s record and assumes history to be dormant within these crumbling walls. Anyone who comes here knows that this huge dwelling was built in the early nineteenth century, for a black king, by blacks barely out of slavery. Thus the traveler is soon caught between the sense of desolation that molds Sans Souci’s present and a furtive awareness of bygone glory. There is so little to see and so much to infer. Anyone who comes here comes too late, after a climax of which little has been preserved, yet early enough to dare imagine what it might have been.
— Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History
