Words&Dirt

“The Revolution was done, it had been Glorious, and what made it glorious was that it had been an anticlimax.  There’d been no Civil War this time, no massacres, no trees bent under the weight of hanged men, no slave-ships.  Was Daniel flattering himself to suppose that this could be put down to his good work?

All his upbringing had taught him to expect a single dramatic moment of apocalypse.  Instead this had been slow evolution spread all round and working silently, like manure on a field.  If anything important had happened, it had done so in places where Daniel wasn’t.  Buried in it somewhere was an inflection point that later they’d point to as the Moment It All Happened.

He was not such an old tired Puritan that he didn’t get joy out of it.  But its very anticlimactitude, if that was a word, its diffuseness, was a sort of omen to him.  It was like being an astronomer, up in that tower behind him, at the moment that the letter arrived from the Continent in which Kepler mentioned that the earth was not, in fact, at the center of the universe.  Like that astronomer, Daniel had much knowledge, and only some of it was wrong––but all of it had to be gone over now, and re-understood.  This realization settled him down a bit.  As when a queer wind-gust comes down chimney and fills a room of merry-makers with smoke, and covers the pudding with a black taste.  He was not quite ready for life in this England.

Now he understood why he’d felt so attracted to the river earlier: not because it was serene, but because it had the power to take him somewhere else.”

––Quicksilver, by Neal Stephenson, pg. 864

“New information technologies, bringing new kinds of international commerce, bring new kinds of disruption.  A thief can sit in one nation and steal money from banks in another.  The solutions to such supranational problems inherently amount to small steps in the direction of supranational governance.  How far we’ll walk down that path is quite arguable, but the path’s basic direction is less so.  Whenever technology has expanded the envelope of non-zero-sumness, new zero-sum threats have materialized, only to be combatted by larger governance in one sense or another.”

––Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, by Robert Wright, pg. 122