Words&Dirt

“The Zoologist looked troubled.  Eventually it said, ‘When you come back from the Sublime, it is as though you leave all but one of your senses behind, as though you have all the rest removed, torn away––and you have become use to having hundreds.’  It paused.  ‘Imagine you,’ it said, nodding at the Caconym, ‘being a human––a basic human, even, without augmentation or amendment: slow, limited, fragile, with no more than a couple of handfuls of very restricted senses.  Then imagine that you have all your senses but––say––touch taken away, and most of your memories as well, including all those to do with language, save for the sort of simple stuff spoken by toddlers.  Then you are exiled, blind and deaf and with no sense of smell or taste or cold or warmth, to a temperate water world inhabited only by gel fish, sponges and sea-feathers, to swim and make your way as best you can, in a world with no sharp edges and almost nothing solid at all.’  The Zoologist paused.  ‘That is what it is to return from the Sublime to the Real.’

The Caconym nodded slowly.  ‘So, why did you?’

The Zoologist shrugged.  ‘To experience a kind of extreme asceticism,’ it said, ‘and to provide a greater contrast, when I return.'”

––The Hydrogen Sonata, by Iain M. Banks, pg. 150

“Long after the Roman Empire itself had collapsed, the opposites delineated by the Rubicon––liberty and despotism, anarchy and order, republic and autocracy––would continue to haunt the imaginings of Rome’s successors.  Narrow and obscure the stream may have been, so insignificant that its very location was ultimately forgotten, yet its name is remembered still.  No wonder.  So fateful was Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon that it has come to stand for every fateful step taken since.

With it, an era of history passed away.  Once, there had been free cities dotted throughout the Mediterranean.  In the Greek world, and in Italy too, these cities had been inhabited by men who identified themselves not as the subjects of a pharaoh or a king of kings, but as citizens, and who proudly boasted of the values that distinguished them from slaves––free speech, private property, rights before the law.  Gradually, however, with the rise of new empires, first those of Alexander the Great and his successors, and then of Rome, the independence of such citizens everywhere had been stifled.  By the first century B.C., there was only one free city left, and that was Rome herself.  And then Caesar crossed the Rubicon, the Republic imploded, and none was left at all.

As a result, a thousand years of civic self-government were brought to an end, and not for another thousand, and more, would it become a living reality again.”

––Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic, by Tom Holland, loc. 125-37