“They came into the light of another street-lamp. Daniel took advantage of it to look at his companion’s face, and gauge his mood. Leibniz looked a good deal more resolute than he had beneath the previous street-lamp. ‘It is childish of me to expect older men to tell me what to do,’ the Doctor said. […]
“‘You have been to London before, Dr. Leibniz?’ ‘I have been studying London-paintings.’ ‘I’m afraid most of those became antiquarian curiosities after the Fire––like street plans of Atlantis.’ ‘And yet viewing several depictions of even an imaginary city, is enlightening in a way,’ Leibniz said. ‘Each painter can view the city from only one standpoint […]
“They’d come here supposedly as refugees from the Black Death, but really they were fleeing their own ignorance––they hungered for understanding, and were like starving wretches who had broken into a lord’s house and gone on an orgy of gluttonous feasting, wolfing down new meals before they could digest, or even chew, the old ones. […]
“‘Heavenly radiance fills the æther, its rays parallel and straight and, so long as nothing is there to interrupt them, invisible. The secrets of God’s creation are all told by those rays, but told in a language we do not understand, or even hear––the direction from which they shine, the spectrum of colors concealed within […]
“‘My father, Drake, educated me for one reason alone,’ Daniel finally says. ‘To assist him in his preparations for the Apocalypse. He reckoned it would occur in the year 1666––Number of the Beast and all that. I was, therefore, produced in 1646––as always, Drake’s timing was carefully thought out. When I came of age, I […]
“‘He will be a great empiricist. He will, perhaps, be the one to accomplish some great thing we have never imagined.’ ‘Enoch, what can you possibly be talking about?’ It made his head ache. How was he able to explain it without making Clarke out to be a fool, and himself a swindler? ‘Something is […]
“There is some error, one frightful error, in the thinking of men. What is that error? We do not know, but the knowledge struggles within us, struggles to be born.” ––Anthem, by Ayn Rand, loc. 877 “A learned person once told me about her favorite sentence, one that she said comes closer to defining […]
“The nature of parties has been imperfectly studied. It is, however, generally understood that a party has a pathology, that it is a kind of individual and that it is likely to be a very perverse individual. And it is also generally understood that a party hardly ever goes the way it is planned or […]
“‘It has always seemed strange to me,’ said Doc. ‘The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of […]
“It was good hunting that day. He got twenty-two little octopi. And he picked off several hundred sea cradles and put them in his wooden bucket. As the tide moved out he followed it while the morning came and the sun arose. The flat extended out two hundred yards and then there was a line […]