Gary Snyder’s Cold Mountain Poems

Author: Gary Snyder
Rating: 4/5
Read: 4/18, 2/19
Who Should Read: People interested in Zen, poetry, Chinese thought

Hanshan, or “Cold Mountain”, is one of my favorite Chinese poets (alongside Stonehouse). Hahshan was (supposedly) a Chinese Buddhist monk who lived in isolation in the wilderness. The poems attributed to him sparkle with a disdain for civilized life and carry a Zen and Taoist bent.

Cold Mountain Poems is a small collection poems translated by Gary Snyder, who does a wonderful job translating Hanshan’s words and feelings. Included are some of my favorite poems from this collection.

My Highlights

Gary Snyder on why he was qualified to translate Cold Mountain’s poems:

I had been a mountaineer and forestry laborer as well as a bookish scholar for several years already, and simply could draw on a wide experience of events and words and observations in finding ways to represent the Han-shan imagery. I also regularly made a practice of internalizing and visualizing the taste of the whole scene – cold, wet, rocky, lonely, or whatever was called for – to the point that I could write it out with some sense of presence. This doesn’t always work by any means, but it is exciting when it does. It reaches across time and space.

On the interest in such poetry:

At least for non–East Asians, they touch us not because of the invocation of a hermetic ideal or solitary asceticism, but because of the almost joyful rejection of materialism and the absolute pleasure in being in the great world “with a sky for a blanket,” aware of living a life apart from the value-assumptions of mainstream people.

There is a deep strain of non-ideological dubiousness about the large materialistic goals that are the official “dream” of developed-world people and certain others worldwide.

Selected Poems

Here are some of my favorite poems from this collection.

2

In a tangle of cliffs I chose a place –
Bird-paths, but no trails for men.
What’s beyond the yard?
White clouds clinging to vague rocks.
Now I’ve lived here – how many years –
Again and again, spring and winter pass.
Go tell families with silverware and cars
“What’s the use of all that noise and money?”

6

Men ask the way to Cold Mountain
Cold Mountain: There’s no through trail.
In summer, ice doesn’t melt
The rising sun blurs in swirling fog
How did I make it?
My heart’s not the same as yours.
If your heart was like mine
You’d get it and be right here.

8

Clambering up the Cold Mountain Path,
The Cold Mountain Trail goes on and on:
The long gorge choked with scree and boulders,
The wide cree, the mist-blurred grass.
The moss is slippery, though there’s been no rain.
The pine sings, but there’s no wind.
Who can leap the world’s ties
and sit with me among the white clouds?

11

Spring-water in the green creek is clear
Moonlight on Cold Mountain is white
Silent knowledge – the spirit is enlightened of itself
Contemplate the void: this world exceeds stillness

16

Cold Mountain is a house
Without beams or walls.
The six doors left and right are open
The hall is blue sky.
The rooms all vacant and vague
The east wall beats on the west wall
At the center nothing.
Borrowers don’t bother me
In the cold I build a little fire
When I’m hungry I boil up some greens.
I’ve got no use for the Kulak
With his big barn and pasture –
He just sets up a prison for himself.
Once in he can’t get out.
Think it over –
You know it might happen to you.

17

If I hide out at Cold Mountain
Living off mountain plants and berries –
All my lifetime, why worry?
One follows his karma through.
Days and months slip by like water,
Time is like sparks knocked off flint.
Go ahead and let the world change –
I’m happy to sit among these cliffs.

20

Some critic tried to put me down –
“Your poems lack the basic truth of Tao”
And I recall the old-timers
Who were poor and didn’t care.
I have to laugh at him,
He misses the point entirely,
Men like that
Ought to stick to making money.

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Cold Mountain Poems

By Gary Snyder

December 27, 2018

Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick

Author: Philip K. Dick
Rating: 4/5
Last Read: December 2018
Who Should Read: Sci-fi fans, short story fans

My favorite form of science fiction is the short story. The short story format enables science fiction writers to paint a picture and separate us from our day-to-day reality, while simultaneously holding up a mirror and highlighting aspects of our human experience that we may not consciously consider.

Philip K. Dick is one of sci-fi’s short story masters. Somehow I avoided his writing for most of my sci-fi reading career, and I’ve been rectifying that by working through various collections.

Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick is an excellent entry point into his work. Contained within are twenty-one of his best short stories, showcasing work spanning his entire career. Many of these stories are sci-fi classics and inspired films, such as Minority Report and Total Recall.

My favorite stories in this collection are:

“The Minority Report”
“We Can Remember It For You Wholesale”
“The Exit Door Leads In”
“Rautavaara’s Case”

My Highlights

Kabir, the sixteenth-century Sufi poet, wrote, “If you have not lived through something, it is not true.” So live through it; I mean, go all the way to the end. Only then can it be understood, not along the way.

The existence of a majority logically implies a corresponding minority.

“But there can be no valid knowledge about the future. As soon as precognitive information is obtained, it cancels itself out. The assertion that this man will commit a future crime is paradoxical. The very act of possessing this data renders it spurious. In every case, without exception, the report of the three police precogs has invalidated their own data. If no arrests had been made, there would still have been no crimes committed.”

“There were three minority reports,” he told Witwer, enjoying the young man’s confusion. Someday, Witwer would learn not to wade into situations he didn’t fully understand. Satisfaction was Anderton’s final emotion. Old and worn out as he was, he had been the only one to grasp the real nature of the problem.

“Where would you like to go first? New York City? Broadway? To the night clubs and theaters and restaurants . . .”
“No, to Central Park. To sit on a bench.”
“But there is no more Central Park, Mr. Biskle. It was turned into a parking lot for government employees while you were on Mars.”
“I see,” Milt Biskle said. “Well, then Portsmouth Square in San Francisco will do.” He opened the door of the ’copter.
“That, too, has become a parking lot,” Miss Ableseth said, with a sad shake of her long, luminous red hair. “We’re so darn overpopulated. Try again, Mr. Biskle; there are a few parks left, one in Kansas, I believe, and two in Utah in the south part near St. George.”
“This is bad news,” Milt said. “May I stop at that amphetamine dispenser and put in my dime? I need a stimulant to cheer me up.”

Ironically, he had gotten exactly what he had asked Rekal, Incorporated for. Adventure, peril, Interplan police at work, a secret and dangerous trip to Mars in which his life was at stake—everything he had wanted as a false memory. The advantages of it being a memory—and nothing more—could now be appreciated.

DOCTRINES OF THE ABSOLUTE BENEFACTOR ANTICIPATED IN THE POETRY OF BAHA AD-DIN ZUHAYR OF THIRTEENTH-CENTURY ARABIA
Glancing down the initial pages of the essay, Chien saw a quatrain familiar to him; it was called “Death,” and he had known it most of his adult, educated life.
Once he will miss, twice he will miss,
He only chooses one of many hours;
For him nor deep nor hill there is,
But all’s one level plain he hunts for flowers.

“Don’t you see, Mr. Chien? You’ve learned something. The Leader is not the Leader; he is something else, but we can’t tell what. Not yet. Mr. Chien, with all due respect, have you ever had your drinking water analyzed? I know it sounds paranoiac, but have you?”
“No,” he said. “Of course not.”
Knowing what she was going to say. Miss Lee said briskly, “Our tests show that it’s saturated with hallucinogens. It is, has been, will continue to be. Not the ones used during the war; not the disorientating ones, but a synthetic quasi-ergot derivative called Datrox-3. You drink it here in the building from the time you get up; you drink it in restaurants and other apartments that you visit. You drink it at the Ministry; it’s all piped from a central, common source.” Her tone was bleak and ferocious. “We solved that problem; we knew, as soon as we discovered it, that any good phenothiazine would counter it. What we did not know, of course, was this—a variety of authentic experiences; that makes no sense, rationally. It’s the hallucination which should differ from person to person, and the reality experience which should be ubiquitous—it’s all turned around. We can’t even construct an ad hoc theory which accounts for that, and God knows we’ve tried. Twelve mutually exclusive hallucinations—that would be easily understood. But not one hallucination and twelve realities.”

But His Greatness, Chien thought, jolted. He did not appear, on the TV screen, to be Occidental. “On TV—” he began. “The image,” Tso-pin interrupted, “is subjected to a variegated assortment of skillful refinements. For ideological purposes. Most persons holding higher offices are aware of this.” He eyed Chien with hard criticism. So everyone agrees, Chien thought. What we see every night is not real. The question is, How unreal? Partially? Or—completely?

All this time, he thought. Hallucinogens in our water supply. Year after year. Decades. And not in wartime but in peacetime. And not to the enemy camp but here in our own. The evil bastards, he said to himself.

And—he was curious. A bad emotion, he knew. Curiosity was, especially in Party activities, often a terminal state careerwise.

“Did it ever occur to you,” Chien said, “that good and evil are names for the same thing? That God could be both good and evil at the same time?”

the computer found no programming circuit. Do I want to interfere with the reality tape? And if so, why? Because, he thought, if I control that, I control reality. At least so far as I’m concerned. My subjective reality . . . but that’s all there is. Objective reality is a synthetic construct, dealing with a hypothetical universalization of a multitude of subjective realities.

Maybe what I want to do, Poole thought, is die.

What I want, he realized, is ultimate and absolute reality, for one micro-second. After that it doesn’t matter, because all will be known; nothing will be left to understand or see.

“Addi has got more to live for than we do.” “Every man has more to live for than any other man. I don’t have a cute chick to sleep with, but I’d like to see the semis rolling along Riverside Freeway at sunset a few more times. It’s not what you have to live for; it’s that you want to live to see it, to be there—that’s what is so damn sad.”

Explanations—that’s what we need. Explanations for problems that don’t exist yet; we can develop the problems later.”

It was hell living in the twenty-first century. Information transfer had reached the velocity of light. Bibleman’s older brother had once fed a ten-word plot outline into a robot fiction machine, changed his mind as to the outcome, and found that the novel was already in print. He had had to program a sequel in order to make his correction.

To himself he thought, I was born in the wrong century. A hundred years ago this wouldn’t have happened and a hundred years from now it will be illegal. What I need is a lawyer.

The first pamphlet pointed out that it was a great honor to be admitted to the College. That was its name—the one word. How strange, he thought, puzzled. It’s like naming your cat Cat and your dog Dog. This is my mother, Mrs. Mother, and my father, Mr. Father. Are these people working right? he wondered. It had been a phobia of his for years that someday he would fall into the hands of madmen—in particular, madmen who seemed sane up until the last moment. To Bibleman this was the essence of horror.

“My point,” Major Casals said, “is simply that certain information such as architectural principles of long-standing—”
“Most architectural principles are long-standing,” Mary said. Major Casals paused. “Otherwise they’d serve no purpose,” Mary said.

Do you know yourself? But you’ll be getting into that when the College bombards you with early Greek thought. ‘Know thyself.’ Apollo’s motto at Delphi. It sums up half of Greek philosophy.”

“It is generally considered that Thales was the first rational man in history,” the terminal said.
“What about Ikhnaton?” Bibleman said.
“He was strange.”
“Moses?”
“Likewise strange.”
“Hammurabi?”
“How do you spell that?”
“I’m not sure. I’ve just heard the name.”
“Then we will discuss Anaximander,” the College terminal said. “And, in a cursory initial survey, Anaximenes, Xenophanes, Paramenides, Melissus—wait a minute; I forgot Heraclitus and Cratylus. And we will study Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Zeno—”
“Christ,” Bibleman said.
“That’s another program,” the College terminal said.

“Since you are so full of conflict, you should find Empedocles interesting. He was the first dialectical philosopher. Empedocles believed that the basis of reality was an antithetical conflict between the forces of Love and Strife. Under Love the whole cosmos is a duly proportioned mixture, called a krasis. This krasis is a spherical deity, a single perfect mind which spends all its time—”
“Is there any practical application to any of this?” Bibleman interrupted.
“The two antithetical forces of Love and Strife resemble the Taoist elements of Yang and Yin with their perpetual interaction from which all change takes place.”
“Practical application.”
“Twin mutually opposed constituents.” On the holoscreen a schematic diagram, very complex, formed. “The two-rotor Panther Engine.”

Blame is a mere cultural matter; it does not travel across species boundaries.

No wonder he loved Martine so; she herself loved back, loved the beauties of the world, and treasured and cherished them as she treasured and cherished him; it was a protective love that nourished but did not stifle.

“Hi,” Martine said, off the VF now. “What are you thinking?”
“Just that you keep alive what you love,” he said.
“I think that’s what you’re supposed to do,” Martine said.

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Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick

By Philip K. Dick

December 18, 2018

The Forever War

Author: Joe Haldeman
Rating: 5/5
Last Read: November 2018
Who Should Read: Sci-fi fans, fans of military fiction, fans of Old Man’s War

I’ve been told that I should read The Forever War at least three times a year for the past ten years. I finally got around to reading it, like John Scalzi in the book’s introduction, and all I really have to say is: everyone was absolutely right. The Forever War is a wonderful book.

The novel is set in a future (circa 1996) where Earth is engaged in a war in the far-out reaches of space with another sentient race. Earth conscripts the best of humanity for soldiering and trains them to fight in laser-equipped battle suits. The novel follows the soldiering career of William Mandella, starting with his “boot camp” experiences and moving through various interstellar battles. Each battle involves a large relative time shift for Mandella, so on each return trip to our solar system he experiences “future” shock due to societal changes that happened in the hundreds of years he was away.

This book is an award-winning sci-fi classic for a good reason. There’s plenty of action, interesting future scenarios, and commentary on society and humanity.

To my mind, there are two things that make a novel a “classic”—a genuine classic, as opposed to merely “old and continuing to sell.” The first is that it speaks to the time in which the novel first appeared. There is no doubt The Forever War did this; its awards and acclaim are signifiers of that fact. The second thing is tougher, and that is that it keeps speaking to readers outside its time, because what’s in the book touches on something that never goes away, or at the very least keeps coming around.

I stopped at the first book (I tend to avoid series), but if you are interested in continuing there is another book in the series.

If you enjoy The Forever War, you will also enjoy John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War. (The same applies if you loved Old Man’s War – read this book!)

My Highlights

‘Man was born into barbarism, when killing his fellow man was a normal condition of existence. He became endowed with a conscience. And he has now reached the day when violence toward another human being must become as abhorrent as eating another’s flesh.’ — Martin Luther King, Jr.

Relativity propped it up, at least gave it the illusion of being there … the way all reality becomes illusory and observer-oriented when you study general relativity. Or Buddhism. Or get drafted.

Since the planet rotated rather slowly — once every ten and one-half days — a ‘stationary’ orbit for the ship had to be 150,000 klicks out. This made the people in the ship feel quite secure, with 6,000 miles of rock and 90,000 miles of space between them and the enemy. But it meant a whole second’s time lag in communication between us on the ground and the ship’s battle computer. A person could get awful dead while that neutrino pulse crawled up and back.

‘Sarge, tell that computer to do something! We’re gonna get—’
‘Oh, shut up, Mandella. Trust in th’ lord.’
‘Lord’ was definitely lower-case when Cortez said it.

… I felt my gorge rising and knew that all the lurid training tapes, all the horrible deaths in training accidents, hadn’t prepared me for this sudden reality … that I had a magic wand that I could point at a life and make it a smoking piece of half-raw meat; I wasn’t a soldier nor ever wanted to be one nor ever would want—

‘Night.’ It’s almost impossible to get sexually excited inside a suit, with the relief tube and all the silver chloride sensors poking you, but somehow this was my body’s response to the emotional impotence, maybe remembering more pleasant sleeps with Marygay, maybe feeling that in the midst of all this death, personal death could be very soon, cranking up the procreative derrick for one last try … lovely thoughts like this.

I fell asleep and dreamed that I was a machine, mimicking the functions of life, creaking and clanking my clumsy way through a world, people too polite to say anything but giggling behind my back, and the little man who sat inside my head pulling the levers and clutches and watching the dials, he was hopelessly mad and was storing up hurts for the day—

I hardly heard him for trying to keep track of what was going on in my skull. I knew it was just post-hypnotic suggestion, even remembered the session in Missouri when they’d implanted it, but that didn’t make it any less compelling. My mind reeled under the strong pseudo-memories: shaggy hulks that were Taurans (not at all what we now knew they looked like) boarding a colonists’ vessel, eating babies while mothers watched in screaming terror (the colonists never took babies; they wouldn’t stand the acceleration), then raping the women to death with huge veined purple members (ridiculous that they would feel desire for humans), holding the men down while they plucked flesh from their living bodies and gobbled it (as if they could assimilate the alien protein) … a hundred grisly details as sharply remembered as the events of a minute ago, ridiculously overdone and logically absurd. But while my conscious mind was rejecting the silliness, somewhere much deeper, down in that sleeping animal where we keep our real motives and morals, something was thirsting for alien blood, secure in the conviction that the noblest thing a man could do would be to die killing one of those horrible monsters

I spent a long time after that telling myself over and over that it hadn’t been me who so gleefully carved up those frightened, stampeding creatures. Back in the twentieth century, they had established to everybody’s satisfaction that ‘I was just following orders’ was an inadequate excuse for inhuman contact … but what can you do when the orders come from deep down in that puppet master of the unconscious?

While I was lying there being squeezed, a silly thought took hold of my brain and went round and round like a charge in a superconductor: according to military formalism, the conduct of war divides neatly into two categories, tactics and logistics. Logistics has to do with moving troops and feeding them and just about everything except the actual fighting, which is tactics. And now we’re fighting, but we don’t have a tactical computer to guide us through attack and defense, just a huge, super-efficient pacifistic cybernetic grocery clerk of a logistic, mark that word, logistic computer. The other side of my brain, perhaps not quite as pinched, would argue that it doesn’t matter what name you give to a computer, it’s a pile of memory crystals, logic banks, nuts and bolts … If you program it to be Genghis Khan, it is a tactical computer, even if its usual function is to monitor the stock market or control sewage conversion. But the other voice was obdurate and said by that kind of reasoning, a man is only a hank of hair and a piece of bone and some stringy meat; and no matter what kind of a man he is, if you teach him well, you can take a Zen monk and turn him into a slavering bloodthirsty warrior.

‘She’s very pretty.’ A remarkable observation, her body torn and caked with crusting blood, her face smeared where I had tried to wipe away the tears. I suppose a doctor or a woman or a lover can look beneath that and see beauty.

‘One cannot make command decisions simply by assessing the tactical situation and going ahead with whatever course of action will do the most harm to the enemy with a minimum of death and damage to your own men and material. Modern warfare has become very complex, especially during the last century. Wars are won not by a simple series of battles won, but by a complex interrelationship among military victory, economic pressures, logistic maneuvering, access to the enemy’s information, political postures — dozens, literally dozens of factors.’

‘I hope none of you ever has to face such a decision. When we get back to Stargate, I will in all probability be court-martialed for cowardice under fire. But I honestly believe that the information that may be gained from analysis of the damage to the Anniversary is more important than the destruction of this one Tauran base.’ He sat up straight. ‘More important than one soldier’s career.’

‘William, face it. It’s a miracle she survived to get into surgery. So there’s a big chance she won’t make it back to Earth. It’s sad; she’s a special person, the special person to you, maybe. But we’ve had so much death … you ought to be getting used to it, come to terms with it.’
I took a long pull at my drink, identical to hers except for the citric acid. ‘You’re getting pretty hard-boiled.’
‘Maybe … no. Just realistic. I have a feeling we’re headed for a lot more death and sorrow.’

‘I don’t know. If they could condition us to kill on cue, they can condition us to do almost anything. Re-enlist.’

‘I’m twenty-three, so I was still in diapers when you people left for Aleph … to begin with, how many of you are homosexual?’
Nobody.
‘That doesn’t really surprise me. I am, of course. I guess about a third of everybody in Europe and America is. ‘Most governments encourage homosexuality — the United Nations is neutral, leaves it up to the individual countries — they encourage homolife mainly because it’s the one sure method of birth control.’
That seemed specious to me. Our method of birth control in the army is pretty foolproof: all men making a deposit in the sperm bank, and then vasectomy.

‘Of course, an illegal market developed, and soon there was great inequality in the amount of food people in various strata of society consumed. A vengeance group in Ecuador, the Imparciales, systematically began to assassinate people who appeared to be well-fed. The idea caught on pretty quickly, and in a few months there was a full-scale, undeclared class war going on all over the world. The United Nations managed to get things back under control in a year or so, by which time the population was down to four billion, crops were more or less recovered, and the food crisis was over.

‘Incidentally, the General translated the money coming to you into dollars just for your own convenience. The world has only one currency now, calories. Your thirty-two thousand dollars comes to about three thousand million calories. Or three million k’s, kilocalories.

‘Also, we no longer have the abundance of electrical power I remember from boyhood … probably a good deal less than you remember. There are only a few places in the world where you can have power all day and night. They keep saying it’s a temporary situation, but it’s been going on for over a decade.’

Wars in the past often accelerated social reform, provided technological benefits, even sparked artistic activity. This one, however, seemed tailor-made to provide none of these positive by-products.

And in the past, people whose country was at war were constantly in contact with the war. The newspapers would be full of reports, veterans would return from the front; sometimes the front would move right into town, invaders marching down Main Street or bombs whistling through the night air — but always the sense of either working toward victory or at least delaying defeat. The enemy was a tangible thing, a propagandist’s monster whom you could understand, whom you could hate. But this war … the enemy was a curious organism only vaguely understood, more often the subject of cartoons than nightmares. The main effect of the war on the home front was economic, unemotional — more taxes but more jobs as well. After twenty-two years, only twenty-seven returned veterans; not enough to make a decent parade. The most important fact about the war to most people was that if it ended suddenly, Earth’s economy would collapse.

We got into a discussion about the war, with a bunch of people who knew Marygay and I were veterans. It’s hard to describe their attitude, which was pretty uniform. They were angry in an abstract way that it took so much tax money to support; they were convinced that the Taurans would never be any danger to Earth; but they all knew that nearly half the jobs in the world were associated with the war, and if it stopped, everything would fall apart.

Every time I’ve come down to Earth the past ten years, I’ve wondered whether she’d still be there. Neither of us had enough money to keep in very close touch.’ He had told us in Geneva that a letter from Luna to Earth cost $100 postage — plus $5,000 tax. It discouraged communication with what the UN considered to be a bunch of regrettably necessary anarchists.

Desperate fun, as I said. Unless the war changed radically, our chances of surviving the next three years were microscopic. We were remarkably healthy victims of a terminal disease, trying to cram a lifetime of sensation into a half of a year.

‘It doesn’t add up, though. Why would they haul me all the way from Heaven to take a chance on my “shaping up,” when probably a third of the people here on Stargate are better officer material? God, the military mind!’ ‘I suspect the bureaucratic mind, at least, had something to do with it. You have an embarrassing amount of seniority to be a footsoldier.’

Perhaps this statement is true of any hierarchical structure, but certainly of businesses:

A good sign that an army has been around too long is that it starts getting top-heavy with officers.

One thing we didn’t have to worry about in this war was enemy agents. With a good coat of paint, a Tauran might be able to disguise himself as an ambulatory mushroom. Bound to raise suspicions.

Hilleboe had called them to attention and was dutifully telling them what a good commander I was going to be; that I’d been in the war from the beginning, and if they intended to survive through their enlistment they had better follow my example. She didn’t mention that I was a mediocre soldier with a talent for getting missed.

‘Part of UNEF. Only has authority on Earth.’ She took a deep sniff at the empty capsule. ‘The idea was to keep people from making babies the biological way. Because, A, people showed a regrettable lack of sense in choosing their genetic partner. And B, the Council saw that racial differences had an unnecessarily divisive effect on humanity; with total control over births, they could make everybody the same race in a few generations.’

The art of chastising subordinates is a delicate art. I could see that I’d have to keep reminding Hilleboe that she wasn’t in charge.

‘As you will read in this book, the war ended 221 years ago. Accordingly, this is the year 220. Old style, of course, it is 3138 ad ‘You are the last group of soldiers to return. When you leave here, I will leave as well. And destroy Stargate. It exists only as a rendezvous point for returnees and as a monument to human stupidity. And shame. As you will read. Destroying it will be a cleansing.’ He stopped speaking and the woman started without a pause. ‘I am sorry for what you’ve been through and wish I could say that it was for good cause, but as you will read, it was not.

The 1143-year-long war had been begun on false pretenses and only because the two races were unable to communicate. Once they could talk, the first question was ‘Why did you start this thing?’ and the answer was ‘Me?’

‘Say, bartender.’
‘Yes, Major?’ ‘Do you know of a place called Middle Finger? Is it still there?’
‘Of course it is. Where else would it be?’ Reasonable question. ‘A very nice place. Garden planet. Some people don’t think it’s exciting enough.’

Summary

Major Characters

William Mandella
Marygay Potter
Sgt Cortes

Most other characters appear and die quickly.

Outline

When I read fiction, I make an outline as a memory aide. If you don’t want to see any spoilers, skip this section.

Boot camp – elite conscripts w/ IQ over 150
Sent to Charon – dark + cold – for training in battle suits
Training + Deaths + Graduation
Sent to Starbase for construction
Sent to first battle against the Taurans – massive slaughter – one escapes
Second battle – advanced weapons used, kill 1/3 of crew, abort attacks
Leave army, return to Earth – Potter + Mandella experience future shock
Mandella stays with Marygay’s family; family gets attacked and killed
Return to Mandella’s mom – she does of illness
Rejoin army as instructors on Luna. They immediately get transferred to a strick force
Attack goes poorly; Potter + Mandella are amputees and sent to Heaven to regrow limbs and recover
Marygay + Mandella are separated on separate strike forces
Travel to the farthest known gate
Set up base + wait for Taurans to attack
Outlast Tauren attack, return to Starbase
Meets “Man”, learns the war is over and was a big mistake
Reunited with Marygay on Middle Finger

My Highlights

‘Man was born into barbarism, when killing his fellow man was a normal condition of existence. He became endowed with a conscience. And he has now reached the day when violence toward another human being must become as abhorrent as eating another’s flesh.’ — Martin Luther King, Jr.

Relativity propped it up, at least gave it the illusion of being there … the way all reality becomes illusory and observer-oriented when you study general relativity. Or Buddhism. Or get drafted.

Since the planet rotated rather slowly — once every ten and one-half days — a ‘stationary’ orbit for the ship had to be 150,000 klicks out. This made the people in the ship feel quite secure, with 6,000 miles of rock and 90,000 miles of space between them and the enemy. But it meant a whole second’s time lag in communication between us on the ground and the ship’s battle computer. A person could get awful dead while that neutrino pulse crawled up and back.

‘Sarge, tell that computer to do something! We’re gonna get—’
‘Oh, shut up, Mandella. Trust in th’ lord.’
‘Lord’ was definitely lower-case when Cortez said it.

… I felt my gorge rising and knew that all the lurid training tapes, all the horrible deaths in training accidents, hadn’t prepared me for this sudden reality … that I had a magic wand that I could point at a life and make it a smoking piece of half-raw meat; I wasn’t a soldier nor ever wanted to be one nor ever would want—

‘Night.’ It’s almost impossible to get sexually excited inside a suit, with the relief tube and all the silver chloride sensors poking you, but somehow this was my body’s response to the emotional impotence, maybe remembering more pleasant sleeps with Marygay, maybe feeling that in the midst of all this death, personal death could be very soon, cranking up the procreative derrick for one last try … lovely thoughts like this.

I fell asleep and dreamed that I was a machine, mimicking the functions of life, creaking and clanking my clumsy way through a world, people too polite to say anything but giggling behind my back, and the little man who sat inside my head pulling the levers and clutches and watching the dials, he was hopelessly mad and was storing up hurts for the day—

I hardly heard him for trying to keep track of what was going on in my skull. I knew it was just post-hypnotic suggestion, even remembered the session in Missouri when they’d implanted it, but that didn’t make it any less compelling. My mind reeled under the strong pseudo-memories: shaggy hulks that were Taurans (not at all what we now knew they looked like) boarding a colonists’ vessel, eating babies while mothers watched in screaming terror (the colonists never took babies; they wouldn’t stand the acceleration), then raping the women to death with huge veined purple members (ridiculous that they would feel desire for humans), holding the men down while they plucked flesh from their living bodies and gobbled it (as if they could assimilate the alien protein) … a hundred grisly details as sharply remembered as the events of a minute ago, ridiculously overdone and logically absurd. But while my conscious mind was rejecting the silliness, somewhere much deeper, down in that sleeping animal where we keep our real motives and morals, something was thirsting for alien blood, secure in the conviction that the noblest thing a man could do would be to die killing one of those horrible monsters

I spent a long time after that telling myself over and over that it hadn’t been me who so gleefully carved up those frightened, stampeding creatures. Back in the twentieth century, they had established to everybody’s satisfaction that ‘I was just following orders’ was an inadequate excuse for inhuman contact … but what can you do when the orders come from deep down in that puppet master of the unconscious?

While I was lying there being squeezed, a silly thought took hold of my brain and went round and round like a charge in a superconductor: according to military formalism, the conduct of war divides neatly into two categories, tactics and logistics. Logistics has to do with moving troops and feeding them and just about everything except the actual fighting, which is tactics. And now we’re fighting, but we don’t have a tactical computer to guide us through attack and defense, just a huge, super-efficient pacifistic cybernetic grocery clerk of a logistic, mark that word, logistic computer. The other side of my brain, perhaps not quite as pinched, would argue that it doesn’t matter what name you give to a computer, it’s a pile of memory crystals, logic banks, nuts and bolts … If you program it to be Genghis Khan, it is a tactical computer, even if its usual function is to monitor the stock market or control sewage conversion. But the other voice was obdurate and said by that kind of reasoning, a man is only a hank of hair and a piece of bone and some stringy meat; and no matter what kind of a man he is, if you teach him well, you can take a Zen monk and turn him into a slavering bloodthirsty warrior.

‘She’s very pretty.’ A remarkable observation, her body torn and caked with crusting blood, her face smeared where I had tried to wipe away the tears. I suppose a doctor or a woman or a lover can look beneath that and see beauty.

‘One cannot make command decisions simply by assessing the tactical situation and going ahead with whatever course of action will do the most harm to the enemy with a minimum of death and damage to your own men and material. Modern warfare has become very complex, especially during the last century. Wars are won not by a simple series of battles won, but by a complex interrelationship among military victory, economic pressures, logistic maneuvering, access to the enemy’s information, political postures — dozens, literally dozens of factors.’

‘I hope none of you ever has to face such a decision. When we get back to Stargate, I will in all probability be court-martialed for cowardice under fire. But I honestly believe that the information that may be gained from analysis of the damage to the Anniversary is more important than the destruction of this one Tauran base.’ He sat up straight. ‘More important than one soldier’s career.’

‘William, face it. It’s a miracle she survived to get into surgery. So there’s a big chance she won’t make it back to Earth. It’s sad; she’s a special person, the special person to you, maybe. But we’ve had so much death … you ought to be getting used to it, come to terms with it.’
I took a long pull at my drink, identical to hers except for the citric acid. ‘You’re getting pretty hard-boiled.’
‘Maybe … no. Just realistic. I have a feeling we’re headed for a lot more death and sorrow.’

‘I don’t know. If they could condition us to kill on cue, they can condition us to do almost anything. Re-enlist.’

‘I’m twenty-three, so I was still in diapers when you people left for Aleph … to begin with, how many of you are homosexual?’
Nobody.
‘That doesn’t really surprise me. I am, of course. I guess about a third of everybody in Europe and America is. ‘Most governments encourage homosexuality — the United Nations is neutral, leaves it up to the individual countries — they encourage homolife mainly because it’s the one sure method of birth control.’
That seemed specious to me. Our method of birth control in the army is pretty foolproof: all men making a deposit in the sperm bank, and then vasectomy.

‘Of course, an illegal market developed, and soon there was great inequality in the amount of food people in various strata of society consumed. A vengeance group in Ecuador, the Imparciales, systematically began to assassinate people who appeared to be well-fed. The idea caught on pretty quickly, and in a few months there was a full-scale, undeclared class war going on all over the world. The United Nations managed to get things back under control in a year or so, by which time the population was down to four billion, crops were more or less recovered, and the food crisis was over.

‘Incidentally, the General translated the money coming to you into dollars just for your own convenience. The world has only one currency now, calories. Your thirty-two thousand dollars comes to about three thousand million calories. Or three million k’s, kilocalories.

‘Also, we no longer have the abundance of electrical power I remember from boyhood … probably a good deal less than you remember. There are only a few places in the world where you can have power all day and night. They keep saying it’s a temporary situation, but it’s been going on for over a decade.’

> Wars in the past often accelerated social reform, provided technological benefits, even sparked artistic activity. This one, however, seemed tailor-made to provide none of these positive by-products.

And in the past, people whose country was at war were constantly in contact with the war. The newspapers would be full of reports, veterans would return from the front; sometimes the front would move right into town, invaders marching down Main Street or bombs whistling through the night air — but always the sense of either working toward victory or at least delaying defeat. The enemy was a tangible thing, a propagandist’s monster whom you could understand, whom you could hate. But this war … the enemy was a curious organism only vaguely understood, more often the subject of cartoons than nightmares. The main effect of the war on the home front was economic, unemotional — more taxes but more jobs as well. After twenty-two years, only twenty-seven returned veterans; not enough to make a decent parade. The most important fact about the war to most people was that if it ended suddenly, Earth’s economy would collapse.

We got into a discussion about the war, with a bunch of people who knew Marygay and I were veterans. It’s hard to describe their attitude, which was pretty uniform. They were angry in an abstract way that it took so much tax money to support; they were convinced that the Taurans would never be any danger to Earth; but they all knew that nearly half the jobs in the world were associated with the war, and if it stopped, everything would fall apart.

Every time I’ve come down to Earth the past ten years, I’ve wondered whether she’d still be there. Neither of us had enough money to keep in very close touch.’ He had told us in Geneva that a letter from Luna to Earth cost $100 postage — plus $5,000 tax. It discouraged communication with what the UN considered to be a bunch of regrettably necessary anarchists.

Desperate fun, as I said. Unless the war changed radically, our chances of surviving the next three years were microscopic. We were remarkably healthy victims of a terminal disease, trying to cram a lifetime of sensation into a half of a year.

‘It doesn’t add up, though. Why would they haul me all the way from Heaven to take a chance on my “shaping up,” when probably a third of the people here on Stargate are better officer material? God, the military mind!’ ‘I suspect the bureaucratic mind, at least, had something to do with it. You have an embarrassing amount of seniority to be a footsoldier.’

Perhaps this statement is true of any hierarchical structure, but certainly of businesses:

> A good sign that an army has been around too long is that it starts getting top-heavy with officers.

One thing we didn’t have to worry about in this war was enemy agents. With a good coat of paint, a Tauran might be able to disguise himself as an ambulatory mushroom. Bound to raise suspicions.

Hilleboe had called them to attention and was dutifully telling them what a good commander I was going to be; that I’d been in the war from the beginning, and if they intended to survive through their enlistment they had better follow my example. She didn’t mention that I was a mediocre soldier with a talent for getting missed.

‘Part of UNEF. Only has authority on Earth.’ She took a deep sniff at the empty capsule. ‘The idea was to keep people from making babies the biological way. Because, A, people showed a regrettable lack of sense in choosing their genetic partner. And B, the Council saw that racial differences had an unnecessarily divisive effect on humanity; with total control over births, they could make everybody the same race in a few generations.’

The art of chastising subordinates is a delicate art. I could see that I’d have to keep reminding Hilleboe that she wasn’t in charge.

‘As you will read in this book, the war ended 221 years ago. Accordingly, this is the year 220. Old style, of course, it is 3138 ad ‘You are the last group of soldiers to return. When you leave here, I will leave as well. And destroy Stargate. It exists only as a rendezvous point for returnees and as a monument to human stupidity. And shame. As you will read. Destroying it will be a cleansing.’ He stopped speaking and the woman started without a pause. ‘I am sorry for what you’ve been through and wish I could say that it was for good cause, but as you will read, it was not.

The 1143-year-long war had been begun on false pretenses and only because the two races were unable to communicate. Once they could talk, the first question was ‘Why did you start this thing?’ and the answer was ‘Me?’

‘Say, bartender.’
‘Yes, Major?’ ‘Do you know of a place called Middle Finger? Is it still there?’
‘Of course it is. Where else would it be?’ Reasonable question. ‘A very nice place. Garden planet. Some people don’t think it’s exciting enough.’

Summary

Major Characters

William Mandella
Marygay Potter
Sgt Cortes

Most other characters appear and die quickly.

Outline

When I read fiction, I make an outline as a memory aide. If you don’t want to see any spoilers, skip this section.

Boot camp – elite conscripts w/ IQ over 150
Sent to Charon – dark + cold – for training in battle suits
Training + Deaths + Graduation
Sent to Starbase for construction
Sent to first battle against the Taurans – massive slaughter – one escapes
Second battle – advanced weapons used, kill 1/3 of crew, abort attacks
Leave army, return to Earth – Potter + Mandella experience future shock
Mandella stays with Marygay’s family; family gets attacked and killed
Return to Mandella’s mom – she does of illness
Rejoin army as instructors on Luna. They immediately get transferred to a strick force
Attack goes poorly; Potter + Mandella are amputees and sent to Heaven to regrow limbs and recover
Marygay + Mandella are separated on separate strike forces
Travel to the farthest known gate
Set up base + wait for Taurans to attack
Outlast Tauren attack, return to Starbase
Meets “Man”, learns the war is over and was a big mistake
Reunited with Marygay on Middle Finger

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The Forever War

By Joe Haldeman

December 11, 2018

Flashman

Author: George MacDonald Fraser
Rating: 4/5
Last Read: November 2018
Who Should Read: People who like to laugh, those interested in military fiction or historical fiction

Flashman is the first book in a long series of novels about the life and exploits of Harry Flashman, an entirely unlikeable anti-hero.

Flashman describes himself openly as a coward, cheat, and a bully, and yet somehow he makes his way to the top of every situation and encounter he’s in. Flashman’s star rises throughout the novel, and everyone who recognizes him for who he is somehow ends up dead or pushed by the wayside.

It details his life from 1839 to 1842 and his travels to Scotland, India, and Afghanistan. It also contains a number of notes by the author, in the guise of a fictional editor, providing additional historical glosses on the events described. The history in these books is largely accurate; most of the prominent figures Flashman meets were real people.

I highly recommend Flashman to anyone who enjoys fiction. The book is fast-paced and full of amusing antics. I found myself laughing and cursing Flashman on every page. Those interested in military fiction or historical fiction will also enjoy the novel, as it covers the terrible defeat of the British in Afghanistan under General Elphinstone.

I stopped at the first book (I tend to avoid series), but if you are interested in continuing there are eleven more books in the series.

My Highlights

Anyway, he gave me a fine holy harangue, about how through repentance I might be saved—which I’ve never believed, by the way. I’ve repented a good deal in my time, and had good cause, but I was never ass enough to suppose it mended anything. But I’ve learned to swim with the tide when I have to, so I let him pray over me, and when he had finished I left his study a good deal happier than when I went in.

Anyway, I was content to let the matter rest just now; I have always believed in one thing at a time, and the thing that was occupying my mind was Miss Judy Parsons.

A lot has been said about the purchase of commissions—how the rich and incompetent can buy ahead of better men, how the poor and efficient are passed over—and most of it, in my experience, is rubbish. Even with purchase abolished, the rich rise faster in the Service than the poor, and they’re both inefficient anyway, as a rule. I’ve seen ten men’s share of service, through no fault of my own, and can say that most officers are bad, and the higher you go, the worse they get, myself included.

Some human faults are military virtues, like stupidity, and arrogance, and narrow-mindedness.

Of course if he had thought at all he would have sniffed something fishy about a ten thousand bribe in the first place. But he was greedy, and I’ve lived long enough to discover that there isn’t any folly a man won’t contemplate if there’s money or a woman at stake.

In her, ignorance and stupidity formed a perfect shield against the world: this, I suppose, is innocence.

“Not fair! Well, well, this is one lesson you’re learning. Nothing’s fair, you young fool.”

if the day comes, don’t wait to die on the field of honour.” He said it without a sneer. “Heroes draw no higher wages than the others, boy. Sleep well.”

But looking back I can say that, all unwittingly, Kabul and the army were right to regard Elphy’s arrival as an incident of the greatest significance. It opened a new chapter: it was a prelude to events that rang round the world. Elphy, ably assisted by McNaghten, was about to reach the peak of his career; he was going to produce the most shameful, ridiculous disaster in British military history.

Think of all the conceivable misfortunes that can arise from combinations of folly, cowardice, and sheer bad luck, and I’ll give you chapter and verse. But I still state unhesitatingly, that for pure, vacillating stupidity, for superb incompetence to command, for ignorance combined with bad judgement—in short, for the true talent for catastrophe—Elphy Bey stood alone.

Only he could have permitted the First Afghan War and let it develop to such a ruinous defeat. It was not easy: he started with a good army, a secure position, some excellent officers, a disorganised enemy, and repeated opportunities to save the situation. But Elphy, with the touch of true genius, swept aside these obstacles with unerring precision, and out of order wrought complete chaos. We shall not, with luck, look upon his like again.

So it always goes with dissension at the top:

And neither of them got on with Shelton, a rude boor of a man who was Elphy’s second-in-command, and this dissension at the top made for uneasiness and mistrust farther down.

I don’t pretend that I became an expert in a few weeks, or that I ever “knew” Afghanistan, but I picked up a little here and there, and began to realise that those who studied the country only from the cantonment at Kabul knew no more about it than you would learn about a strange house if you stayed in one room of it all the time.

It was unfortunate that he happened, about this time, to be awaiting his promotion and transfer to the Governorship of Bombay; I think the knowledge that he was leaving may have made him careless.

Ask him,” I shouted, “how I came here! Ask the lying, treacherous bastard!”
“Never try to flatter Gul Shah,” said the stout man cheerfully. “He’ll believe every word of it. No, there has been a mistake, regrettably, but it has not been irreparable. For which God be thanked—and my timely arrival, to be sure.” And he smiled at me again. “But you must not blame Gul Shah, or his people: they did not know you for what you were.”
Now, as he said those words, he ceased to be a waggish madman; his voice was as gentle as ever, but there was no mistaking the steel underneath. Suddenly things became real again, and I understood that the kindly smiling man before me was strong in a way that folk like Gul Shah could never be: strong and dangerous.

You have to manage morale:

“First, my dear friend Flashman,” says he, all charm, “I must tell you that you have been kept here not only for your own good but for your people’s. Their situation is now bad. Why, I do not know, but Elfistan Sahib has behaved like a weak old woman. He has allowed the mobs to rage where they will, he has left the deaths of his servants unavenged, he has exposed his soldiers to the worst fate of all—humiliation—by keeping them shut up in cantonments while the Afghan rabble mock at them. Now his own troops are sick at heart; they have no fight in them.”

“The British cannot stay here now,” he went on. “They have lost their power, and we Afghans wish to be rid of them. There are those who say we should slaughter them all—needless to say, I do not agree.” And he smiled. “For one thing, it might not be so easy—”
“It is never easy,” said old Muhammed Din. “These same feringhees took Ghuznee Fort; I saw them, by God.”
“—and for another, what would the harvest be?” went on Akbar. “The White Queen avenges her children. No, there must be a peaceful withdrawal to India; this is what I would prefer myself. I am no enemy of the British, but they have been guests in my country too long.”

I have observed, in the course of a dishonest life, that when a rogue is outlining a treacherous plan, he works harder to convince himself than to move his hearers. Akbar wanted to cook his Afghan enemies’ goose, that was all, and perfectly understandable, but he wanted to look like a gentleman still—to himself.

“Now,” went on Akbar, “you must deliver my proposals to McLoten Sahib personally, and in the presence of Muhammed Din and Khan Hamet here, who will accompany you. If it seems”—he flashed his smile—“that I don’t trust you, my friend, let me say that I trust no one. The reflection is not personal.”

“You don’t know one of the first rules of politics: that a man can be trusted to follow his own interest. I see perfectly well that Akbar is after undisputed power among his own people; well, who’s to blame him? And I tell you, I believe you wrong Akbar Khan; in our meetings he has impressed me more than any other Afghan I have met. I judge him to be a man of his word.”

“To my most beloved Hector,” and I thought, by God, she’s cheating on me, and has sent me the wrong letter by mistake. But in the second line was a reference to Achilles, and another to Ajax, so I understood she was just addressing me in terms which she accounted fitting for a martial paladin; she knew no better. It was a common custom at that time, in the more romantic females, to see their soldier husbands and sweethearts as Greek heroes, instead of the whoremongering, drunken clowns most of them were. However, the Greek heroes were probably no better, so it was not so far off the mark.

But chance helped me, as she always does if you keep your wits about you

“Why should you want to preserve my life?” says I. “What do you owe me?”
“We have been friends,” says he, grinning that sudden grin of his. “Also I admired the compliments you paid me as you rode away from Mohammed Khan’s fort the other day.”
“They weren’t meant to flatter you,” says I.
“The insults of an enemy are a tribute to the brave,” laughs he.

When I woke it was broad day, and Sergeant Hudson had a little fire going and was brewing coffee. It was the first hot drink I had tasted in days; he even had a little sugar for it.
“Where the devil did you come by this, Hudson?” says I, for there had been nothing but dried mutton and a few scraps of biscuit on the last few days of the march.
“Foraged, sir,” says he, cool as you please, so I asked no more questions, but sipped contentedly as I lay in my blankets.

He’s a pretty a terrible leader:

So I agreed, and found myself considering this Sergeant Hudson for the first time, for beyond noting that he was a steady man I had given him not much notice before. After all, why should one notice one’s men very much?

There is a painting of the scene at Gandamack, which I saw a few years ago, and it is like enough the real thing as I remember it. No doubt it is very fine and stirs martial thoughts in the gloryblown asses who look at it; my only thought when I saw it was, “You poor bloody fools!” and I said so, to the disgust of other viewers. But I was there, you see, shivering with horror as I watched, unlike the good Londoners, who let the roughnecks and jailbirds keep their empire for them; they are good enough for getting cut up at the Gandamacks which fools like Elphy and McNaghten bring ’em to, and no great loss to anybody.

So we were safe, and to come safe out of a disaster is more gratifying than to come safe out of none at all.

There is great pleasure in catastrophe that doesn’t touch you, and anyone who says there isn’t is a liar. Haven’t you seen it in the face of a bearer of bad news, and heard it in the unctuous phrases at the church gate after a funeral?

Hudson, of course, didn’t understand why I should be so horrified at this, until I told him the whole story—about Narreeman, and how Akbar had rescued me from Gul’s snakes in Kabul. Heavens, how I must have talked, but when I tell you that we were in the cellar a week together, without ever so much as seeing beyond the door, and myself in a sweat of anxiety about what our fate might be, you will understand that I needed an audience. Your real coward always does, and the worse his fear the more he blabs.

God, how I called; I roared like a bull calf, and got nothing back, not even echoes. I would do it again, too, in the same position, for all that I don’t believe in God and never have. But I blubbered like an infant, calling on Christ to save me, swearing to reform and crying gentle Jesus meek and mild over and over again. It’s a great thing, prayer. Nobody answers, but at least it stops you from thinking.

God alone knew what I was supposed to have done that was so brave, but doubtless I should learn in time. All I could see was that somehow appearances were heavily on my side—and who needs more than that? Give me the shadow every time, and you can keep the substance—it’s a principle I’ve followed all my life, and it works, if you know how to act on it.

It calls for nice judgement, this art of bragging; you must be plain, but not too plain, and you must smile only rarely. Letting them guess more than you say is the kernel of it, and looking uncomfortable when they compliment you.

But you will have noticed, no doubt, that when a man has a reputation good or bad, folk will always delight in adding to it; there wasn’t a man in Afghanistan who knew me but who wanted to recall having seen me doing something desperate, and Broadfoot, quite sincerely, was like all the rest.

I forgot the incident at once. I remember it now, for it was that same day that everything happened all at once. There are days like that; a chapter in your life ends and another one begins, and nothing is the same afterwards.

This myth called bravery, which is half-panic, half-lunacy (in my case, all panic), pays for all; in England you can’t be a hero and bad. There’s practically a law against it.

We shook hands, and he drove off. I never spoke to him again. Years later, though, I told the American general, Robert Lee, of the incident, and he said Wellington was right—I had received the highest honour any soldier could hope for. But it wasn’t the medal; for Lee’s money it was Wellington’s hand. Neither, I may point out, had any intrinsic value.

Pride is a hellish thing; without it there isn’t any jealousy or ambition. And I was proud of the figure I cut—in bed and in barracks. And here was I, the lion of the hour, medal and all, the Duke’s handshake and the Queen’s regard still fresh—and I was gnawing my innards out about a gold-headed filly without a brain to her name.

Flashman shows his true character when finding out he’s been cheated on:

I looked, and seeing myself so damned dashing, and her radiant and fair beside me, I fought down the wretchedness and rage. No, it couldn’t be true….
“Susan, you have not put away my coat, silly girl. Take it at once, before it creases.”
By God, though, I knew it was. Or I thought I knew. To the devil with the consequences, no little ninny in petticoats was going to do this to me.
“Elspeth,” says I, turning.
“Hang it carefully, now, when you’ve brushed it. There. Yes, my love?”
“Elspeth….”
“Oh, Harry, you look so strong and fierce, on my word. I don’t think I shall feel easy in my mind when I see all these fancy London ladies making eyes at you.” And she pouted very pretty and touched her finger on my lips.
“Elspeth, I—”
“Oh, I had nearly forgot—you had better take some money with you. Susan, bring me my purse. In case of any need that may arise, you know. Twenty guineas, my love.”
“Much obliged,” says I. What the devil, you have to make do as best you can; if the tide’s there, swim with it and catch on to whatever offers. You only go by once.
“Will twenty be sufficient, do you think?”
“Better make it forty.”

Summary

Major Characters

Flashman
Earl of Cardigan
Bernier
Elspeth
Gul Shah
Burnes
Elby Bey (Elphinstone)
Akbar Khan
Sgt Hudson

Outline

When I read fiction, I make an outline as a memory aide. If you don’t want to see any spoilers, skip this section.

Flashman is expelled from school
Flashman joins the 11th Light Dragoons as an officer
Flashman “wins” duel with Bernier after rigging it
Flashman gets reassigned to Glasgow, marries Elspeth (Forced)
Flashman gets transferred to India for marrying down
Flashman learns Hindi, goes to a party with the governor, gets sent to Afghanistan
Flashman learns Pashtu, gets sent as an emissary to the Gulzai
Flashman rapes the dancer, makes an enemy of Gul Shah – ambushed while hunting
The complacent garrison is attacked. Burnes dies.
Flashman is captured by Gul Shah, then saved by Akbar Khan
Flashman is sent to make a deal: British help double-cross a tribe, get safe retreat out of Afghanistan.
British get double-crossed; still retreat out of Afghanistan
Backstabbing by Akbar Khan – most of the force is wiped out in the Kabul pass (terrible decisions by Elphinstone)
Flashman separates from the army with Sgt Hudson
They see the massacre @ Gandamack, and are captured by Afghans
Flashman is tortured by Gul Shah, he escapes with Sgt Hudson after they kill Gul Shah
They make it to a fort outside of Jalalabad
The fort is overrun, the only survivor is Flashman
Flashman is sent to England as a hero – meets the Queen, Duke of Wellington, gets a medal
Finds out his wife is cheating on him – fine with it because he wants money.

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Flashman: A Novel

By George MacDonald Fraser

November 20, 2018

Astrophysics for People in a Hurry

Author: Neil de Grasse Tyson
Rating: 4/5
Last Read: November 2018
Who Should Read: Amateur physicists and people who are interested in the wonders of our universe

Last Updated: 2018-11-24

I’ve always been interested in physics, but I wasn’t able to keep up with the mathematics and crazy problems during college. Over the past two years I’ve started picking up friendlier physics books to try to catch up on modern developments (“modern” as in “after the 1920s”). Astrophysics for People in a Hurry falls into this category – something I can ready to learn more about our world without having to break my brain by learning crazy mathematics.

NDT starts the book off by exploring the formation of the universe after the big bang. He reaches far and wide in his astrophysics summary, teaching us about dark matter, Einstein’s “biggest blunder”, and how post-apocalyptic scientists won’t even be able to tell that there are other galaxies. His tour of astrophysics is fast-paced and dizzying, and he keeps the reader engaged throughout the book.

Astrophysics for People in a Hurry is excellent for a brief taste of cosmic perspective. The universe is a grand spectacle, and it is such a blessing to be a part of it. We are the universe figuring itself out in a distant corner of the universe. While highly educational, the book is worth reading just for that brief feeling of wonder and joy in being alive.

We are stardust brought to life, then empowered by the universe to figure itself out—and we have only just begun.

My Highlights

The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you. —NDT

The world has persisted many a long year, having once been set going in the appropriate motions. From these everything else follows. LUCRETIUS, C. 50 BC

One thing quarks do have going for them: all their names are simple—something chemists, biologists, and especially geologists seem incapable of achieving when naming their own stuff.

As the universe continued to cool, the amount of energy available for the spontaneous creation of basic particles dropped. During the hadron era, ambient photons could no longer invoke E = mc2 to manufacture quark–antiquark pairs. Not only that, the photons that emerged from all the remaining annihilations lost energy to the ever-expanding universe, dropping below the threshold required to create hadron–antihadron pairs. For every billion annihilations—leaving a billion photons in their wake—a single hadron survived. Those loners would ultimately get to have all the fun: serving as the ultimate source of matter to create galaxies, stars, planets, and petunias. Without the billion-and-one to a billion imbalance between matter and antimatter, all mass in the universe would have self-annihilated, leaving a cosmos made of photons and nothing else—the ultimate let-there-be-light scenario.

People who believe they are ignorant of nothing have neither looked for, nor stumbled upon, the boundary between what is known and unknown in the universe.

We are stardust brought to life, then empowered by the universe to figure itself out—and we have only just begun.

For household lamps that still use glowing metal filaments, the bulbs all peak in the infrared, which is the single greatest contributor to their inefficiency as a source of visible light. Our senses detect infrared only in the form of warmth on our skin. The LED revolution in advanced lighting technology creates pure visible light without wasting wattage on invisible parts of the spectrum. That’s how you can get crazy-sounding sentences like: “7 Watts LED replaces 60 Watts Incandescent” on the packaging.

Albert Einstein hardly ever set foot in the laboratory; he didn’t test phenomena or use elaborate equipment. He was a theorist who perfected the “thought experiment,” in which you engage nature through your imagination, by inventing a situation or model and then working out the consequences of some physical principle. In Germany before World War II, laboratory-based physics far outranked theoretical physics in the minds of most Aryan scientists. Jewish physicists were all relegated to the lowly theorists’ sandbox and left to fend for themselves. And what a sandbox that would become.

Copernicus’s basic idea was correct, and that’s what mattered most. It simply required some tweaking to make it more accurate. Yet, in the case of Einstein’s relativity, the founding principles of the entire theory require that everything must happen exactly as predicted. Einstein had, in effect, built what looks on the outside like a house of cards, with only two or three simple postulates holding up the entire structure. Indeed, upon learning of a 1931 book entitled One Hundred Authors Against Einstein, he responded that if he were wrong, then only one would have been enough.

GR regards gravity as the response of a mass to the local curvature of space and time caused by some other mass or field of energy. In other words, concentrations of mass cause distortions—dimples, really—in the fabric of space and time. These distortions guide the moving masses along straight-line geodesics, though they look to us like the curved trajectories we call orbits. The twentieth-century American theoretical physicist John Archibald Wheeler said it best, summing up Einstein’s concept as, “Matter tells space how to curve; space tells matter how to move.”

Lambda preserved what Einstein and every other physicist of his day had strongly presumed to be true: the status quo of a static universe—an unstable static universe. To invoke an unstable condition as the natural state of a physical system violates scientific credo. You cannot assert that the entire universe is a special case that happens to be balanced forever and ever. Nothing ever seen, measured, or imagined has behaved this way in the history of science, which makes for powerful precedent.

The most accurate measurements to date reveal dark energy as the most prominent thing in town, currently responsible for 68 percent of all the mass-energy in the universe; dark matter comprises 27 percent, with regular matter comprising a mere 5 percent.

Without a doubt, Einstein’s greatest blunder was having declared that lambda was his greatest blunder.

A remarkable feature of lambda and the accelerating universe is that the repulsive force arises from within the vacuum, not from anything material. As the vacuum grows, the density of matter and (familiar) energy within the universe diminishes, and the greater becomes lambda’s relative influence on the cosmic state of affairs. With greater repulsive pressure comes more vacuum, and with more vacuum comes greater repulsive pressure, forcing an endless and exponential acceleration of the cosmic expansion. As a consequence, anything not gravitationally bound to the neighborhood of the Milky Way galaxy will recede at ever-increasing speed, as part of the accelerating expansion of the fabric of space-time. Distant galaxies now visible in the night sky will ultimately disappear beyond an unreachable horizon, receding from us faster than the speed of light. A feat allowed, not because they’re moving through space at such speeds, but because the fabric of the universe itself carries them at such speeds. No law of physics prevents this. In a trillion or so years, anyone alive in our own galaxy may know nothing of other galaxies. Our observable universe will merely comprise a system of nearby, long-lived stars within the Milky Way. And beyond this starry night will lie an endless void—darkness in the face of the deep. Dark energy, a fundamental property of the cosmos, will, in the end, undermine the ability of future generations to comprehend the universe they’ve been dealt. Unless contemporary astrophysicists across the galaxy keep remarkable records and bury an awesome, trillion-year time capsule, postapocaplyptic scientists will know nothing of galaxies—the principal form of organization for matter in our cosmos—and will thus be denied access to key pages from the cosmic drama that is our universe. Behold my recurring nightmare: Are we, too, missing some basic pieces of the universe that once were? What part of the cosmic history book has been marked “access denied”? What remains absent from our theories and equations that ought to be there, leaving us groping for answers we may never find?

While many objects have peculiar shapes, the list of round things is practically endless and ranges from simple soap bubbles to the entire observable universe. Of all shapes, spheres are favored by the action of simple physical laws. So prevalent is this tendency that often we assume something is spherical in a mental experiment just to glean basic insight even when we know that the object is decidedly non-spherical. In short, if you do not understand the spherical case, then you cannot claim to understand the basic physics of the object.

Using freshman-level calculus you can show that the one and only shape that has the smallest surface area for an enclosed volume is a perfect sphere. In fact, billions of dollars could be saved annually on packaging materials if all shipping boxes and all packages of food in the supermarket were spheres.

the weaker the gravity on the surface of an object, the higher its mountains can reach. Mount Everest is about as tall as a mountain on Earth can grow before the lower rock layers succumb to their own plasticity under the mountain’s weight.

In space, surface tension always forces a small blob of liquid to form a sphere. Whenever you see a small solid object that is suspiciously spherical, you can assume it formed in a molten state. If the blob has very high mass, then it could be composed of almost anything and gravity will ensure that it forms a sphere.

The stars of the Milky Way galaxy trace a big, flat circle. With a diameter-to-thickness ratio of one hundred to one, our galaxy is flatter than the flattest flapjacks ever made. In fact, its proportions are better represented by a crépe or a tortilla. No, the Milky Way’s disk is not a sphere, but it probably began as one.

If we had eyes that could see magnetic fields, Jupiter would look five times larger than the full Moon in the sky.

Whether you prefer to sprint, swim, walk, or crawl from one place to another on Earth, you can enjoy close-up views of our planet’s unlimited supply of things to notice. You might see a vein of pink limestone on the wall of a canyon, a ladybug eating an aphid on the stem of a rose, a clamshell poking out from the sand. All you have to do is look.

Of all the sciences cultivated by mankind, Astronomy is acknowledged to be, and undoubtedly is, the most sublime, the most interesting, and the most useful. For, by knowledge derived from this science, not only the bulk of the Earth is discovered . . . ; but our very faculties are enlarged with the grandeur of the ideas it conveys, our minds exalted above [their] low contracted prejudices. JAMES FERGUSON, 1757

Yet the cosmic view comes with a hidden cost. When I travel thousands of miles to spend a few moments in the fast-moving shadow of the Moon during a total solar eclipse, sometimes I lose sight of Earth. When I pause and reflect on our expanding universe, with its galaxies hurtling away from one another, embedded within the ever-stretching, four-dimensional fabric of space and time, sometimes I forget that uncounted people walk this Earth without food or shelter, and that children are disproportionately represented among them.

If small genetic differences between us and our fellow apes account for what appears to be a vast difference in intelligence, then maybe that difference in intelligence is not so vast after all. Imagine a life-form whose brainpower is to ours as ours is to a chimpanzee’s. To such a species, our highest mental achievements would be trivial. Their toddlers, instead of learning their ABCs on Sesame Street, would learn multivariable calculus on Boolean Boulevard.††† Our most complex theorems, our deepest philosophies, the cherished works of our most creative artists, would be projects their schoolkids bring home for Mom and Dad to display on the refrigerator door with a magnet.

If a huge genetic gap separated us from our closest relative in the animal kingdom, we could justifiably celebrate our brilliance. We might be entitled to walk around thinking we’re distant and distinct from our fellow creatures. But no such gap exists. Instead, we are one with the rest of nature, fitting neither above nor below, but within.

We do not simply live in this universe. The universe lives within us.

The cosmic perspective enables us to grasp, in the same thought, the large and the small. The cosmic perspective opens our minds to extraordinary ideas but does not leave them so open that our brains spill out, making us susceptible to believing anything we’re told. The cosmic perspective opens our eyes to the universe, not as a benevolent cradle designed to nurture life but as a cold, lonely, hazardous place, forcing us to reassess the value of all humans to one another. The cosmic perspective shows Earth to be a mote. But it’s a precious mote and, for the moment, it’s the only home we have.

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Astrophysics for People in a Hurry

By Neil deGrasse Tyson

September 19, 2018

The Fall

Author: Albert Camus
Rating: 4/5
Last Read: August 2018
Who Should Read: Anyone interested in The Mind, philosophy, psychology, or religion

I’ve read a few of Camus’s essays, but The Fall was my first major foray into his work.

The Fall is a short novel. The book is presented as a confessional monologue given by a lawyer to a compatriot in a bar. The lawyer, Jean-Baptiste Clamence, recounts the events of his life which led to his fall from a fully-absorbed and selfish love of life to one of dark depression and guilt. Clamence’s evolution in The Fall seems to purposefully mirror the themes presented in the book of Genesis, where man is kicked out of the garden of Eden and Wakes Up to a world of work, pain, and knowledge of evil.

How does Clamence’s Fall occur? While walking through Paris one night, Clamence fails to save a woman whom (he assumes) is pushed into in the river and drowns. His inaction that night drives him further and further into madness and guilt. Camus seems to emphasize a point frequently repeated by Jordan Peterson throughout his biblical lecture series: Nobody gets away with anything, ever.

Clamence’s self-judgment leads him down the road to an existential nightmare. He’s quite an interesting and disturbing character, especially for someone so introspective. He posits that we can never improve ourselves, because our own consciences will eternally condemn us as guilty. This is an amusing stance for a character who admits that he is morally bankrupt, but continues to act the same way that he did before “The Fall”. He seems to think that his admission of guilt and cowardice makes him noble, or at least no longer a hypocritical liar. Even after the self-torment, he says that given a second chance to save the woman, he knows that he would still fail to act.

It is this final admission of Clamence’s that leaves me the most disturbed – his attitude feels evil and sickening to me. Perhaps I find myself so disturbed because this attitude is more common than I would like to think.

If you are a student of the human condition, The Fall is a book for you. This novel is extremely philosophical and touches on many points which are still relevant in our society today. Perhaps the points discussed in the novel have always been relevant to humanity. I’m still chewing on many internal questions and uncomfortable Truths raised by this book.

This is so true that we rarely confide in those who are better than we. Rather, we are more inclined to flee their society. Most often, on the other hand, we confess to those who are like us and who share our weaknesses. Hence we don’t want to improve ourselves or be bettered, for we should first have to be judged in default. We merely wish to be pitied and encouraged in the course we have chosen. In short, we should like, at the same time, to cease being guilty and yet not to make the effort of cleansing ourselves. Not enough cynicism and not enough virtue.

My Highlights

I enjoyed my own nature to the fullest, and we all know that there lies happiness, although, to soothe one another mutually, we occasionally pretend to condemn such joys as selfishness.

I could readily understand why sermons, decisive preachings, and fire miracles took place on accessible heights. In my opinion no one meditated in cellars or prison cells (unless they were situated in a tower with a broad view); one just became moldy.

After all, living aloft is still the only way of being seen and hailed by the largest number.

Indeed, wasn’t that Eden, cher monsieur: no intermediary between life and me? Such was my life. I never had to learn how to live. In that regard, I already knew everything at birth. Some people’s problem is to protect themselves from men or at least to come to terms with them. In my case, the understanding was already established. Familiar when it was appropriate, silent when necessary, capable of a free and easy manner as readily as of dignity, I was always in harmony. Hence my popularity was great and my successes in society innumerable.

Yes, few creatures were more natural than I. I was altogether in harmony with life, fitting into it from top to bottom without rejecting any of its ironies, its grandeur, or its servitude. In particular the flesh, matter, the physical in short, which disconcerts or discourages so many men in love or in solitude, without enslaving me, brought me steady joys. I was made to have a body. Whence that harmony in me, that relaxed mastery that people felt, even to telling me sometimes that it helped them in life. Hence my company was in demand. Often, for instance, people thought they had met me before. Life, its creatures and its gifts, offered themselves to me, and I accepted such marks of homage with a kindly pride. To tell the truth, just from being so fully and simply a man, I looked upon myself as something of a superman.

Have you never suddenly needed understanding, help, friendship? Yes, of course. I have learned to be satisfied with understanding. It is found more readily and, besides, it’s not binding. “I beg you to believe in my sympathetic understanding” in the inner discourse always precedes immediately “and now, let’s turn to other matters.”

Friendship is less simple. It is long and hard to obtain, but when one has it there’s no getting rid of it; one simply has to cope with it. Don’t think for a minute that your friends will telephone you every evening, as they ought to, in order to find out if this doesn’t happen to be the evening when you are deciding to commit suicide, or simply whether you don’t need company, whether you are not in a mood to go out. No, don’t worry, they’ll ring up the evening you are not alone, when life is beautiful.

May heaven protect us, cher monsieur, from being set on a pedestal by our friends!

But it’s not easy, for friendship is absent-minded or at least unavailing. It is incapable of achieving what it wants. Maybe, after all, it doesn’t want it enough? Maybe we don’t love life enough? Have you noticed that death alone awakens our feelings? How we love the friends who have just left us? How we admire those of our teachers who have ceased to speak, their mouths filled with earth! Then the expression of admiration springs forth naturally, that admiration they were perhaps expecting from us all their lives.

But do you know why we are always more just and more generous toward the dead? The reason is simple. With them there is no obligation. They leave us free and we can take our time, fit the testimonial in between a cocktail party and a nice little mistress, in our spare time, in short. If they forced us to anything, it would be to remembering, and we have a short memory. No, it is the recently dead we love among our friends, the painful dead, our emotion, ourselves after all!

That’s the way man is, cher monsieur. He has two faces: he can’t love without self-love.

Death certainly has this affect on me:

Notice your neighbors if perchance a death takes place in the building. They were asleep in their little routine and suddenly, for example, the concierge dies. At once they awake, bestir themselves, get the details, commiserate. A newly dead man and the show begins at last. They need tragedy, don’t you know; it’s their little transcendence, their apéritif.

Camus isn’t pulling any punches, and he hits the nail on the head:

I knew a man who gave twenty years of his life to a scatterbrained woman, sacrificing everything to her, his friendships, his work, the very respectability of his life, and who one evening recognized that he had never loved her. He had been bored, that’s all, bored like most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth a life full of complications and drama. Something must happen—and that explains most human commitments. Something must happen, even loveless slavery, even war or death. Hurray then for funerals!

Life became less easy for me: when the body is sad the heart languishes.

Humans need slaves (or at least domination), Clamence says:

I am well aware that one can’t get along without domineering or being served. Every man needs slaves as he needs fresh air. Commanding is breathing—you agree with me? And even the most destitute manage to breathe. The lowest man in the social scale still has his wife or his child. If he’s unmarried, a dog. The essential thing, after all, is being able to get angry with someone who has no right to talk back.

Still happening:

Power, on the other hand, settles everything. It took time, but we finally realized that. For instance, you must have noticed that our old Europe at last philosophizes in the right way. We no longer say as in simple times: “This is the way I think. What are your objections?” We have become lucid. For the dialogue we have substituted the communiqué: “This is the truth,” we say. “You can discuss it as much as you want; we aren’t interested. But in a few years there’ll be the police who will show you we are right.”

To me, this seems to be how the rich currently think of the masses:

Just between us, slavery, preferably with a smile, is inevitable then. But we must not admit it. Isn’t it better that whoever cannot do without having slaves should call them free men? For the principle to begin with, and, secondly, not to drive them to despair. We owe them that compensation, don’t we? In that way, they will continue to smile and we shall maintain our good conscience.

I have to admit it humbly, mon cher compatriote, I was always bursting with vanity. I, I, I is the refrain of my whole life, which could be heard in everything I said. I could never talk without boasting, especially if I did so with that shattering discretion that was my specialty. It is quite true that I always lived free and powerful. I simply felt released in regard to all for the excellent reason that I recognized no equals. I always considered myself more intelligent than everyone else, as I’ve told you, but also more sensitive and more skillful, a crack shot, an incomparable driver, a better lover. Even in the fields in which it was easy for me to verify my inferiority—like tennis, for instance, in which I was but a passable partner—it was hard for me not to think that, with a little time for practice, I would surpass the best players. I admitted only superiorities in me and this explained my good will and serenity. When I was concerned with others, I was so out of pure condescension, in utter freedom, and all the credit went to me: my self-esteem would go up a degree.

By gradual degrees I saw more clearly, I learned a little of what I knew. Until then I had always been aided by an extraordinary ability to forget. I used to forget everything, beginning with my resolutions. Fundamentally, nothing mattered.

Thus I progressed on the surface of life, in the realm of words as it were, never in reality. All those books barely read, those friends barely loved, those cities barely visited, those women barely possessed! I went through the gestures out of boredom or absent-mindedness. Then came human beings; they wanted to cling, but there was nothing to cling to, and that was unfortunate—for them. As for me, I forgot. I never remembered anything but myself.

As I passed, the idiot greeted me with a “poor dope” that I still recall. A totally insignificant story, in your opinion? Probably. Still it took me some time to forget it, and that’s what counts.

I am guilty of this – the monkey mind at play.

As an afterthought I clearly saw what I should have done. I saw myself felling d’Artagnan with a good hook to the jaw, getting back into my car, pursuing the monkey who had struck me, overtaking him, jamming his machine against the curb, taking him aside, and giving him the licking he had fully deserved. With a few variants, I ran off this little film a hundred times in my imagination. But it was too late, and for several days I chewed a bitter resentment.

Is this how my own anger serves me – simply wanting to dominate and have others listen?

I had dreamed—this was now clear—of being a complete man who managed to make himself respected in his person as well as in his profession. Half Cerdan, half de Gaulle, if you will. In short, I wanted to dominate in all things. This is why I assumed the manner, made a particular point of displaying my physical skill rather than my intellectual gifts. But after having been struck in public without reacting, it was no longer possible for me to cherish that fine picture of myself. If I had been the friend of truth and intelligence I claimed to be, what would that episode have mattered to me? It was already forgotten by those who had witnessed it. I’d have barely accused myself of having got angry over nothing and also, having got angry, of not having managed to face up to the consequences of my anger, for want of presence of mind. Instead of that, I was eager to get my revenge, to strike and conquer. As if my true desire were not to be the most intelligent or most generous creature on earth, but only to beat anyone I wanted, to be the stronger, in short, and in the most elementary way.

The truth is that every intelligent man, as you know, dreams of being a gangster and of ruling over society by force alone.

What does it matter, after all, if by humiliating one’s mind one succeeds in dominating everyone?

Everyone has a shadow. Is yours properly integrated, or do you let it run free?

When I was threatened, I became not only a judge in turn but even more: an irascible master who wanted, regardless of all laws, to strike down the offender and get him on his knees. After that, mon cher compatriote, it is very hard to continue seriously believing one has a vocation for justice and is the predestined defender of the widow and orphan.

You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question.

Of course, true love is exceptional—two or three times a century, more or less. The rest of the time there is vanity or boredom.

The mind’s scheming, exposed by Camus:

I had principles, to be sure, such as that the wife of a friend is sacred. But I simply ceased quite sincerely, a few days before, to feel any friendship for the husband.

Our feminine friends have in common with Bonaparte the belief that they can succeed where everyone else has failed.

How many people must this way:

I was never concerned with the major problems except in the intervals between my little excesses.

In short, for me to live happily it was essential for the creatures I chose not to live at all. They must receive their life, sporadically, only at my bidding.

How do I know I have no friends? It’s very easy: I discovered it the day I thought of killing myself to play a trick on them, to punish them, in a way. But punish whom? Some would be surprised, and no one would feel punished. I realized I had no friends. Besides, even if I had had, I shouldn’t be any better off. If I had been able to commit suicide and then see their reaction, why, then the game would have been worth the candle. But the earth is dark, cher ami, the coffin thick, and the shroud opaque.

Men are never convinced of your reasons, of your sincerity, of the seriousness of your sufferings, except by your death. So long as you are alive, your case is doubtful; you have a right only to their skepticism.

In order to cease being a doubtful case, one has to cease being, that’s all.

You think you are dying to punish your wife and actually you are freeing her. It’s better not to see that.

So what’s the good of dying intentionally, of sacrificing yourself to the idea you want people to have of you? Once you are dead, they will take advantage of it to attribute idiotic or vulgar motives to your action. Martyrs, cher ami, must choose between being forgotten, mocked, or made use of. As for being understood—never!

I’m not saying to avoid punishment, for punishment without judgment is bearable. It has a name, besides, that guarantees our innocence: it is called misfortune.

Today we are always ready to judge as we are to fornicate. With this difference, that there are no inadequacies to fear. If you doubt this, just listen to the table conversation during August in those summer hotels where our charitable fellow citizens take the boredom cure. If you still hesitate to conclude, read the writings of our great men of the moment. Or else observe your own family and you will be edified. Mon cher ami, let’s not give them any pretext, no matter how small, for judging us! Otherwise, we’ll be left in shreds.

In short, the moment I grasped that there was something to judge in me, I realized that there was in them an irresistible vocation for judgment.

Your successes and happiness are forgiven you only if you generously consent to share them. But to be happy it is essential not to be too concerned with others. Consequently, there is no escape. Happy and judged, or absolved and wretched.

As for me, the injustice was even greater: I was condemned for past successes.

People hasten to judge in order not to be judged themselves. What do you expect? The idea that comes most naturally to man, as if from his very nature, is the idea of his innocence.

We are all exceptional cases. We all want to appeal against something! Each of us insists on being innocent at all cost, even if he has to accuse the whole human race and heaven itself.

You won’t delight a man by complimenting him on the efforts by which he has become intelligent or generous. On the other hand, he will beam if you admire his natural generosity. Inversely, if you tell a criminal that his crime is not due to his nature or his character but to unfortunate circumstances, he will be extravagantly grateful to you.

But those rascals want grace, that is irresponsibility, and they shamelessly allege the justifications of nature or the excuses of circumstances, even if they are contradictory. The essential thing is that they should be innocent, that their virtues, by grace of birth, should not be questioned and that their misdeeds, born of a momentary misfortune, should never be more than provisional.

As I told you, it’s a matter of dodging judgment. Since it is hard to dodge it, tricky to get one’s nature simultaneously admired and excused, they all strive to be rich. Why? Did you ever ask yourself? For power, of course. But especially because wealth shields from immediate judgment, takes you out of the subway crowd to enclose you in a chromium-plated automobile, isolates you in huge protected lawns, Pullmans, first-class cabins. Wealth, cher ami, is not quite acquittal, but reprieve, and that’s always worth taking.

Above all, don’t believe your friends when they ask you to be sincere with them. They merely hope you will encourage them in the good opinion they have of themselves by providing them with the additional assurance they will find in your promise of sincerity. How could sincerity be a condition of friendship? A liking for truth at any cost is a passion that spares nothing and that nothing resists. It’s a vice, at times a comfort, or a selfishness. Therefore, if you are in that situation, don’t hesitate: promise to tell the truth and then lie as best you can. You will satisfy their hidden desire and doubly prove your affection.

This is so true that we rarely confide in those who are better than we. Rather, we are more inclined to flee their society. Most often, on the other hand, we confess to those who are like us and who share our weaknesses. Hence we don’t want to improve ourselves or be bettered, for we should first have to be judged in default. We merely wish to be pitied and encouraged in the course we have chosen. In short, we should like, at the same time, to cease being guilty and yet not to make the effort of cleansing ourselves. Not enough cynicism and not enough virtue.

Don’t smile; that truth is not so basic as it seems. What we call basic truths are simply the ones we discover after all the others.

However that may be, after prolonged research on myself, I brought out the fundamental duplicity of the human being. Then I realized, as a result of delving in my memory, that modesty helped me to shine, humility to conquer, and virtue to oppress. I used to wage war by peaceful means and eventually used to achieve, through disinterested means, everything I desired.

For instance, I never complained that my birthday was overlooked; people were even surprised, with a touch of admiration, by my discretion on this subject. But the reason for my disinterestedness was even more discreet: I longed to be forgotten in order to be able to complain to myself. Several days before the famous date (which I knew very well) I was on the alert, eager to let nothing slip that might arouse the attention and memory of those on whose lapse I was counting (didn’t I once go so far as to contemplate falsifying a friend’s calendar?). Once my solitude was thoroughly proved, I could surrender to the charms of a virile self-pity.

I have never been really able to believe that human affairs were serious matters. I had no idea where the serious might lie, except that it was not in all this I saw around me—which seemed to me merely an amusing game, or tiresome. There are really efforts and convictions I have never been able to understand. I always looked with amazement, and a certain suspicion, on those strange creatures who died for money, fell into despair over the loss of a “position,” or sacrificed themselves with a high and mighty manner for the prosperity of their family. I could better understand that friend who had made up his mind to stop smoking and through sheer will power had succeeded. One morning he opened the paper, read that the first H-bomb had been exploded, learned about its wonderful effects, and hastened to a tobacco shop.

You remember the remark: “Woe to you when all men speak well of you!” Ah, the one who said that spoke words of wisdom!

Then it was that the thought of death burst into my daily life. I would measure the years separating me from my end. I would look for examples of men of my age who were already dead. And I was tormented by the thought that I might not have time to accomplish my task. What task? I had no idea. Frankly, was what I was doing worth continuing?

You see, it is not enough to accuse yourself in order to clear yourself; otherwise, I’d be as innocent as a lamb. One must accuse oneself in a certain way, which it took me considerable time to perfect.

The greater the threat to the feeling in which I had hoped to find calm, the more I demanded that feeling of my partner.

I tried accordingly to give up women, in a certain way, and to live in a state of chastity. After all, their friendship ought to satisfy me. But this was tantamount to giving up gambling. Without desire, women bored me beyond all expectation, and obviously I bored them too. No more gambling and no more theater—I was probably in the realm of truth. But truth, cher ami, is a colossal bore.

Despairing of love and of chastity, I at last bethought myself of debauchery, a substitute for love, which quiets the laughter, restores silence, and above all, confers immortality.

One plays at being immortal and after a few weeks one doesn’t even know whether or not one can hang on till the next day.

There is nothing frenzied about debauchery, contrary to what is thought. It is but a long sleep.

Physical jealousy is a result of the imagination at the same time that it is a self-judgment.

Believe me, religions are on the wrong track the moment they moralize and fulminate commandments. God is not needed to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men suffice, aided by ourselves.

Hell is a real place, and I see people living there every day:

I’ll tell you a big secret, mon cher. Don’t wait for the Last Judgment. It takes place every day.

Say, do you know why he was crucified—the one you are perhaps thinking of at this moment? Well, there were heaps of reasons for that. There are always reasons for murdering a man. On the contrary, it is impossible to justify his living. That’s why crime always finds lawyers, and innocence only rarely. But, beside the reasons that have been very well explained to us for the past two thousand years, there was a major one for that terrible agony, and I don’t know why it has been so carefully hidden. The real reason is that he knew he was not altogether innocent. If he did not bear the weight of the crime he was accused of, he had committed others—even though he didn’t know which ones.

There was a time when I didn’t at any minute have the slightest idea how I could reach the next one. Yes, one can wage war in this world, ape love, torture one’s fellow man, or merely say evil of one’s neighbor while knitting. But, in certain cases, carrying on, merely continuing, is superhuman.

In solitude and when fatigued, one is after all inclined to take oneself for a prophet.

You see, a person I knew used to divide human beings into three categories: those who prefer having nothing to hide rather than being obliged to lie, those who prefer lying to having nothing to hide, and finally those who like both lying and the hidden.

I didn’t know that freedom is not a reward or a decoration that is celebrated with champagne. Nor yet a gift, a box of dainties designed to make you lick your chops. Oh, no! It’s a chore, on the contrary, and a long-distance race, quite solitary and very exhausting. No champagne, no friends raising their glasses as they look at you affectionately. Alone in a forbidding room, alone in the prisoner’s box before the judges, and alone to decide in face of oneself or in the face of others’ judgment. At the end of all freedom is a court sentence; that’s why freedom is too heavy to bear, especially when you’re down with a fever, or are distressed, or love nobody.

Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful. Hence one must choose a master, God being out of style.

However, I have a superiority in that I know it and this gives me the right to speak. You see the advantage, I am sure. The more I accuse myself, the more I have a right to judge you. Even better, I provoke you into judging yourself, and this relieves me of that much of the burden. Ah, mon cher, we are odd, wretched creatures, and if we merely look back over our lives, there’s no lack of occasions to amaze and horrify ourselves.

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The Fall

By Albert Camus

August 24, 2018

Timeless Laws of Software Development

This article was originally posted on Embedded Artistry.

I am always seeking the wisdom and insights of those who have spent decades working in software development. The experiences of those who came before us is a rich source of wisdom, information, and techniques.

Only a few problems in our field are truly new. Most of the solutions we seek have been written about time-and-time-again over the past 50 years. Rather than continually seeking new technology as the panacea to our problems, we should focus ourselves on applying the tried and tested basic principles of our field.

Given my point of view, it’s no surprise that I was immediately drawn to a book titled Timeless Laws of Software Development.

The author, Jerry Fitzpatrick, is a software instructor and consultant who has worked in a variety of industries: biomedical, fitness, oil and gas, telecommunications, and manufacturing. Even more impressive for someone writing about the Timeless Laws of Software Development, Jerry was originally an electrical engineer. He worked with Bob Martin and James Grenning at Teradyne, where he developed the hardware for Teradyne’s early voice response system.

Jerry has spent his career dealing with the same problems we are currently dealing with. It would be criminal not to steal and apply his hard-earned knowledge.

I recommend this invaluable book equally to developers, team leads, architects, and project managers.

Table of Contents:

Structure of the Book
The Timeless Laws
What I Learned
Selected Quotes
Buy the Book

Structure of the Book

The book is short, weighing in at a total of 180 pages, including the appendices, glossary, and index. Do not be fooled by its small stature, for there is much wisdom packed into these pages.

Jerry opens with an introductory chapter and dedicates an entire chapter to each of his six Timeless Laws (discussed below). Each law is broken down into sub-axioms, paired with examples, and annotated with quotes and primary sources.

Aside from the always-useful glossary and index, Jerry ends the book with three appendices, each valuable in its own right:

“About Software Metrics”, which covers metrics including lines of code, cyclomatic complexity, software size, and Jerry’s own “ABC” metric
“Exploring Old Problems”, which covers symptoms of the software crisis, the cost to develop software, project factors and struggles, software maintenance costs, superhuman developers, and software renovation.
“Redesigning a Procedure”, where Jerry walks readers through a real-life refactoring exercise

“Exploring Old Problems” was an exemplary chapter. I highly recommended it to project managers and team leads.

My only real critique of the book is that the information is not partitioned in a way that makes it easily accessible to different roles – project managers may miss valuable lessons while glossing over programming details. Don’t give in to the temptation to skip: each chapter has valuable advice no matter your role.

The Timeless Laws

Jerry proposes six Timeless Laws of software development:

Plan before implementing
Keep the program small
Write clearly
Prevent bugs
Make the program robust
Prevent excess coupling

At first glance, these six laws are so broadly stated that the natural reaction is, “Duh”. Where the book shines is in the breakdown of these laws into sub-axioms and methods for achieving the intent of the law.

Breakdown of the Timeless Laws

Plan before implementing
1. Understand the requirements
2. Reconcile conflicting requirements
3. Check the feasibility of key requirements
4. Convert assumptions to requirements
5. Create a development plan
Keep the program small
1. Limit project features
2. Avoid complicated designs
3. Avoid needless concurrency
4. Avoid repetition
5. Avoid unnecessary code
6. Minimize error logging
7. Buy, don’t build
8. Strive for Reuse
Write clearly
1. Use names that denote purpose
2. Use clear expressions
3. Improve readability using whitespace
4. Use suitable comments
5. Use symmetry
6. Postpone optimization
7. Improve what you have written
Prevent bugs
1. Pace yourself
2. Don’t tolerate build warnings
3. Manage Program Inputs
4. Avoid using primitive types for physical quantities
5. Reduce conditional logic
6. Validity checks
7. Context and polymorphism
8. Compare floating point values correctly
Make the program robust
1. Don’t let bugs accumulate
2. Use assertions to expose bugs
3. Design by contract
4. Simplify exception handling
5. Use automated testing
6. Invite improvements
Prevent excess coupling
1. Discussion of coupling
2. Flexibility
3. Decoupling
4. Abstractions (functional, data, OO)
5. Use black boxes
6. Prefer cohesive abstractions
7. Minimize scope
8. Create barriers to coupling
9. Use atomic initialization
10. Prefer immutable instances

What I Learned

I’ve regularly referred to this book over the past year. My hard-copy is dog-eared and many pages are covered in notes, circles, and arrows.

I’ve incorporated many aspects of the book into my development process. I’ve created checklists that I use for design reviews and code reviews, helping to ensure that I catch problems as early as possible. I’ve created additional documentation for my projects, as well as templates to facilitate ease of reuse.

Even experienced developers and teams can benefit from a review of this book. Some of the concepts may be familiar to you, but we all benefit from a refresher. There is also the chance that you will find one valuable gem to improve your practice, and isn’t that worth the small price of a book?

The odds are high that you’ll find more than one knowledge gem while reading Timeless Laws.

Here are some of the lessons I took away from the book:

Create a development plan
Avoid the “what if” game
Logging is harmful
Defensive programming is harmful
Utilize symmetry in interface design

Create a Development Plan

We are all familiar with the lack of documentation for software projects. I’m repeatedly stunned by teams which provide no written guidance or setup instructions for new members. Jerry points out the importance of maintaining documentation:

Documentation is the only way to transfer knowledge without describing things in person.

One such method that I pulled from the book is the idea of the “Development Plan”. The plan serves as a guide for developers working on the project. The plan describes the development tools, project, goals, and priorities.

As with all documentation, start simple and grow the development plan as new information becomes available or required. Rather than having a large document, it’s easy to break the it up into smaller, standalone files. Having separate documents will help developers easily find the information they need. The development plan should be kept within the repository so developers can easily find and update it.

Topics to cover in your development plan include:

List of development priorities
Code organization
How to set up the development environment
Minimum requirements for hardware, OS, compute power, etc.
Glossary of project terms
Uniform strategy for bug prevention, detection, and repair
Uniform strategy for program robustness
Coding style guidelines (if applicable)
Programming languages to be used, and where they are used
Tools to be used for source control, builds, integration, testing, and deployment
High-level organization: projects, components, file locations, and naming conventions
High-level logical architecture: major sub-systems and frameworks

Development plans are most useful for new team members, since they can refer to the document and become productive without taking much time from other developers. However, your entire team will benefit from having a uniform set of guidelines that can be easily located and referenced.

Avoid the “What If” Game

Many of us, myself included, are guilty of participating in the “what if” game. The “what if” game is prevalent among developers, especially when new ideas are proposed. The easiest way to shoot a hole in a new idea is to ask a “what if” question: “This architecture looks ok, but what if we need to support 100,000,000 connections at once?”

The “what if” game is adversarial and can occur because:

Humans have a natural resistance to change
Some people enjoy showing off their knowledge
Some people enjoy being adversarial
The dissenter dislikes the person who proposed the idea
The dissenter does not want to take on additional work

“What if” questions are difficult to refute, as they are often irrational. We should always account for realistic possibilities, but objections should be considered only if the person can explain why the proposal is disruptive now or is going to be disruptive in the future.

Aside from keeping conversations focused on realistic possibilities, we can mitigate the ability to ask “what if” with clear and well-defined requirements.

Logging is Harmful

I have been a long-time proponent of error logging, and I’ve written many embedded logging libraries over the past decade.

While I initially was skeptical of Fitzpatrick’s attitude toward error logging, I started paying closer attention to the log files I was working with as well as the use of logging in my own code. I noticed the points that Jerry highlighted: my code was cluttered, logs were increasingly useless, and it was always a struggle to remove outdated logging statements.

You can read more about my thoughts on error logging in my article: The Dark Side of Error Logging.

Defensive Programming is Harmful

Somewhere along the way in my career, the idea of defensive programming was drilled into me. Many of my old libraries and programs are layered with unnecessary conditional statements and error-code returns. These checks contribute to code bloat, since they are often repeated at multiple levels in the stack.

Jerry points out that in conventional product design, designs are based on working parts, not defective ones. As such, designing our software systems based on the assumption that all modules are potentially defective leads us down the path of over-engineering.

Trust lies at the heart of defensive programming. If no module can be trusted, then defensive programming is imperative. If all modules can be trusted, then defensive programming is irrelevant.

Like conventional products, software should be based on working parts, not defective ones. Modules should be presumed to work until proven otherwise. This is not to say that we don’t do any form of checking: inputs from outside of the program need to be validated.

Assertions and contracts should be used to enforce preconditions and postconditions. Creating hard failure points helps us to catch bugs as quickly as possible. Modules inside of the system should be trusted to do their job and to enforce their own requirements.

Since I’ve transitioned toward the design-by-contract style, my code is much smaller and easier to read.

Utilize Symmetry in Interface Design

Using symmetry in interface design is one of those points that seemed obvious on the surface. Upon further inspection, I found I regularly violated symmetry rules in my interfaces.

Symmetry helps us to manage the complexity of our programs and reduce the amount of knowledge we need to keep in mind at once. Since we have existing associations with naming pairs, we can easily predict function names without needing to look them up.

Universal naming pairs should be used in public interfaces whenever possible:

on/off
start/stop
enable/disable
up/down
left/right
get/set
empty/full
push/pop
create/destroy

Our APIs should also be written in a consistent manner:

Motor::Start() / Motor::Stop()
motor_start() / motor_stop()
StartMotor() / StopMotor()

Avoid creating (and fix!) inconsistent APIs:

Motor::Start() / Motor::disable()
startMotor / stop_motor
start_motor / Stop_motor

Naming symmetry may be obvious, but where I am most guilty is in parameter order symmetry. Our procedures should utilize the same parameter ordering rules whenever possible.

For example, consider the C standard library functions defined in string.h. In all but one procedure (strlen), the first parameter is the destination string, and the second parameter is the source string. The parameter order also matches the normal assignment order semantics (dest = src).

The standard library isn’t the holy grail of symmetry, however. The stdio.h header showcases some bad symmetry by changing the location of the FILE pointer:

int fprintf ( FILE * stream, const char * format, ... );
int fscanf ( FILE * stream, const char * format, ... );

// Better design: FILE is first!
int fputs ( const char * str, FILE * stream );
char * fgets ( char * str, int num, FILE * stream );

Keeping symmetry in mind will improve the interfaces we create.

Selected Quotes

I pulled hundreds of quotes from this book, and you will be seeing many of them pop up on our Twitter Feed over the next year. A small selection of my highlights are included below.

Any quotes without attribution come directly from Jerry.

Intentionally hiding a bug is the greatest sin a developer can commit.

Failure is de rigueur in our industry. Odds are, you’re working on a project that will fail right now.
— Jeff Atwood, How to Stop Sucking and Be Awesome

Writing specs is like flossing: everybody agrees that it’s a good thing, but nobody does.
— Joel Spolsky

Documentation is the only way to transfer knowledge without describing things in person.

Robustness must be a goal and up front priority.

Disorder is the natural state of all things. Software tends to get larger and more complicated unless the developers push back and make it smaller and simpler. If the developers don’t push back, the battle against growth is lost by default.

YAGNI (You ain’t gonna need it):
Always implement things when you actually need them, never when you just foresee that you need them. The best way to implement code quickly is to implement less of it. The best way to have fewer bugs is to implement less code.

— Ron Jeffries

Most developers write code that reflects their immediate thoughts, but never return to make it smaller or clearer.

The answer is to clear our heads of clutter. Clear thinking becomes clear writing; one can’t exist without the other.
— William Zinsser

Plan for tomorrow but implement only for today.

Code that expresses its purpose clearly – without surprises – is easier to understand and less likely to contain bugs.

Most developers realize that excess coupling is harmful but they don’t resist it aggressively enough. Believe me: if you don’t manage coupling, coupling will manage you.

Few people realize how badly they write.
— William Zinsser

To help prevent bugs, concurrency should only be used when needed. When it is needed, the design and implementation should be handled carefully.

Sometimes problems are poorly understood until a solution is implemented and found lacking. For this reason, it’s often best to implement a basic solution before attempting a more complete and complicated one. Adequate solution are usually less costly than optimal ones.

I’ve worked with many developers who didn’t seem to grasp the incredible speed at which program instructions execute. They worried about things that would have a tiny effect on performance or efficiency. They should have been worried about bug prevention and better-written code.

Most sponsors would rather have a stable program delivered on-time than a slightly faster and more efficient program delivered late.

It’s better to implement features directly and clearly, then optimize any that affect users negatively.

Efficiency and performance are only problems if the requirements haven’t been met. Optimization usually reduces source code clarity, so it isn’t justified for small gains in efficiency or performance. Our first priorities should be correctness, clarity, and modest flexibility.

Implementation is necessarily incremental, but a good architecture is usually holistic. It requires a thorough understanding of all requirements.

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Timeless Laws of Software Development

By Jerry Fitzpatrick

August 4, 2018

Deep Nutrition

Author: Catherine Shanahan
Rating: 10/10
Last Read: July 2018

Deep Nutrition is a book which explains the negative effects that our modern diets are having on our bodies. Dr. Shanahan provides background and reasoning for the traditional “human diet”, which is as close as we can get to the way our great-great-great grandparents ate. She explains why the traditional diet is essential and walks through the damage that vegetable oils and sugars are causing. She also discusses the modern diet’s impact on fetal/childhood development and modern diseases.

Much of the book is dedicated to the link between our nutrition and our health, as well as making the argument that the modern diet of highly processed foods is harming us and destroying our genetic momentum. The book also contains recipes, meal planning guides, and a FAQ section to help you transition as easily as possible.

We completely changed our eating habits as a result of reading Deep Nutrition, and we have never felt better. We’ve replaced all of our cooking oils and condiments, reduced our carb intake to < 50g on most days, started fermenting food, improved the quality of our food purchases, and started eating in a more nose-to-tail style. We’ve also found ourselves less interested in eating out at restaurants, especially since most of them use cheap and highly processed cooking oils (canola, cottonseed, soy, corn, safflower, etc.).

I can’t deny it. We are believers.

My Highlights

I am still working on processing our book highlights. We thought this book was so important that we needed to share our recommendation right away.

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Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food

By Catherine Shanahan M.D.

March 27, 2018

The Revenant: A Novel of Revenge

Author: Michael Punke
Rating: 8/10
Last Read: March 2018

I purchased The Revenant a few months ago and experienced a few false starts with it. For some reason, I was never able to make it past the first few pages before deciding to pick another book. During this past attempt, I ended up being engrossed in the book and finished it in two sittings.

The Revenant is set in the 1820s and takes place in the expanding western frontier. The book is based on the life of Hugh Glass, a fur trapper who was mauled by a grizzly and abandoned to die by his companions. He makes his way 200-300 miles back to the nearest settlement to restock so he can get revenge on his former companions who abandoned him to die. Along the way he faces death due to injuries, illness, starvation, predators, and hostile Native Americans.

I recommend The Revenant for those who love the wilderness. It’s also a great read for students of the human soul, as revenge is an interesting and powerful motivation for accomplishing crazy feats. Not a great selection for pre-bed reading, however – there are intense scenes throughout the book.

He vowed to survive, if for no other reason than to visit vengeance on the men who betrayed him.

My Highlights

God had placed him in a garden of infinite bounty, a Land of Goshen in which any man could prosper if only he had the courage and the fortitude to try. Ashley’s weaknesses, which he confessed forthrightly, were simply barriers to be overcome by some creative combination of his strengths. Ashley expected setbacks, but he would not tolerate failure.

In truth, Glass had developed significant doubts about the captain. Misfortune seemed to hang on him like day-before smoke.

I’m glad I don’t have to worry about enemies when I make a fire:

They bled the game, gathered wood, and set two or three small fires in narrow, rectangular pits. Smaller fires produced less smoke than a single conflagration, while also offering more surface for smoking meat and more sources of heat. If enemies did spot them at night, more fires gave the illusion of more men.

He knew that leadership required him to make tough decisions for the good of the brigade. He knew that the frontier respected—required—independence and self-sufficiency above all else. There were no entitlements west of St. Louis. Yet the fierce individuals who comprised his frontier community were bound together by the tight weave of collective responsibility. Though no law was written, there was a crude rule of law, adherence to a covenant that transcended their selfish interests. It was biblical in its depth, and its importance grew with each step into wilderness. When the need arose, a man extended a helping hand to his friends, to his partners, to strangers. In so doing, each knew that his own survival might one day depend upon the reaching grasp of another.

The utility of his code seemed diminished as the captain struggled to apply it to Glass. Haven’t I done my best for him? Tending his wounds, portaging him, waiting respectfully so that he might at least have a civilized burial. Through Henry’s decisions, they had subordinated their collective needs to the needs of one man. It was the right thing to do, but it could not be sustained. Not here.

The human soul can be dark:

Wasn’t that why he was there in the clearing—to salve his wounded pride? Not to take care of another man, but to take care of himself? Wasn’t he just like Fitzgerald, profiting from another man’s misfortune? Say what you would about Fitzgerald, at least he was honest about why he stayed.

The boy came to believe that going west was more than just a fancy for someplace new. He came to see it as a part of his soul, a missing piece that could only be made whole on some far-off mountain or plain.

There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.

Once focused, it was clear that the eyes stared back with complete lucidity, clear that Glass, like Bridger, had calculated the full meaning of the Indians on the river. Every pore in Bridger’s body seemed to pound with the intensity of the moment, yet to Bridger it seemed that Glass’s eyes conveyed a serene calmness. Understanding? Forgiveness? Or is that just what I want to believe? As the boy stared at Glass, guilt seized him like clenched fangs. What does Glass think? What will the captain think?

The human/snake relationship has always been an interesting one:

Glass wanted to roll away, but there was something inevitable about the way the snake moved. Some part of Glass remembered an admonishment to hold still in the presence of a snake. He froze, as much from hypnosis as from choice. The snake moved to within a few feet of his face and stopped. Glass stared, trying to mimic the serpent’s unblinking stare. He was no match. The snake’s black eyes were as unforgiving as the plague. He watched, mesmerized, as the snake wrapped itself slowly into a perfect coil, its entire body made for the sole purpose of launching forward in attack.

He would crawl until his body could support a crutch. If he only made three miles a day, so be it. Better to have those three miles behind him than ahead. Besides, moving would increase his odds of finding food.

At thirty-six, Glass no longer considered himself a young man. And unlike young men, Glass did not consider himself as someone with nothing to lose. His decision to go west was not rash or forced, but as fully deliberate as any choice in his life. At the same time, he could not explain or articulate his reasons. It was something that he felt more than understood.

In the last moments of daylight he examined the rattles at the tip of the tail. There were ten, one added in each year of the snake’s life. Glass had never seen a snake with ten rattles. A long time, ten years. Glass thought about the snake, surviving, thriving for a decade on the strength of its brutal attributes. And then a single mistake, a moment of exposure in an environment without tolerance, dead and devoured almost before its blood ceased to pump. He cut the rattles from the remains of the snake and fingered them like a rosary. After a while he dropped them into his possibles bag. When he looked at them, he wanted to remember.

The frustrating necessity of delay was like water on the hot iron of his determination—hardening it, making it unmalleable. He vowed to survive, if for no other reason than to visit vengeance on the men who betrayed him.

Still, he thought, there was no luck at all in standing still.

Glass came to visualize his strength as the sand in an hourglass. Minute by minute he felt his vitality ebbing away. Like an hourglass, he knew, a moment would arrive when the last grain of sand would tumble down the aperture, leaving the upper chamber void.

He resolved to stop earlier the next day. Perhaps dig pits in two locations. The thought of slower progress irritated him. How long could he avoid Arikara on the banks of the well-traveled Grand? Don’t do that. Don’t look too far ahead. The goal each day is tomorrow morning.

The wolf waits patiently for a mistake and then strikes. How often do you wait for the right moment before leaping into action?

A hundred yards downstream from Glass, a pack of eight wolves also watched the great bull and the outliers he guarded. The alpha male sat on his haunches near a clump of sage. All afternoon he had waited patiently for the moment that just arrived, the moment when a gap emerged between the outliers and the rest of the herd. A gap. A fatal weakness. The big wolf raised himself suddenly to all fours.

It wasn’t until the wolves began to move that their lethal strength became obvious. The strength was not derivative of muscularity or grace. Rather it flowed from a single-minded intelligence that made their movements deliberate, relentless. The individual animals converged into a lethal unit, cohering in the collective strength of the pack.

The white wolf crouched, poised, it seemed, to attack again. But suddenly the wolf with one ear turned and ran after the pack. The white wolf stopped to contemplate the changing odds. He knew well his place in the pack: Others led and he followed. Others picked out the game to be killed, he helped to run it down. Others ate first, he contented himself with the remainder. The wolf had never seen an animal like the one that appeared today, but he understood precisely where it fit in the pecking order. Another clap of thunder erupted overhead, and the rain began to pour down. The white wolf took one last look at the buffalo, the man, and the smoking sage, then he turned and loped after the others.

The notion of burial had always struck him as stifling and cold. He liked the Indian way better, setting the bodies up high, as if passing them to the heavens.

The Indian accomplished effortlessly what Glass was compelled to pretend—an air of complete confidence. His name was Yellow Horse. He was tall, over six feet, with square shoulders and perfect posture that accentuated a powerful neck and chest. In his tightly braided hair he wore three eagle feathers, notched to signify enemies killed in battle. Two decorative bands ran down the doeskin tunic on his chest. Glass noticed the intricacy of the work, hundreds of interwoven porcupine quills dyed brilliantly in vermillion and indigo.

Lies tend to compound:

“We buried him deep … covered him with enough rock to keep him protected. Truth is, Captain, I wanted to get moving right away—but Bridger said we ought to make a cross for the grave.” Bridger looked up, horrified at this last bit of embellishment. Twenty admiring faces stared back at him, a few nodding in solemn approval. God—not respect! What he had craved was now his, and it was more than he could bear. Whatever the consequences, he had to purge the awful burden of their lie—his lie. He felt Fitzgerald’s icy stare from the corner of his eye. I don’t care. He opened his mouth to speak, but before he could find the right words, Captain Henry said, “I knew you’d pull your weight, Bridger.” More approving nods from the men of the brigade. What have I done? He cast his eyes to the ground.

He felt disdain and even shame for the filthy Indians who camped around the fort, prostituting their wives and daughters for the next drink of whiskey. There was something to fear in an evil that could make men leave their old lives behind and live in such disgrace.

Beyond Fort Brazeau’s effect on the resident Indians, other aspects of the post left him profoundly disquieted. He marveled at the intricacy and quality of the goods produced by the whites, from their guns and axes to their fine cloth and needles. Yet he also felt a lurking trepidation about a people who could make such things, harnessing powers that he did not understand. And what about the stories of the whites’ great villages in the East, villages with people as numerous as the buffalo. He doubted these stories could be true, though each year the trickle of traders increased.

Standing to greet another, a sign of respect:

Yellow Horse stood when Glass walked into the camp, a low fire illuminating their faces.

Again, standing to greet:

Dominique rose, shook Glass’s hand and said, “Enchanté.”

My kit doesn’t look anything like this:

They returned to the cabin and Glass picked out the rest of his supplies. He chose a .53 pistol to complement the rifle. A ball mold, lead, powder, and flints. A tomahawk and a large skinning knife. A thick leather belt to hold his weapons. Two red cotton shirts to wear beneath the doeskin tunic. A large Hudson’s Bay capote. A wool cap and mittens. Five pounds of salt and three pigtails of tobacco. Needle and thread. Cordage. To carry his newfound bounty, he picked a fringed leather possibles bag with intricate quill beading. He noticed that the voyageurs all wore small sacks at the waist for their pipe and tobacco. He took one of those too, a handy spot for his new flint and steel.

Kiowa laughed too, then said: “With all due respect, mon ami, your face tells a story by itself—but we’d like to hear the particulars.

Kiowa understood early in his career that his trade dealt not only in goods, but also in information. People came to his trading post not just for the things they could buy, but also for the things they could learn.

Glass shook his head again, more firmly this time. “I have my own affairs to attend.” m
“Bit of a silly venture, isn’t it? For a man of your skills? Traipsing across Louisiana in the dead of winter. Chase down your betrayers in the spring, if you’re still inclined.”
The warmth of the earlier conversation seemed to drain from the room, as if a door had been opened on a frigid winter day. Glass’s eyes flashed and Kiowa regretted immediately his comment. “It’s not an issue on which I asked your counsel.”
“No, monsieur. No, it was not.”

The colder weather settled into Glass’s wounds the way a storm creeps its way up a mountain valley.

With the exception of Charbonneau, who was gloomy as January rain, the voyageurs approached each waking moment with an infallibly cloudless optimism. They laughed at the slimmest opportunity. They showed little tolerance for silence, filling the day with unceasing and passionate discussion of women, water, and wild Indians. They fired constant insults back and forth. Indeed, to pass up an opportunity for a good joke was viewed as a character flaw, a sign of weakness. Glass wished he understood more French, if only for the entertainment value of following the banter that kept them all so jolly.

In the rare moments when conversation lagged, someone would break out in zestful song, an instant cue for the others to join in. What they lacked in musical ability, they compensated in unbridled enthusiasm. All in all, thought Glass, an agreeable way of life.

Like many of the things he encountered each day, Professeur was confused by what happened next. He felt an odd sensation and looked down to find the shaft of an arrow protruding from his stomach. For a moment he wondered if La Vierge had played some kind of joke. Then a second arrow appeared, then a third. Professeur stared in horrified fascination at the feathers on the slender shafts. Suddenly he could not feel his legs and he realized he was falling backward. He heard his body make heavy contact with the frozen ground. In the brief moments before he died, he wondered, Why doesn’t it hurt?

His awe of the mountains grew in the days that followed, as the Yellowstone River led him nearer and nearer. Their great mass was a marker, a benchmark fixed against time itself. Others might feel disquiet at the notion of something so much larger than themselves. But for Glass, there was a sense of sacrament that flowed from the mountains like a font, an immortality that made his quotidian pains seem inconsequential. And so he walked, day after day, toward the mountains at the end of the plain.

Henry was a failure at many things, but he understood the power of incentives.

Stunned silence filled the room as the men struggled to comprehend the vision before them. Unlike the others, Bridger understood instantly. In his mind he had seen this vision before. His guilt swelled up, churning like a paddle wheel in his stomach. He wanted desperately to flee. How do you escape something that comes from inside? The revenant, he knew, searched for him.

Glass reached down and removed the small pouch that Pig wore around his throat. He dumped the contents onto the ground. A flint and steel tumbled out, along with several musket balls, patches—and a delicate pewter bracelet. It struck Glass as an odd possession for the giant man. What story connected the dainty trinket to Pig? A dead mother? A sweetheart left behind? They would never know, and the finality of the mystery filled Glass with melancholy thoughts of his own souvenirs.

I also dislike someone who complains about problems but offers no solutions:

Glass shot an irritated glance at Red, who had an uncanny knack for spotting problems and an utter inability for crafting solutions. That said, he was probably right. The few creeks they’d passed had been small. Any Indians in the area would hug tight to the Platte, directly in their path. But what choice do we have?

Kiowa said, “I’m sorry that you never had a proper rendezvous with Fitzgerald. But you should have figured out by now that things aren’t always so tidy.”
They stood there for a while, with no sound but the flapping of the flag. “It’s not that simple, Kiowa.”
“Of course it’s not simple. Who said it was simple? But you know what? Lots of loose ends don’t ever get tied up. Play the hand you’re dealt. Move on.”

Glass said nothing more. Kiowa too was silent for a long time. Finally he said quietly, “Il n’est pire sourd que celui qui ne veut pas entendre. Do you know what that means?”
Glass shook his head.
“It means there are none so deaf as those that will not hear. Why did you come to the frontier?” demanded Kiowa. “To track down a common thief? To revel in a moment’s revenge? I thought there was more to you than that.”

He stood there on the high rampart for a long time that night, listening to the Missouri and staring at the stars. He wondered at the source of the waters, of the mighty Big Horns whose tops he had seen but never touched. He wondered at the stars and the heavens, comforted by their vastness against his own small place in the world. Finally he climbed down from the ramparts and went inside, quickly finding the sleep that had eluded him before.

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The Revenant: A Novel of Revenge

By Michael Punke

February 21, 2017

Dune

Author: Frank Herbert
Rating: 10/10
Last Read: November 2015, July 2018

Quick Summary: Dune is my favorite book. I have read this book at least ten times, and I think I might be lowballing myself.

Dune is a 1950s sci-fi epic set in the far future. Man has given up his reliance on thinking machines, and various specialized schools of humanity have developed. The story centers on Paul Atreides, a young noble whose family is given dominion over a desert planet whose primary resource (“the spice”) is used and coveted by the rest of the planets of man. Traps and plans laid for generations come to fruition as many groups fight for control over the spice, the planet, and Paul himself.

Frank Herbert weaves many political, religious, power, and ecological ideas into Dune. There is much wisdom found buried inside an excellent story.

Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional greatness will destroy a man.

My Highlights

A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct. –loc 88

“A popular man arouses the jealousy of the powerful,” Hawat had said. –loc 118

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.” –loc 202

The old woman said: “You’ve heard of animals chewing off a leg to escape a trap? There’s an animal kind of trick. A human would remain in the trap, endure the pain, feigning death that he might kill the trapper and remove a threat to his kind.” –loc 210

“Hope clouds observation.” –loc 239

He understood terrible purposes. They drove against all odds. They were their own necessity. –loc 254

“Why do you test for humans?” he asked.
“To set you free.”
–loc 259

“Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” –loc 260

“Listen to my nephew,” the Baron said. “He aspires to rule my Barony, yet he cannot rule himself.” –loc 367

However, as someone once observed, given the right lever you can move a planet. –loc 418

“I see in the future what I’ve seen in the past. You well know the pattern of our affairs, Jessica. The race knows its own mortality and fears stagnation of its heredity. It’s in the bloodstream—the urge to mingle genetic strains without plan. –loc 483

In politics, the tripod is the most unstable of all structures. –loc 492

“Jessica, girl, I wish I could stand in your place and take your sufferings. But each of us must make her own path.” –loc 506

In a low voice, she said: “I’ve been so lonely.”
“It should be one of the tests,” the old woman said. “Humans are almost always lonely.”
–loc 512

“The willow submits to the wind and prospers until one day it is many willows—a wall against the wind. This is the willow’s purpose.” –loc 556

Parting with friends is a sadness. A place is only a place. –loc 596

“Grave this on your memory, lad: A world is supported by four things….” She held up four big-knuckled fingers. “…the learning of the wise, the justice of the great, the prayers of the righteous and the valor of the brave. But all of these are as nothing….” She closed her fingers into a fist. “…without a ruler who knows the art of ruling. Make that the science of your tradition!” –loc 625

“She asked me to tell her what it is to rule,” Paul said. “And I said that one commands. And she said I had some unlearning to do.” –loc 642

“She said a ruler must learn to persuade and not to compel. She said he must lay the best coffee hearth to attract the finest men.” –loc 644

the mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve, but a reality to experience. –loc 650

‘A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.’ –loc 651

“Mood?” Halleck’s voice betrayed his outrage even through the shield’s filtering. “What has mood to do with it? You fight when the necessity arises—no matter the mood! Mood’s a thing for cattle or making love or playing the baliset. It’s not for fighting.” –loc 714

“If wishes were fishes we’d all cast nets” –loc 766

Then, what deafness may we not all possess? What senses do we lack that we cannot see and cannot hear another world all around us? –loc 824

The truth could be worse than he imagines, but even dangerous facts are valuable if you’ve been trained to deal with them. –loc 868

“Knowing where the trap is—that’s the first step in evading it. –loc 886

“How could you win the loyalty of such men?” “There are proven ways: play on the certain knowledge of their superiority, the mystique of secret covenant, the esprit of shared suffering. It can be done. It has been done on many worlds in many times.” –loc 907

“The mind commands the body and it obeys. The mind orders itself and meets resistance.” –loc 1064

There are worse things than dying, you know—even for an entire people. –loc 1085

“Can you remember your first taste of spice?”
“It tasted like cinnamon.”
“But never twice the same,” he said. “It’s like life—it presents a different face each time you take it.
–loc 1287

For the others, we can say that Muad’Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It is shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. –loc 1314

“Any road followed precisely to its end leads precisely nowhere. Climb the mountain just a little bit to test that it’s a mountain. From the top of the mountain, you cannot see the mountain.” –loc 1380

Please permit the room to convey a lesson we learned from the same teachers: the proximity of a desirable thing tempts one to overindulgence. On that path lies danger. –loc 1435

Command must always look confident, he thought. All that faith riding on your shoulders while you sit in the critical seat and never show it. –loc 1619

There is probably no more terrible instant of enlightenment than the one in which you discover your father is a man—with human flesh. –loc 2013

“Nothing wins more loyalty for a leader than an air of bravura,” the Duke said. “I, therefore, cultivate an air of bravura.” –loc 2044

But the young body carried a sense of command, a poised assurance, as though he saw and knew things all around him that were not visible to others. –loc 2092

A gift is the blessing of the giver.’” –loc 2128

“What is money,” Kynes asked, “if it won’t buy the services you need?” –loc 2222

“When God hath ordained a creature to die in a particular place, He causeth that creature’s wants to direct him to that place.” –loc 2469

Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional greatness will destroy a man. –loc 2475

A thing to note about any espionage and/or counter-espionage school is the similar basic reaction pattern of all its graduates. Any enclosed discipline sets its stamp, its pattern, upon its students. That pattern is susceptible to analysis and prediction. –loc 2654

“It’s a rule of ecology,” Kynes said, “that the young Master appears to understand quite well. The struggle between life elements is the struggle for the free energy of a system. Blood’s an efficient energy source.” –loc 2685

“Freely given, freely accepted,” –loc 2703

“Growth is limited by that necessity which is present in the least amount. And, naturally, the least favorable condition controls the growth rate.” –loc 2717

“When strangers meet, great allowance should be made for differences of custom and training.” –loc 2816

There is no escape—we pay for the violence of our ancestors. –loc 2862

“Humans live best when each has his own place, when each knows where he belongs in the scheme of things. Destroy the place and destroy the person. –loc 3002

“Anything outside yourself, this you can see and apply your logic to it,” she said. “But it’s a human trait that when we encounter personal problems, those things most deeply personal are the most difficult to bring out for our logic to scan. We tend to flounder around, blaming everything but the actual, deep-seated thing that’s really chewing on us.” –loc 3014

There should be a science of discontent. People need hard times and oppression to develop psychic muscles. –loc 3169

Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife—chopping off what’s incomplete and saying: “Now, it’s complete because it’s ended here.” –loc 3361

The mind goes on working no matter how we try to hold it back
–loc 3703

“A time to get and time to lose,” Jessica thought, quoting to herself from the O.C. Bible. “A time to keep and a time to cast away; a time for love and a time to hate; a time of war and a time of peace.” –loc 3766

“They say: ‘Be prepared to appreciate what you meet.’” –loc 3875

“Fate is the same for everyone,” the Fremen said. “Your Duke, it is said, has met his fate. –loc 4067

Superstitions sometimes have strange roots and stranger branchings.” –loc 4284

“Blackmail?”
“One of the tools of statecraft, as you’ve said yourself,” Paul said
–loc 4292

What do you despise? By this are you truly known. —FROM “MANUAL OF MUAD’DIB” –loc 4420

We came from Caladan—a paradise world for our form of life. There existed no need on Caladan to build a physical paradise or a paradise of the mind—we could see the actuality all around us. And the price we paid was the price men have always paid for achieving a paradise in this life—we went soft, we lost our edge. –loc 4892

Whether a thought is spoken or not it is a real thing and it has power –loc 4938

“You think that day will come?”
“I have little to do with how you’ll meet tomorrow, Gurney Halleck. I can only help you meet today.”
–loc 4944

“Fortune passes everywhere,” –loc 4986

Subtlety and self-control were, after all, the most deadly threats to us all. –loc 5018

Paul spoke without turning: “I find myself enjoying the quiet here.” How the mind gears itself for its environment, she thought. And she recalled a Bene Gesserit axiom: “The mind can go either direction under stress—toward positive or toward negative: on or off. Think of it as a spectrum whose extremes are unconsciousness at the negative end and hyperconsciousness at the positive end. The way the mind will lean under stress is strongly influenced by training.” –loc 5030

Science is made up of so many things that appear obvious after they are explained. –loc 5253

Then, as his planet killed him, it occurred to Kynes that his father and all the other scientists were wrong, that the most persistent principles of the universe were accident and error. –loc 5301

“To save one from a mistake is a gift of paradise,” –loc 5471

She knew what it was—she had succumbed to that profound drive shared by all creatures who are faced with death—the drive to seek immortality through progeny. The fertility drive of the species had overpowered them. –loc 5588

A leader, you see, is one of the things that distinguishes a mob from a people. He maintains the level of individuals. Too few individuals, and a people reverts to a mob.” –loc 5601

The young reed dies so easily. Beginnings are times of such great peril. –loc 5616

“Keep the mind on the knife and not on the hand that holds it,” Gurney Halleck had told him time and again. “The knife is more dangerous than the hand and the knife can be in either hand.” –loc 5835

“Survival is the ability to swim in strange water.” –loc 5950

“From water does all life begin.” –loc 5956

The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future. –loc 6148

“It’s easier to be terrified by an enemy you admire.” –loc 6401

‘Do not count a human dead until you’ve seen his body. And even then you can make a mistake.’” –loc 6497

“To accept a little death is worse than death itself,” –loc 6763

“Usul, you’re crying,” Chani murmured. “Usul, my strength, do you give moisture to the dead? To whose dead?”
“To ones not yet dead,” he said.
“Then let them have their time of life,” she said.
–loc 6919

Else why bargain? One bargains with equals or near equals! –loc 7022

“Hawat’s a dangerous toy,” Feyd-Rautha said.
“Toy! Don’t be stupid. I know what I have in Hawat and how to control it. Hawat has deep emotions, Feyd. The man without emotions is the one to fear. But deep emotions… ah, now, those can be bent to your needs.” –loc 7050

Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic. –loc 7084

Yet, it is possible to see peril in the finding of ultimate perfection. It is clear that the ultimate pattern contains its own fixity. In such perfection, all things move toward death. –loc 7224

She had quoted a Bene Gesserit proverb to him: “When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movement becomes headlong—faster and faster and faster. They put aside all thought of obstacles and forget that a precipice does not show itself to the man in a blind rush until it’s too late.” –loc 7270

“Give as few orders as possible,” his father had told him once long ago. “Once you’ve given orders on a subject, you must always give orders on that subject.” –loc 7371

“Control the coinage and the courts—let the rabble have the rest.” Thus the Padishah Emperor advised you. And he tells you: “If you want profits, you must rule.” There is truth in these words, but I ask myself: “Who are the rabble and who are the ruled?” –loc 7445

“All men beneath your position covet your station,” –loc 8094

“Prophets have a way of dying by violence.” –loc 8096

“My father had an instinct for his friends,” Paul said. “He gave his love sparingly, but with never an error. His weakness lay in misunderstanding hatred. –loc 8246

“One of the most terrible moments in a boy’s life,” Paul said, “is when he discovers his father and mother are human beings who share a love that he can never quite taste. It’s a loss, an awakening to the fact that the world is there and here and we are in it alone. The moment carries its own truth; you can’t evade it. I heard my father when he spoke of my mother.
–loc 8251

“There is in each of us an ancient force that takes and an ancient force that gives. A man finds little difficulty facing that place within himself where the taking force dwells, but it’s almost impossible for him to see into the giving force without changing into something other than man. For a woman, the situation is reversed.” –loc 8471

There should be a word-tension directly opposite to adab, the demanding memory, she thought. There should be a word for memories that deny themselves. –loc 8953

“How would you like to live billions upon billions of lives?” Paul asked. “There’s a fabric of legends for you! Think of all those experiences, the wisdom they’d bring. But wisdom tempers love, doesn’t it? And it puts a new shape on hate. How can you tell what’s ruthless unless you’ve plumbed the depths of both cruelty and kindness?
–loc 8962

The Guild navigators, gifted with limited prescience, had made the fatal decision: they’d chosen always the clear, safe course that leads ever downward into stagnation. –loc 8996

“Was that their plan?” Jessica said.
“Isn’t it obvious?” Paul asked.
“I see the signs!” Jessica snapped. “My question was meant to remind you that you should not try to teach me those matters in which I instructed you.”
–loc 9132

“Expect only what happens in the fight. That way you’ll never be surprised.”