You wonder what I am doing? Well, so do I, in truth. Days seem to dawn, suns to shine, evenings to follow, and then I sleep. What I have done, what I am doing, what I am going to do, puzzle and bewilder me. Have you ever been a leaf and fallen from your tree in autumn and been really puzzled about it? That’s the feeling.
— Letter to Eric Kennington (6 May 1935)
…episodes of intense emotional distress and disorder often reflect natural (and, yes, even healthy) expressions of an individual’s struggles toward reorganization. Such struggles are not always successful, of course, but they may be viewed with substantially less fear and impatience if they are construed as the activities of an open, developing system in search of a “more extensive balance” with its world. (Human Change Processes)
The revolution of ages may bring round the same calamities; but ages may revolve without producing a Tacitus to describe them. (Footnote 110)
In learning the sciences examples are of more use than precepts.
(Post script to solving problem LXI; page 191 of Joseph Raphson’s 1721 English translation)
You don’t become a mystery without learning a few secrets. (17)
Hypocrisy, it seems, is the one coin that never loses its value. (38)
Which is more important, the truth or what people believe? Most would say the truth, but that is too easy. No one actually wants the truth. Not in this universe. Hearing the truth is like looking on the face of a god — you have a moment of pure revelation, and then you are ash carried away to oblivion, knowing nothing, seeing nothing. When people say they want the truth, they mean that they want something they can understand, something that fits, that they can carry around in their thoughts like a relic, to touch and take away the fear of what they are living.
Am I a traitor? Am I one soul, or am I many? Have I had many names or only the one? Do I wish redemption or vengeance? It’s comforting to be able to pick one, and then see everything fall into line behind it — villain-hero, right-wrong, on and on. That’s what people want when they ask for the truth. They want the lie that makes the world simple.
But you are not like that, are you? You know that it is better not to ask for the truth. That what you should ask for are secrets. (pg 111)
The warlock sought only to break the limits of the possible, for no reason other than the pleasure of the breaking. They were the worst kind of mad. (Ch.11)
“You are quite mad, Zultanekh,” replied Oltyx eventually. “I suspect I will come to miss it.”
“Does one have to settle on one sort of madness or another,” Zultanekh pondered, “in order to endure eternity? Yes, I think so. I have settled comfortably into mine. I hope that you find peace in your own, young Oltyx.” (Epilogue)
That would be neat and helpful, and I don’t think life is neat and helpful. It’s never been that way for me, anyway.
“Then it occurs to me, Garviel, that only a weapon which questions its use could be of any value in that role. To be a member of the Mournival, you need to have concerns. You need to have wit, and most certainly you need to have doubts. Do you know what a naysmith is?”
“No.”
“In early Terran history, during the dominance of the Sumaturan dynasts, naysmiths were employed by the ruling classes. Their job was to disagree. To question everything. To consider any argument or policy and find fault with it, or articulate the counter position. They were highly valued.” (Pg 68?)
Watching the light of understanding rekindled in Iacton Qruze reminded Sindermann that there was still hope.
And there is nothing more dangerous in the galaxy than a little hope.
(Chapter 13, pg 297 of paperback.)
‘Know this, son of Magnus,’ said the Khan. ‘There is more under the arch of heaven than victory and defeat. We may fall back, but not forever. We may feint and we may weave, but not forever. We may yet be doomed to lose all we cherish, but we shall do so in the knowledge that we could have turned away, and did not.’
First vox contact with the Swordstorm came through. The docking cycle began.
‘We remained true,’ the Khan said. ‘They can never have this, not if they burn all we ever built and scorn us through the dancing flames. You hear me? We remained true.’
Olly Piers simmered for a moment, then straightened his shako, and glared at him.
“Look around. Look at the shit around you, boy. This is what the very edge looks like. The very brink. This is what it looks like when you’re holding on so desperately there’s no skin left on your fingerbones. This is when it matters most. This is when it makes the difference between living and dying. You take whatever you can to blaze up your spirits. Anything. A truth, a lie, it doesn’t matter. You use whatever you can to keep you going, and you share it with whoever’s with you. Whatever you’ve got, you understand? Whatever keeps you going one more step. That’s how you live. That’s how you win. That’s how you survive, and how your friends and your comrades survive with you, so you can all tell glory tales afterwards, and make even more bullshit up to get you through shitstorms to come.”
“Piers, that’s a really cynical way of—”
“Oh, piss yourself off a cliff, you precious little high-minded historian shit-streak, and take your pious little notion of what truth and history means with you! It’s your pissing history books that prove my case! The power of myths and lies and frigging stories have got us through thirty frigging thousand years of shit, so I’m gonna go out on a limb and suggest it’s a pretty effective bloody formula!
“Besides,” he added, slumping back against the trench wall, his voice dropping, “it frigging well was Mythrus. […]”
[…]
He slithered forward, keeping his head below the trench lip as a volley of shots went over. He grabbed Hari by the shoulder roughly, turned him around, and pointed along the trench.
“What’s that, eh?”
Hari looked. Twenty metres away, a squad of Auxilia were manhandling a battle banner upright. The Emperor Ascendant, in a sunburst.
“A banner,” said Hari.
“And look, boy, how it takes four…no, five, look…men to get it upright and displayed. That’s five soldiers who could be firing rifles at enemy targets. But the idea matters more. It rallies us. It reminds us why we’re here. It could be anything. It could be a picture of a giant rabbit. It could be a picture of my hairy frigging arse. Doesn’t matter. It reminds us, plain and simple, that there’s a point to what we’re doing, and a reason to keep doing it. Without it, we’re just a bunch of frigging idiots shitting ourselves in a ditch. Now think on that, and get your sodding arse out of here.”
(Emphasis mine)
Hari blinked. He had no idea why soldiers lied. If this was war, the actual inside of war, then why did they make shit up? No tall tale, not even one spun by a skilled, serial liar like Olly Piers, could ever hope to match the astonishing truth of war. Lies were smaller than war. No lie, no matter how cocky and outrageous, was ever going to take war on and win.
War was a scream in capital letters. It was a noise. It wasn’t even words. It had no syntax, no adjectives, no subtext, no context. It communicated itself as suddenly, simply and unequivocally as a punch in the face. It was a thing, not a story.
Then maybe that was why. That was why soldiers lied. It was the only way, the only meagre, insufficient way they could talk about what they had endured. It was the only way they could give voice to something that defied articulation. War was so big, soldiers needed to get it out of themselves, spew it out, purge themselves, and lies were the only things that worked. It was either that, or punch someone else in the face.
Unless…
Hari blinked again. Now he grasped it. The lies weren’t exorcism. At least, not completely. They were protection. After the fact, after the brute scream of war, the lies weren’t a means to talk about something that defied words. They weren’t approximate expression. They were curative. They were comfort. The lies were lies of glory and heroism, achievement and success. They weren’t born out of arrogance or boasting or self-aggrandisement. They were just ways to talk about something that was otherwise unbearable. They were coping strategies to insulate survivors against the madness and the punch in the face. They were ways to make war feel like it had some point, some value, some lasting worth. Lies made war better for those unlucky enough to survive it.
Lies gave soldiers something to think about, and talk about, and cherish, so they would never have to…never, ever have to think about the truth.
“It’s a stupid bloody time to figure that out…” Hari murmured to himself. He laughed, for want of anything else to do.
“What?” Piers yelled. “What did you say?”
Hari looked at him. Olly Piers, shako on crooked, meal-tin spills down the front of his coat, rancid of breath, half-covered in dirt and grease, too old by far to be having to do this all over again. What a horrible life you must have lived, Piers, to have become such a magnificent liar. What terrible things you must have seen to make you need to lie so much. That’s what you were telling me all along, and I was too stupid to comprehend. I had no frame of reference.
I have it now, thought Hari. I wish I didn’t. I would give anything not to have had this experience, and not to be here. There is no truth here, no story, no words. There’s nothing to take from this of any worth, and all my high-minded ambitions to come along and brave the dangers in order to capture something valuable were bullshit.
There is nothing here to cherish. Nothing here to learn. War is noise, sensory overload, pain, terror, horror. That’s it. It’s an inarticulate obscenity. It can’t be communicated, and even if it could be, it shouldn’t be.
“What’s Olly short for?” Hari asked.
“Why, boy?”
“I’m writing your story,” said Hari. “I wanted to get your name right.”
“I don’t have a story,” Piers rumbled, and went back to scrubbing. “I have stories, plural. Many fine stories. But not a story. I am a complicated man. I will not be reduced or abbreviated.”
“Except to Olly.”
“Shut your hole, clever clogs.”
If stories ever end, then this story ends here. […]
I think, though it is not my field of specialisation, that some stories end, but others carry on. They are eternal. They secretly carry on after the story appears to be finished, continuing in silence. They do not talk. They are never heard. I think my story may be like that.
[…]
And I think my story ends here too. Soon.
I would have liked to tell it to someone. Share it. But that sort of connection is something I have never been allowed.
Here are the things I would have said.
I am fighting to the end in a battle that cannot be won. I am fighting to the end in a battle that I knew could not be won before it even began. I am doing this, not because I am brave, or because I am foolish, but because it was the only thing to do. If we give up on the doomed, we give up on ourselves.
My presence, the curse of my company, has kept the doomed souls alive a little longer than fate had planned. I have not driven off the daemons or the night, for they are too strong for even me. But I have held them at bay for a while. I have made the daemons wary. (Pg 531)
At the Eternity Wall space port, late in a very long life, I have discovered to my joy that my presence, the curse of my company, can also be a blessing. This is new to me, and unfamiliar. I have fought to protect these people, who cannot see me, but the mystery of me — for it appears it can be a mystery as well as a curse — has inspired them. The fact of my absence is a place they cannot explain, so they have filled it with stories and ideas, and those stories and ideas have given them strength and hope and courage.
I never planned for that. I did not set out to do it. It simply happened. These are strange times.
I will confess, now, because no one is listening, that this has been the greatest accomplishment of my life. It is completely unexpected. My whole life, I have stood apart, and wherever I have gone, I have spread only fear and discomfort. But here, briefly and unexpectedly, I have affected people in another way. I have been an unlikely conduit for strength and unity. I have been a mystery that has compelled them to stand up and believe, not cower and shrink in fear.
I have been able to touch them.
This is my fortune. It is all I have ever wanted.
I wish it could continue, but it will not. As I have said, this is a story that is reaching its end. (Pp. 532–533)
If the boy had been there, he’d have asked Piers if he was afraid. Because he always asked such stupid questions. But Piers would have answered him. He’d have said “no”.
Because he always lied.
Humanity has always managed to summon a poetic turn of phrase for the projected end of everything. Scribes love to speak of how things fall apart, the centre unable to hold — contrasting the rise of oceans with the fall of empires. Philosophers claim the end will come not with a bang, but with a whimper. And of death? Nothing to fear, they promise. Death is merely another path.
These sentiments are always composed by men and women far removed from any experience of what the end of all things would really be. It’s easy to fall back on sanguine philosophy when you can’t comprehend the truth. Yes, the centre cannot hold, but its dissolution means the genocide of trillions. Yes, death is another path, but that path leads to the soul of every man, woman and child sliding into the open mouths of mad gods.
Had the ancient wise ones seen such things with their own eyes, perhaps their scrawls would have been somewhat less serene.
But a coin has two sides. Twinned with the serenity of ignorance is the spectre of hope. People will resist the end, even against the evidence of their eyes and the workings of their minds. Logic plays no part in it. This is the arena of hope, with survival instincts baked into the brain of every living being. Emotions like that burn through anything as cold and blunt as reason. (Chapter 8, emphasis mine)
So defiant. So certain. So ignorant. The pride of those who have nothing worth fighting for. (222)
No soul is as self-righteous as the one that believes it gazes into the future. (295)
No one ever said enlightenment came without cost. (304)
Sometimes there just isn’t the opportunity or the willingness to make things better. Sometimes you can’t simply have another go. You make a choice, and it’s a bad one, and you’re left with it. No amount of trying again will fix it. Don’t expect anyone to feel sorry for you, to cut you slack; you make a mistake you’ll have to live with. (317–318, “Of the lives in the ruins of the cities”)
Behold and marvel, this is what winning looks like. (857)
Even today, sixty years later, I have a lasting memory of Trooper Bragg at that moment. His simplicity and his genuine sense of optimism. Simply his courage. I have no way of knowing what became of Trooper Bragg. I hope fate was kind to him. (868)
Awry. Beltayn’s favourite word, always used as a masterpiece of understatement. “The invading orks have killed everyone, sir! Something’s awry!” … “Everything’s been awry since the genestealers turned out, sir!” (Pg 66)
“Losenti!” called Guilliman on a whim, raising his voice over the smooth thumping of the machine. Losenti paused at the threshold of his door. “What do you do down here, when you are not needed, when you are alone?”
Losenti turned his head. His wrinkled face was bathed in the warm light of Cawl’s device. “I write poetry,” he said. “And I dream of better times.”
But mettle lasts where metal rusts.
“Hope drains you,” Sojuk says, “because it promises too much. Be glad you’re shot of it. When you have nothing left to hope for, you have nothing left to fear.”
Yeah, kindness. It’s a meek little word, isn’t it, for a commodity that too many people these days think of as weak and trivial. There ought to be a stronger word for it. I’d say “humanity”, but that usage has been debased by our history.
His delusion was his own past; the fact that he’s done this before. Other odysseys, other quests, other longshots that miraculously overcame the odds. This venture would be a myth, for in myths, the weak, the outnumbered, the mere mortals, they always prevailed.
He should have remembered that myths never feel like myths at the time. You only realise you’ve been part of one long after it’s over. At the time, nothing is certain, and the chances of triumph are slim. The world is vicious, and life isn’t a story. It doesn’t get a satisfying ending just because that’s how bards make stories end.
Mystified, they all stare at him. It’s always that way with labyrinths. Those who followed Oll long ago were the same. A labyrinth is a designed experience, a puzzle. It asks you questions and the answers are hard to grasp. There’s a reason the words ‘maze’ and ‘amaze’ come from the same root.
A historian, however, has the perspective of hindsight, which, alas, cannot be said of the actual participants. So, rather than pointing an accusatory finger, with righteous cries of “how could they have been so stupid?” it behooves us more to shake our heads in pity as we contemplate our forebears’ blind stumbling into the very brink of destruction.
Myths only linger if they have meaning. They are knowledge encoded in story so they can be passed down through generations. I was surrounded by the symbols of myth, and yet could not extract a meaning. (pg. 86)
All is deceit. Nothing wears a true face or uses a true name. Nothing is as it appears to be, as if the whole universe were busy playing out a function, ‘guised in cunning. The mad are sane, the bind can see, the sane are otherwise demented, good is evil, and up, for all I care, is down. (105–106)
“I think,” Renner panted, “I think you should hand it back.”
“Hand what back?”
“This life of yours,” he replied. “Hand it back and ask for a replacement, for it is no good. It is broken and mad.” (pg. 313)
Any oddity in the field of mathematics is important. (339)
I had never known my true self. I was but an accumulation of unanswered questions. (370)
What had been pandaemonium became…There is no word. Words fail. When you are caught at a fever pitch of violent, chaotic jeopardy, the worst state you have ever known, and it becomes still worse, language simply runs out of superlatives and has nowhere to go.
Captain Lotara Satin punched a fist into her open palm. ‘The things you learn,’ she smiled, ‘with a little curiosity’ Vel-Kheredar click-ticked in amused disapproval. ‘There is an ancient Terran proverb regarding curiosity, flag-captain. It involves felines and murder, thus I confess it makes little sense to me’