Tag: 2016

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The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

Author: John Vaillant
Rating: 8/10
Last Read: September 2016

Quick Summary:  This book has been on my reading list for years – and I’m sorry that I put it off so long.  I needed an enjoyable book to read while I was flying to China and back, and the Tiger definitely kept me occupied.

On the surface, this book is about a man-eating tiger in the Primorye region of Russia (near China).  However, Vaillant goes into great detail to describe the region, characters, and conflicts that lead each of the participants to the Primorye and into contact with this killer tiger.  I know nothing of Russia’s far east, so the book was enlightening on these accounts. I did find myself skipping ahead at times to get back to the Tiger itself.  Vaillant’s star of the book is definitely this tiger, and his writing is most captivating when he’s discussing the beautiful death machines.

My Highlights

“He realized that in a town a man cannot live as he wishes, but as other people wish. Strangers surrounded him on every side and hampered him at every step.” –loc 465

“In situations like this, my rule is from the Bible,” Trush explains: “ ‘First, there was the word and then a deed.’ It is always better to warn a person first; if he does not understand that warning, take action. That’s the principle that I follow. Not for everyone, though.” –loc 734

“The most terrifying and important test for a human being is to be in absolute isolation,” he explained. “A human being is a very social creature, and ninety percent of what he does is done only because other people are watching. Alone, with no witnesses, he starts to learn about himself—who is he really? Sometimes, this brings staggering discoveries. Because nobody’s watching, you can easily become an animal: it is not necessary to shave, or to wash, or to keep your winter quarters clean—you can live in shit and no one will see. You can shoot tigers, or choose not to shoot. You can run in fear and nobody will know. You have to have something—some force, which allows and helps you to survive without witnesses. Markov had it. –loc 1313

Many people reach a point where they realize that the shape their life has taken does not square with the ambitions they once had for it. –loc 1355

Men carry their superiority inside; animals outside. Russian Proverb –loc 1643

Based on the observations of hunters and biologists, it appears that Amur tigers will occasionally kill bears solely on something that we might recognize as principle. –loc 2234

Due to the extraordinary circumstances, an exhaustive necropsy was done and, in the end, it confirmed that West had indeed crushed the bear’s skull. “In that sort of situation, you only have one choice,” West said later. “It’s live or die. Most people are too scared to think about living.” –loc 2439

“There are two categories of people when it comes to extreme situations,” said the leopard specialist Vasily Solkin. “One gets scared first and then starts thinking; the other starts thinking first and gets scared after the fact. Only the latter survive in the taiga.” –loc 2444

A new model had been created; whatever bonds had held this tiger in relationship to his human neighbors, indeed, to his own nature, were broken. Now, anything was possible. When a domestic animal goes wild—a sheep-killing dog, for example—it is referred to as feral, but there is no name for what happens when a wild animal goes in the other direction and becomes dangerously familiar with the world of domesticated creatures. What should one call it when a tiger starts eating people and shit, and injures itself demolishing man-made things? Is it rage? A loss of bearing? Or simply adaptation to a new order? Perhaps some things are best left unnamed. –loc 2551

“To do so,” wrote Uexküll in “A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men,” “we must first blow, in fancy, a soap bubble around each creature to represent its own world, filled with the perceptions which it alone knows. When we ourselves then step into one of these bubbles, the familiar … is transformed.” Uexküll called this bubble the umwelt, a German word that he applied to a given animal’s subjective or “self-centered” world. An individual’s umwelt exists side by side with the Umgebung—the term Uexküll used to describe the objective environment, a place that exists in theory but that none of us can truly know given the inherent limitations of our respective umwelten. In addition to being delightful words to say, umwelt and umgebung offer a framework for exploring and describing the experience of other creatures. –loc 2581

Ultimately, the problem comes down to umwelt; we are such prisoners of our subjective experience that it is only by force of will and imagination that we are able to take leave of it at all and consider the experience and essence of another creature—or even another person. –loc 2616

In fact, the ability to step inside the umwelt “bubble” of another creature is not so much a newfound skill as it is a lost art. Successful hunting, it could be said, is an act of terminal empathy: the kill depends on how successfully a hunter inserts himself into the umwelt of his prey—even to the point of disguising himself as that animal and mimicking its behavior. –loc 2618

“A hunter can only rely on himself,” he said. “If anything happens, there is no one to help him, and all of us who live this way have a very advanced intuition. We also carry the experience of our ancestors in our heads: that’s how a man functions in taiga. The tiger is a hunter, just the same as a man is a hunter. A hunter has to think about how to get his prey. It is different for boar and deer: if leaves or cones fall down from a tree, that’s what they eat; there is no need to think. Tigers think.” –loc 2636

Anthropologists who write about indigenous peoples often note their tendency to anthropomorphize the animals around them. Even though !Kung and Nanai hunters (among countless others) have used this approach to great effect while hunting, the ascription of recognizable emotions and motives to animals causes problems for Western scholars, not least because they are awfully hard to prove in a lab or defend in a dissertation. Such claims are what lawyers and philosophers refer to as “arguments from inference”: anecdotal and unprovable. Under these circumstances, the potential for hair-splitting, semantic quibbling, and “definition objection” is endless, but it also misses the point: these feelings of trans-species understanding and communication have less to do with animals being humanized, or humans being “animalized,” than with all parties simply being sensitized to nuances of the other’s presence and behavior. –loc 2797

The colonel might as well have been describing peasants falling before berserkers. The most painful detail in this anecdote is the baboons’ resignation: with no hope of escape, they fashioned a refuge of last resort from the darkness in their own hands. The image is so poignant, in part, because those hands could so easily be ours. Perhaps it was the possibility of such catastrophes that kept the Sterkfontein baboons from fleeing that night when Brain frightened them so badly: better to lose one or two than risk the whole troop. –loc 2976

In terms of my feelings toward this tiger, I have only feelings of gratitude, and I will explain why: if a person goes through a tough ordeal in his life, he either breaks down or becomes stronger than he used to be. In my case, it was the latter. After this incident, I became stronger—not physically, of course, but spiritually. Maybe it will sound funny, but, possibly, some strength from this tiger was transferred to me.” –loc 3352

The horror in a thing is usually derived from its presence, however distorted or fragmentary, but here in the scrub and snow by the Takhalo was a broken frame with no picture in it. Had there been no tracks and no story, one could have thought these things had simply been abandoned—as if, a year or two earlier, some hunter had come down to the river for a swim, left his belongings in a heap, and simply never returned. Over the intervening seasons, animals, weather, and rot would have shredded and stained them, leaving the ruins that lay there now. But these clothes were only a few days old, and their owner had ceased to exist. –loc 3675

Smirnov may as well have been quoting Henry V:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews,
summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favoured rage.
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect.
–loc 3914

The impact of an attacking tiger can be compared to that of a piano falling on you from a second-story window. But unlike the piano, the tiger is designed to do this, and the impact is only the beginning. –loc 4252

The difference between the extinctions at the close of the Pleistocene and the bulk of those taking place today is one of consciousness: this time, however passively they may occur, they still amount to voluntary acts. Simply put: we know better. This is not an opinion, or a moral judgment; it is a fact. –loc 4747

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Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Author: Hunter S. Thompson
Rating: 7/10
Last Read: July 2016

Quick Summary: A journalist and his “lawyer” go on a five day drug binge and attempt to cover stories in Las Vegas.  Lots of “what the fuck” moments abound – you can’t take your eyes from the page. 

Quick read.  

The book is 70% descriptions of drug usage and effects of drugs.  If drugs aren’t your cup of tea… you should probably just skip over this one.

My Takeaways

Vegas is a very bad place to take hallucinogens.

Don’t mix your drugs.

My Highlights

In a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.

No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted.

After a while you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth. Most acid fanciers can handle this sort of thing

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run … but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant.…

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Invisible Cities

Author: Italo Calvino
Rating: 7/10
Last Read: May 2016

Quick Summary: A collection of short “stories” told by  Marco Polo about cities he has visited.  These are poetic, fantastical descriptions of unreal places, usually highlighting an individual aspect of life in a city.

The book is interesting, though it took me quite a while to get into it – there’s no easing you into the strangeness that you will encounter.

This is definitely a book you can revisit and appreciate further, I think.

My Highlights

In the lives of emperors there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered, and the melancholy and relief of knowing we shall soon give up any thought of knowing and understanding them. –loc 67

As this wave from memories flows in, the city soaks it up like a sponge and expands. A description of Zaira as it is today should contain all Zaira’s past. The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls. –loc 107

You walk for days among trees and among stones. Rarely does the eye light on a thing, and then only when it has recognized that thing as the sign of another thing: a print in the sand indicates the tiger’s passage; a marsh announces a vein of water; the hibiscus flower, the end of winter. All the rest is silent and interchangeable; trees and stones are only what they are. –loc 122

The eye does not see things but images of things that mean other things: –loc 125

But in vain I set out to visit the city: forced to remain motionless and always the same, in order to be more easily remembered, Zora has languished, disintegrated, disappeared. The earth has forgotten her. –loc 150

Each city receives its form from the desert it opposes; and so the camel driver and the sailor see Despina, a border city between two deserts. –loc 163

The city is redundant: it repeats itself so that something will stick in the mind. –loc 168

Perhaps, Kublai thought, the empire is nothing but a zodiac of the mind’s phantasms. –loc 203

the more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there; –loc 222

At this point Kublai Khan interrupted him or imagined interrupting him, or Marco Polo imagined himself interrupted, with a question such as: “You advance always with your head turned back?” or “Is what you see always behind you?” or rather, “Does your journey take place only in the past?” –loc 225

traveler’s past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places. –loc 230

And Marco’s answer was: “Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.” –loc 240

It is pointless to ask whether the new ones are better or worse than the old, since there is no connection between them, just as the old post cards do not depict Maurilia as it was, but a different city which, by chance, was called Maurilia, like this one. –loc 253

It makes no sense to divide cities into these two species, but rather into another two: those that through the years and the changes continue to give their form to desires, and those in which desires either erase the city or are erased by it. –loc 285

“Signs form a language, but not the one you think you know.” –loc 368

In Chloe, a great city, the people who move through the streets are all strangers. At each encounter, they imagine a thousand things about one another; meetings which could take place between them, conversations, surprises, caresses, bites. But no one greets anyone; eyes lock for a second, then dart away, seeking other eyes, never stopping. –loc 392

“Memory’s images, once they are fixed in words, are erased,” –loc 639

“You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expressions: on every new face you encounter, it prints the old forms, for each one it finds the most suitable mask.” –loc 695

The Great Khan tried to concentrate on the game: but now it was the game’s reason that eluded him. The end of every game is a gain or a loss: but of what? What were the real stakes? At checkmate, beneath the foot of the king, knocked aside by the winner’s hand, nothingness remains: a black square, or a white one. By disembodying bis conquests to reduce them to the essential, Kublai had arrived at the extreme operation: the definitive conquest, of which the empire’s multiform treasures were only illusory envelopes; it was reduced to a square of planed wood. –loc 964

“I speak and speak,” Marco says, “but the listener retains only the words he is expecting. –loc 987

“Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents. Your atlas preserves the differences intact: that assortment of qualities which are like the letters in a name.” –loc 1012

Cities have no name for me: they are places without leaves, separating one pasture from another, and where the goats are frightened at street corners and scatter. The dog and I run to keep the flock together.” –loc 1134

“The places have mingled,” the goatherd said. “Cecilia is everywhere. Here, once upon a time, there must have been the Meadow of the Low Sage. My goats recognize the grass on the traffic island.” –loc 1145

“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.” –loc 1243

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Into Thin Air

Author: Jon Krakauer
Rating: 8/10
Last Read: March 2016

Quick Summary: A retelling of a tragic Everest expedition which claimed the lives of multiple experienced mountaineers and clients.

Key Takeaways

Ego will get you killed.

Mountains are dangerous places.  Even experienced mountaineers make mistakes, which cost them their lives or the lives of others. Altitude does not make decision making easier.

Climbing at altitude is not fun, in the traditional sense.

There were many, many fine reasons not to go, but attempting to climb Everest is an intrinsically irrational act—a triumph of desire over sensibility. Any person who would seriously consider it is almost by definition beyond the sway of reasoned argument.

My Highlights

The staggering unreliability of the human mind at high altitude made the research problematic. –loc 146

There were many, many fine reasons not to go, but attempting to climb Everest is an intrinsically irrational act—a triumph of desire over sensibility. Any person who would seriously consider it is almost by definition beyond the sway of reasoned argument. –loc 158

The plain truth is that I knew better but went to Everest anyway. And in doing so I was a party to the death of good people, which is something that is apt to remain on my conscience for a very long time. –loc 160

As I gazed across the sky at this contrail, it occurred to me that the top of Everest was precisely the same height as the pressurized jet bearing me through the heavens. That I proposed to climb to the cruising altitude of an Airbus 300 jetliner struck me, at that moment, as preposterous, or worse. My palms felt clammy. –loc 622

There was loneliness, too, as the sun set, but only rarely now did doubts return. Then I felt sinkingly as if my whole life lay behind me. Once on the mountain I knew (or trusted) that this would give way to total absorption with the task at hand. But at times I wondered if I had not come a long way only to find that what I really sought was something I had left behind. –loc 763

The more improbable the situation and the greater the demands made on [the climber], the more sweetly the blood flows later in release from all that tension. The possibility of danger serves merely to sharpen his awareness and control. And perhaps this is the rationale of all risky sports: You deliberately raise the ante of effort and concentration in order, as it were, to clear your mind of trivialities. It’s a small scale model for living, but with a difference: Unlike your routine life, where mistakes can usually be recouped and some kind of compromise patched up, your actions, for however brief a period, are deadly serious. A. Alvarez The Savage God: A Study of Suicide –loc 1221

Eighteen days earlier she’d broken into tears when she’d taken me to the plane to Nepal. “Driving home from the airport,” she confessed, “I couldn’t stop crying. Saying good-bye to you was one of the saddest things I’ve ever done. I guess I knew on some level that you might not be coming back, and it seemed like such a waste. It seemed so fucking stupid and pointless.” –loc 1373

Ms. O’Dowd walked to the team’s Sherpa leader, Ang Dorje, and said audibly: “This is Ken Vernon, one of the ones we told you about. He is to be given no assistance whatsoever.” Ang Dorje is a tough, nuggety rock of a man and we had already shared several glasses of Chang, the fiery local brew. I looked at him and said, “Not even a cup of tea?” To his credit, and in the best tradition of Sherpa hospitality, he looked at Ms. O’Dowd and said: “Bullshit.” He grabbed me by the arm, dragged me into the mess tent and served up a mug of steaming tea and a plate of biscuits. –loc 1605

I doubt if anyone would claim to enjoy life at high altitudes—enjoy, that is, in the ordinary sense of the word. There is a certain grim satisfaction to be derived from struggling upwards, however slowly; but the bulk of one’s time is necessarily spent in the extreme squalor of a high camp, when even this solace is lacking. –loc 1636

worst of all is the feeling of complete helplessness and inability to deal with any emergency that might arise. I used to try to console myself with the thought that a year ago I would have been thrilled by the very idea of taking part in our present adventure, a prospect that had then seemed like an impossible dream; but altitude has the same effect on the mind as upon the body, one’s intellect becomes dull and unresponsive, and my only desire was to finish the wretched job and to get down to a more reasonable clime. –loc 1642

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience. Joan Didion –loc 1933

Now I dream of the soft touch of women, the songs of birds, the smell of soil crumbling between my fingers, and the brilliant green of plants that I diligently nurture. I am looking for land to buy and I will sow it with deer and wild pigs and birds and cottonwoods and sycamores and build a pond and the ducks will come and fish will rise in the early evening light and take the insects into their jaws. There will be paths through this forest and you and I will lose ourselves in the soft curves and folds of the ground. We will come to the water’s edge and lie on the grass and there will be a small, unobtrusive sign that says, THIS IS THE REAL WORLD, MUCHACHOS, AND WE ARE ALL IN IT. –loc 4074

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Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero

Author: James Romm
Rating: 9/10
Last Read: January 2016

Quick Summary: An overview of the life of Seneca, putting his philosophical works into context with his life and surroundings.  Discusses palace intrigues with the emperor Nero.

If you like history or philosophy, it is an excellent read.

Life, properly regarded, is only a journey toward death. We wrongly say that the old and sick are “dying,” when infants and youths are doing so just as certainly. We are dying every day, all of us

Key Takeaways

Nothing is created in a vacuum.  Seneca’s letters are a source of immense wisdom still today… but when added into the context of his life, his goals, and his aspirations they can take on a totally different slant.

Nothing can be proven, but the theory fits with a pattern of opportunism in much of Seneca’s work. His command of the written word was so deft, his rhetorical skills so subtle, that it was easy for him to help himself while also helping others.

History is super fucking interesting and way better than anything we can make up.  

Elsewhere in De Ira Seneca calls to mind the sufferings of Asian viziers in old Greek legends. Harpagus served as chief minister to a Persian king but offended his master by disregarding an order. The king took a gory revenge: he served Harpagus a stew of his own children’s flesh, then showed him the severed heads to reveal what he had eaten. How did Harpagus like his dinner? the king asked, with Caligulan cruelty. Harpagus’ choking reply was “At a king’s table, every meal is pleasant.” The flattery at least gained him this, Seneca says grimly: he did not have to finish his meal.

My Highlights

Amici vitia si feras, facias tua. If you put up with the crimes of a friend, you make them your own. —ROMAN PROVERB –loc 47

Consolation to Marcia, written about A.D. 40, takes the form of a letter addressed to a mother grieving for a dead son, but it was meant to be read widely. Seneca would play the same rhetorical trick his entire life, allowing his readers to listen in on what seemed to be an intimate exchange. –loc 306

Nothing can be proven, but the theory fits with a pattern of opportunism in much of Seneca’s work. His command of the written word was so deft, his rhetorical skills so subtle, that it was easy for him to help himself while also helping others. –loc 324

Marcia’s grief, for Seneca, exemplifies a universal human blindness. We assume that we own things—family, wealth, position—whereas we have only borrowed them from Fortune. We take for granted that they will be with us forever, and we grieve at their loss; but loss is the more normal event—it is what we should have expected all along. –loc 336

life, properly regarded, is only a journey toward death. We wrongly say that the old and sick are “dying,” when infants and youths are doing so just as certainly. We are dying every day, all of us. –loc 343

Not only in Rome, but everywhere and in all times, good men have knuckled under to despots. –loc 410

Elsewhere in De Ira Seneca calls to mind the sufferings of Asian viziers in old Greek legends. Harpagus served as chief minister to a Persian king but offended his master by disregarding an order. The king took a gory revenge: he served Harpagus a stew of his own children’s flesh, then showed him the severed heads to reveal what he had eaten. How did Harpagus like his dinner? the king asked, with Caligulan cruelty. Harpagus’ choking reply was “At a king’s table, every meal is pleasant.” The flattery at least gained him this, Seneca says grimly: he did not have to finish his meal. –loc 411

Seneca’s hymn to suicide is thus very much of its time. By his day, suicide had come to signify, for aristocratic victims of the emperors, an inability to fight back; the best one could hope for was to embarrass the princeps by a highly public exit. –loc 459

Prexaspes was another vizier like Harpagus, a right-hand man to a Persian monarch. His master, Cambyses, a notorious drunk, set out one day to prove to his court that wine did not affect him. He set up an archery course, with Prexaspes’ son as the target; then, good as his word, he shot the boy through the heart. The story is related in De Ira just before the hymn to suicide above (in which Prexaspes is recalled as “the man whom it befell to have a king shoot arrows at his dear ones”). But Seneca leaves the sequel to the story curiously untold. Years later Prexaspes found himself in possession of dangerous information. He knew that a group of plotters had murdered Cambyses’ heir and put an impostor on the throne. He had colluded with the plot’s leaders, who valued his high standing among the Persian people. When the people became uneasy about their king’s legitimacy, the plotters asked Prexaspes to reassure them. Prexaspes climbed a high tower in a central square of the capital. From a window at the top, he called out to the populace below—but not as instructed. He denounced the impostor and revealed the plot, confessing that he himself had killed the true heir to the throne, on Cambyses’ orders. Then he launched himself off the tower and fell to his death. Inspired by his deed, the Persians rallied against the conspirators and soon overthrew them and their false king. –loc 463

Was life under such arbitrary power worth living? It was the question Seneca had posed in De Ira and, in a different way, in Consolation to Marcia. For Lucius Junius Silanus, the answer—no—was clear enough. Three days after his dismissal, on the same day Claudius wed Agrippina, he took his own life. –loc 618

As in the biblical tale of the Tower of Babel, the very complexity of civilization seemed to carry the seeds of its own destruction—or at least to have a fixed terminus, reached at a regular point every few thousand years. To Seneca, who lived in a city that had reached unimagined levels of sophistication, that terminus seemed not far off. –loc 633

By a curious coincidence, the careers of these two brothers—Seneca’s older brother Novatus, and Pallas’ brother Antonius Felix—are bound together by an unlikely thread: the travels of the apostle Paul. –loc 843

Only philosophic contemplation, he argues, can fulfill that quest. Only those who study philosophy are truly alive, in that they move outside the prison of time into the realm of eternals. All others, those who follow worldly pursuits, are squandering their time, merely running out the ever-ticking clock of mortality. –loc 972

“To fight against an equal is risky; against a higher-up, insane; against someone beneath you, degrading,” –loc 1202

But De Clementia is more emphatic on this point. “We have all of us done wrong,” Seneca intones here, in words that would not be out of place in a modern Christian sermon, “some seriously, some lightly, some intentionally, some pushed into it by accident or carried away by the wrongdoing of others; some have stood by our good designs not firmly enough and have lost our guiltlessness, unwillingly, while trying to keep our grasp on –loc 1563

Seneca had made the bargain that many good men have made when agreeing to aid bad regimes. On the one hand, their presence strengthens the regime and helps it endure. But their moral influence may also improve the regime’s behavior or save the lives of its enemies. For many, this has been a bargain worth making, even if it has cost them—as it may have cost Seneca—their immortal soul. –loc 2088

According to Seneca’s definition in the treatise, Nero’s giving had been not a beneficium, an act of generosity, but a means of asserting power and imposing obligation. –loc 2200

In the fog-bound glens of eastern England, Boudicca, warrior-queen of the Iceni, was gathering a mighty host determined to end Roman rule. At her hands, more than 80,000 Romans and their allies would soon be killed, and the Roman army would come within a hairsbreadth of an epic disaster. –loc 2206

According to Dio’s account, before the rebellion began, Seneca had called in his loans to British tribal leaders, abruptly and on harsh terms. That put many Britons into bankruptcy, while others were broken by the corrupt finance officer in charge of the region, Decianus Catus. Together, Dio suggests, Catus and Seneca forced Britons into a corner where they had nothing to lose by revolt. Tacitus, by contrast, says nothing of Seneca’s moneylending in Britain, though he confirms that Catus had made enemies there by rapacity. For Tacitus, the principal spark of the conflict was the flogging of Boudicca and the rape of her daughters, committed by arrogant Roman troops grown scornful of British tribesmen. –loc 2246

Then Nero turned to a more salient point. “If you return money to me, it won’t be your moderation spoken of by every mouth, but my greed; if you leave your princeps, it will be chalked up to fear of my cruelty. Your self-restraint would earn great praise; but it doesn’t befit a wise man to get glory for himself while bringing ill repute on a friend.” –loc 2329

The most consequential departure was that of Burrus, the stalwart Praetorian prefect, recently dead. The gruff old soldier had been one of few who stood up to Nero, speaking his mind and then, if asked to reconsider, saying to the princeps: “I’ve told you already, don’t question me twice.” –loc 2452

Discomforts overwhelm the body, Seneca muses, in the same way that vice and ignorance overwhelm the soul. The sufferer may not even know he is suffering, just as a deep sleeper does not know he is asleep. Only philosophy can rouse souls from such comas. –loc 2563

By insisting that death is everywhere and cannot be escaped, Seneca seems to relieve himself of the burden of action. For indeed, Seneca was taking very little action in these years to help himself or others. –loc 2672

The will to power, Atreus implies, lurks in even the most detached, self-contented sage. –loc 2945

Seneca’s prose works offer forgiveness, but in the bleak world of the tragedies, the sin of weakness comes back on the sinner’s head a thousandfold. In a gruesome messenger speech, we hear how Atreus butchered, fileted, and stewed Thyestes’ children. Then we watch as Thyestes unknowingly consumes the horrid casserole. –loc 2964

A great stream of manacled men surged toward Nero’s residence, so many that the suspects had to be detained outside, near the gates, for lack of rooms to torture them in. –loc 3167

Seneca allegedly once told Nero—the occasion of the remark is not known—“No matter how many you kill, you can’t kill your successor.” But in this case, as in many others, Nero proved his teacher wrong. He had indeed eliminated all possible successors, men belonging to the Julian line, by the end of 65. –loc 3376

The power to die, Seneca had promised, was present at every moment and transcended every oppression. –loc 3430

Domitian again, as his father had done, banished the Stoics from Rome, including Epictetus, whose magnetic personality had by now become a phenomenon. Epictetus landed in Nicopolis, in the Greek East, and began attracting new followers. His conversations and quips were written down by one of them, young Arrian of Nicomedia (later a famous historian), and began circulating as the Discourses and Encheiridion (“Handbook”). In time these writings, in Greek, filtered back to Rome, where they came under the eyes of an aristocratic youth named Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. One day, after his elevation to princeps, this Marcus would quote the sayings of Epictetus in his own writings—bringing Stoic philosophy back into the palace from which it had been exiled since the death of Seneca. –loc 3519

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Wool (Silo Series)

Author: Hugh Howry
Rating: 8/10
Last Read: March 2016

Quick Summary: The world is in ruin.  Humanity is kept alive in a silo.  Punishment? People get sent to die in the harsh outer environment.  But the new sheriff senses there’s something fishy going on and investigates.

This is an excellent read.  The story ends on a solid note, if you are not interested in continuing the series (I haven’t).

My Highlights

“The days pile up and weigh small decisions down, don’t they? That decision not to visit. The first few days slide by easy enough; anger and youth power them along. But then they pile up like unrecycled trash. Isn’t that right?” –loc 1413

One of the last things Mayor Jahns had told her had proved truer than she could imagine: people were like machines. They broke down. They rattled. They could burn you or maim you if you weren’t careful. Her job was not only to figure out why this happened and who was to blame, but also to listen for the signs of it coming. Being sheriff, like being a mechanic, was as much the fine art of preventive maintenance as it was the cleaning up after a breakdown. –loc 1772

But then, the lowering of the body and the plucking of ripe fruit just above the graves was meant to hammer this home: the cycle of life is here; it is inescapable; it is to be embraced, cherished, appreciated. One departs and leaves behind the gift of sustenance, of life. They make room for the next generation. We are born, we are shadows, we cast shadows of our own, and then we are gone. All anyone can hope for is to be remembered two shadows deep. –loc 2209

Killing a man should be harder than waving a length of pipe in their direction. It should take long enough for one’s conscience to get in the way. –loc 4142

“What always happens. People go crazy. It only needs to happen once.” He smiled. “We get no credit for being sane, do we? I get no credit. Even from me. From myself. I hold it together and hold it together and I make it another day, another year, and there’s no reward. Nothing great about me being normal. About not being crazy.” He frowned. “Then you have one bad day, and you worry for yourself, you know? It only takes one.” –loc 4359

Once guns were made, who would unmake them? Barrels rested on shoulders and bristled like pincushions above the crowd. There were things, like spoken ideas, that were almost impossible to take back. –loc 4469

“None of us asked to be where we are,” she reminded him coolly. This gave Lukas pause, thinking of where she was, what she’d been through to get there. “What we control,” Juliette said, “is our actions once fate puts us there.” –loc 5417

“We can’t control where we are right now,” he mumbled, “just what we do going forward.” –loc 6297

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The Trial

Author: Franz Kafka
Rating: 8/10
Last Read: January 2016

Quick Summary: A man is put on trial in a secret court and attempts to prove his innocence without knowing what the charges are.  As any of us would, he descends into madness. 

Key Takeaways

It turns out if you read old books, you can see the risks of your current situations quite clearly.  Secret trials?  Special courts?  Unable to fight the battles on your own, especially when you don’t have all of the information?  Yeah.  We live in that reality.

I, too, would go mad if I was on trial, didn’t know why, and couldn’t defend myself.

My Highlights

How are we to avoid those in office becoming deeply corrupt when everything is devoid of meaning? –loc 644

K.’s uncle was always in a hurry, as he suffered from the unfortunate belief that he had a number things to do while he was in the big city and had to settle all of them in one day –loc 1226

The only right thing to do is to learn how to deal with the situation as it is. –loc 1625

How is it even possible for someone to be guilty. We’re all human beings here, one like the other.” –loc 2853

“That is true,” said the priest, “but that is how the guilty speak.” –loc 2853

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Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging

Author: Sebastian Junger
Rating: 10/10
Last Read: June 2016
Recommended Reading? Yes!

Quick Summary: Our societal “advances” have been robbing us of the needs we have as social human animals, and this manifests many ways in our society today.  We all miss being part of a tribe.

Related Books: On Killing, Sapiens

Key Takeaways

That nagging feeling inside of you, saying that you feel lonely even surrounded by people constantly? That’s a real feeling – a product of the systems we have created and surround ourselves with.

Real human connection flourishes when there is a dependency and shared experience.

The modern world is a psychically dangerous place for us.

My Highlights

I wanted the chance to prove my worth to my community and my peers, but I lived in a time and a place where nothing dangerous ever really happened. Surely this was new in the human experience, I thought. How do you become an adult in a society that doesn’t ask for sacrifice? How do you become a man in a world that doesn’t require courage? –Loc 43

Humans don’t mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary. –Loc 72

First agriculture, and then industry, changed two fundamental things about the human experience. The accumulation of personal property allowed people to make more and more individualistic choices about their lives, and those choices unavoidably diminished group efforts toward a common good. And as society modernized, people found themselves able to live independently from any communal group. A person living in a modern city or a suburb can, for the first time in history, go through an entire day—or an entire life—mostly encountering complete strangers. They can be surrounded by others and yet feel deeply, dangerously alone. –Loc 221

A wealthy person who has never had to rely on help and resources from his community is leading a privileged life that falls way outside more than a million years of human experience. –Loc 245

Financial independence can lead to isolation, and isolation can put people at a greatly increased risk of depression and suicide. This might be a fair trade for a generally wealthier society—but a trade it –Loc 247

self-determination theory, which holds that human beings need three basic things in order to be content: they need to feel competent at what they do; they need to feel authentic in their lives; and they need to feel connected to others. –Loc 252

Bluntly put, modern society seems to emphasize extrinsic values over intrinsic ones, and as a result, mental health issues refuse to decline with growing wealth. –Loc 255

“The economic and marketing forces of modern society have engineered an environment… that maximize[s] consumption at the long-term cost of well-being,” a study in the Journal of Affective Disorders concluded in 2012. “In effect, humans have dragged a body with a long hominid history into an overfed, malnourished, sedentary, sunlight-deficient, sleep-deprived, competitive, inequitable, and socially-isolating environment with dire consequences.” –Loc 261

Northern European societies, including America, are the only ones in history to make very young children sleep alone in such numbers. The isolation is thought to make many children bond intensely with stuffed animals for reassurance. –Loc 274
In 2007, anthropologist Christopher Boehm published an analysis of 154 foraging societies that were deemed to be representative of our ancestral past, and one of their most common traits was the absence of major wealth disparities between individuals. Another was the absence of arbitrary authority. “Social life is politically egalitarian in that there is always a low tolerance by a group’s mature males for one of their number dominating, bossing, or denigrating the others,” Boehm observed. –Loc 286

Modern society, on the other hand, is a sprawling and anonymous mess where people can get away with incredible levels of dishonesty without getting caught. What tribal people would consider a profound betrayal of the group, modern society simply dismisses as fraud. –Loc 308

Fraud in the insurance industry is calculated to be $100 billion to $300 billion a year, a cost that gets passed directly to consumers in the form of higher premiums. All told, combined public- and private-sector fraud costs every household in the United States probably around $5,000 a year—or roughly the equivalent of working four months at a minimum-wage job. –Loc 314
The FBI reports that since the economic recession of 2008, securities and commodities fraud in the United States has gone up by more than 50 percent. In the decade prior, almost 90 percent of corporate fraud cases—insider trading, kickbacks and bribes, false accounting—implicated the company’s chief executive officer and/or chief financial officer. –Loc 321

Dishonest bankers and welfare or insurance cheats are the modern equivalent of tribe members who quietly steal more than their fair share of meat or other resources. That is very different from alpha males who bully others and openly steal resources. –Loc 331

That is ironic, because the political origins of the United States lay in confronting precisely this kind of resource seizure by people in power. –Loc 347

“An earthquake achieves what the law promises but does not in practice maintain,” one of the survivors wrote. “The equality of all men.” –Loc 434

Communities that have been devastated by natural or man-made disasters almost never lapse into chaos and disorder; if anything, they become more just, more egalitarian, and more deliberately fair to individuals. –Loc 437

He was unable to find a single instance where communities that had been hit by catastrophic events lapsed into sustained panic, much less anything approaching anarchy. If anything, he found that social bonds were reinforced during disasters, and that people overwhelmingly devoted their energies toward the good of the community rather than just themselves. –Loc 509

Men perform the vast majority of bystander rescues, and children, the elderly, and women are the most common recipients of them. Children are helped regardless of gender, as are the elderly, but women of reproductive age are twice as likely to be helped by a stranger than men are. Men have to wait, on average, until age seventy-five before they can expect the same kind of assistance in a life-threatening situation that women get their whole lives. –Loc 539

The beauty and the tragedy of the modern world is that it eliminates many situations that require people to demonstrate a commitment to the collective good. Protected by police and fire departments and relieved of most of the challenges of survival, an urban man might go through his entire life without having to come to the aid of someone in danger—or even give up his dinner. Likewise, a woman in a society that has codified its moral behavior into a set of laws and penalties might never have to make a choice that puts her very life at risk. What would you risk dying for—and for whom—is perhaps the most profound question a person can ask themselves. The vast majority of people in modern society are able to pass their whole lives without ever having to answer that question, which is both an enormous blessing and a significant loss. It is a loss because having to face that question has, for tens of millennia, been one of the ways that we have defined ourselves as people. And it is a blessing because life has gotten far less difficult and traumatic than it was for most people even a century ago. –Loc 567

“The miners’ code of rescue meant that each trapped miner had the knowledge that he would never be buried alive if it were humanly possible for his friends to reach him,” a 1960 study called Individual and Group Behavior in a Coal Mine Disaster explained. “At the same time, the code was not rigid enough to ostracize those who could not face the rescue role.” –Loc 596

Canadian psychologists who interviewed the miners after their rescue determined that these early leaders tended to lack empathy and emotional control, that they were not concerned with the opinions of others, that they associated with only one or two other men in the group, and that their physical abilities far exceeded their verbal abilities. But all of these traits allowed them to take forceful, life-saving action where many other men might not. –Loc 608

Once the escape attempts failed, different kinds of leaders emerged. In what researchers termed the “survival period,” the ability to wait in complete darkness without giving up hope or succumbing to panic became crucial. Researchers determined that the leaders during this period were entirely focused on group morale and used skills that were diametrically opposed to those of the men who had led the escape attempts. They were highly sensitive to people’s moods, they intellectualized things in order to meet group needs, they reassured the men who were starting to give up hope, and they worked hard to be accepted by the entire group. –Loc 612

If women aren’t present to provide the empathic leadership that every group needs, certain men will do it. If men aren’t present to take immediate action in an emergency, women will step in. –Loc 619

To some degree the sexes are interchangeable—meaning they can easily be substituted for one another—but gender roles aren’t. Both are necessary for the healthy functioning of society, and those roles will always be filled regardless of whether both sexes are available to do it. –Loc 621

“In every upheaval we rediscover humanity and regain freedoms,” one sociologist wrote about England’s reaction to the war. “We relearn some old truths about the connection between happiness, unselfishness, and the simplification of living.” –Loc 628

Self-interest gets subsumed into group interest because there is no survival outside group survival, and that creates a social bond that many people sorely miss. –Loc 631

But I also believe that the world we are living in—and the peace that we have—is very fucked up if somebody is missing war. And many people do.” –Loc 638

What I had was classic short-term PTSD. From an evolutionary perspective, it’s exactly the response you want to have when your life is in danger: you want to be vigilant, you want to avoid situations where you are not in control, you want to react to strange noises, you want to sleep lightly and wake easily, you want to have flashbacks and nightmares that remind you of specific threats to your life, and you want to be, by turns, angry and depressed. Anger keeps you ready to fight, and depression keeps you from being too active and putting yourself in more danger. Flashbacks also serve to remind you of the danger that’s out there—a “highly efficient single-event survival-learning mechanism,” as one researcher termed it. All humans react to trauma in this way, and most mammals do as well. It may be unpleasant, but it’s preferable to getting killed. –Loc 694

I had a much older friend named Joanna who was very concerned about how I was faring psychologically after the wars I’d covered. Joanna died soon after I came back from one particularly long stint overseas, and I had almost no reaction to the news until I started talking to her nephew about the trips she’d taken during the early 1960s to register black voters in the South. People were getting killed for doing that, and I remember Joanna telling me that she and her husband, Ellis, never knew if she would make it back alive when she left on those trips. After a year of covering combat there was something about her willingness to die for others—for human dignity—that completely undid me. Stories about soldiers had the same effect on me: completely divorced from any sense of patriotism, accounts of great bravery could emotionally annihilate me. The human concern for others would seem to be the one story that, adequately told, no person can fully bear to hear. –Loc 707

Given the profound alienation of modern society, when combat vets say that they miss the war, they might be having an entirely healthy response to life back home. –Loc 734

Killing seems to traumatize people regardless of the danger they’re in or the perceived righteousness of their cause. –Loc 787

The discrepancy might be due to the fact that intensive training and danger create what is known as unit cohesion—strong emotional bonds within the company or the platoon—and high unit cohesion is correlated with lower rates of psychiatric breakdown. –Loc 793

Studies from around the world show that recovery from war—from any trauma—is heavily influenced by the society one belongs to, and there are societies that make that process relatively easy. Modern society does not seem to be one of them. Among American vets, if one weeds out obviously exaggerated trauma on the one hand and deep trauma on the other, there are still enormous numbers of people who had utterly ordinary wartime experiences and yet feel dangerously alienated back home. Clinically speaking, such alienation is not the same as PTSD—and maybe deserves its own diagnostic term—but both result from military service abroad, so it’s understandable that vets and clinicians alike are prone to conflating them. Either way, it makes one wonder exactly what it is about modern society that is so mortally dispiriting to come home to. –Loc 838

“For the first time in [our] lives… we were in a tribal sort of situation where we could help each other without fear,” a former gunner in the 62nd Coast Artillery –Loc 847

“There were fifteen men to a gun. You had fifteen guys who for the first time in their lives were not living in a competitive society. We had no hopes of becoming officers. I liked that feeling very much… It was the absence of competition and boundaries and all those phony standards that created the thing I loved about the Army.” –Loc 850

What people miss presumably isn’t danger or loss but the unity that these things often engender. There are obvious stresses on a person in a group, but there may be even greater stresses on a person in isolation, so during disasters there is a net gain in well-being. –Loc 858

Even if he or she is part of a family, that is not the same as belonging to a group that shares resources and experiences almost everything collectively. –Loc 863

“We are not good to each other. Our tribalism is to an extremely narrow group of people: our children, our spouse, maybe our parents. Our society is alienating, technical, cold, and mystifying. Our fundamental desire, as human beings, is to be close to others, and our society does not allow for that.” –Loc 868

First, cohesive and egalitarian tribal societies do a very good job at mitigating the effects of trauma, but by their very nature, many modern societies are exactly the opposite: hierarchical and alienating. –Loc 930

Secondly, ex-combatants shouldn’t be seen—or be encouraged to see themselves—as victims. One can be deeply traumatized, as firemen are by the deaths of both colleagues and civilians, without being viewed through the lens of victimhood. –Loc 933

The one way that soldiers are never allowed to see themselves during deployment is as victims, because the passivity of victimhood can get them killed. It’s yelled, beaten, and drilled out of them long before they get close to the battlefield. But when they come home they find themselves being viewed so sympathetically that they’re often excused from having to fully function in society. Some of them truly can’t function, and those people should be taken care of immediately; but imagine how confusing it must be to the rest of them. –Loc 937

What I liked about the encounter was that it showed how very close the energy of male conflict and male closeness can be. –Loc 982

There seemed to be a great human potential out there, organized around the idea of belonging, and the trick was to convince people that their interests had more in common than they had in conflict. I once asked a combat vet if he’d rather have an enemy in his life or another close friend. He looked at me like I was crazy. “Oh, an enemy, a hundred percent,” he said. “Not even close. I already got a lot of friends.” He thought about it a little longer. “Anyway, all my best friends I’ve gotten into fights with—knock-down, drag-out fights. Granted we were always drunk when it happened, but think about that.” –Loc 984

There are many costs to modern society, starting with its toll on the global ecosystem and working one’s way down to its toll on the human psyche, but the most dangerous loss may be to community. –Loc 995

If the human race is under threat in some way that we don’t yet understand, it will probably be at a community level that we either solve the problem or fail to. If the future of the planet depends on, say, rationing water, communities of neighbors will be able to enforce new rules far more effectively than even local government. It’s how we evolved to exist, and it obviously works. –Loc 997

The earliest and most basic definition of community—of tribe—would be the group of people that you would both help feed and help defend. –Loc 1001

A society that doesn’t offer its members the chance to act selflessly in these ways isn’t a society in any tribal sense of the word; it’s just a political entity that, lacking enemies, will probably fall apart on its own. –Loc 1002

The public is often accused of being disconnected from its military, but frankly it’s disconnected from just about everything. Farming, mineral extraction, gas and oil production, bulk cargo transport, logging, fishing, infrastructure construction—all the industries that keep the nation going are mostly unacknowledged by the people who depend on them most. –Loc 1012

This fundamental lack of connectedness allows people to act in trivial but incredibly selfish ways. Rachel Yehuda pointed to littering as the perfect example of an everyday symbol of disunity in society. “It’s a horrible thing to see because it sort of encapsulates this idea that you’re in it alone, that there isn’t a shared ethos of trying to protect something shared,” she told me. “It’s the embodiment of every man for himself. It’s the opposite of the military.” –Loc 1020

In this sense, littering is an exceedingly petty version of claiming a billion-dollar bank bailout or fraudulently claiming disability payments. When you throw trash on the ground, you apparently don’t see yourself as truly belonging to the world that you’re walking around in. And when you fraudulently claim money from the government, you are ultimately stealing from your friends, family, and neighbors—or somebody else’s friends, family, and neighbors. That diminishes you morally far more than it diminishes your country financially. –Loc 1023

The myth addresses a fundamental fear in human society: that you can defend against external enemies but still remain vulnerable to one lone madman in your midst. –Loc 1039

Contempt is one of four behaviors that, statistically, can predict divorce in married couples. People who speak with contempt for one another will probably not remain united for long. –Loc 1142

“If you want to make a society work, then you don’t keep underscoring the places where you’re different—you underscore your shared humanity,” she told me. “I’m appalled by how much people focus on differences. Why are you focusing on how different you are from one another, and not on the things that unite us?” –Loc 1154

Bauman obviously felt that true leadership—the kind that lives depend on—may require powerful people to put themselves last, and that he was one of those people. –Loc 1195

He didn’t understand the greed. He didn’t understand if you have a hundred million dollars, why do you need another million?” –Loc 1198

He clearly understood that belonging to society requires sacrifice, and that sacrifice gives back way more than it costs. –Loc 1200

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Siddhartha

Author: Herman Hesse
Rating: 10/10
Last Read: June 2016
Recommended Reading? Yes!

Quick Summary: Siddhartha is a Brahman seeking enlightenment in the time of the Buddha.  He walks many paths in order to find the elusive secret to enlightenment.

Key Takeaways

Even after straying from the path, Siddhartha still manages to find enlightenment.  You can learn from your failures, and in the end perhaps they even open the doorways you need to reach your goal.

Teachers can be dangerous – sometimes the secret is that you must search for the answers on your own, rather than buying into dogma too readily.

Business, property, and the sense-dulling enjoyments of the world stole Siddhartha from the path.  Make sure they don’t do the same to you – treat it as Siddhartha originally did, like a game.

My Highlights

Siddhartha was thus loved by everyone. He was a source of joy for everybody, he was a delight for them all. But he, Siddhartha, was not a source of joy for himself, he found no delight in himself. –loc. 35

“Your soul is the whole world”, –loc. 58

Marvellous wisdom was in these verses, all knowledge of the wisest ones had been collected here in magic words, pure as honey collected by bees. –loc. 59

all of this was not worthy of one look from his eye, it all lied, it all stank, it all stank of lies, it all pretended to be meaningful and joyful and beautiful, and it all was just concealed putrefaction. –loc. 139

A goal stood before Siddhartha, a single goal: to become empty, empty of thirst, empty of wishing, empty of dreams, empty of joy and sorrow. Dead to himself, not to be a self any more, to find tranquility with an emptied heard, to be open to miracles in unselfish thoughts, that was his goal. –loc. 141

Thus Gotama walked towards the town, to collect alms, and the two Samanas recognised him solely by the perfection of his calm, by the quietness of his appearance, in which there was no searching, no desire, no imitation, no effort to be seen, only light and peace. –loc. 301

Whether it may be good or bad, whether living according to it would be suffering or joy, I do not wish to discuss, possibly this is not essential—but the uniformity of the world, that everything which happens is connected, that the great and the small things are all encompassed by the same forces of time, by the same law of causes, of coming into being and of dying, this is what shines brightly out of your exalted teachings, oh perfected one. –loc. 356

“You’ve heard the teachings, oh son of a Brahman, and good for you that you’ve thought about it thus deeply. You’ve found a gap in it, an error. You should think about this further. But be warned, oh seeker of knowledge, of the thicket of opinions and of arguing about words. There is nothing to opinions, they may be beautiful or ugly, smart or foolish, everyone can support them or discard them. But the teachings, you’ve heard from me, are no opinion, and their goal is not to explain the world to those who seek knowledge. They have a different goal; their goal is salvation from suffering. This is what Gotama teaches, nothing else.” –loc. 366

It is not my place to judge another person’s life. Only for myself, for myself alone, I must decide, I must chose, I must refuse. –loc. 385

He realized that one thing had left him, as a snake is left by its old skin, that one thing no longer existed in him, which had accompanied him throughout his youth and used to be a part of him: the wish to have teachers and to listen to teachings. He had also left the last teacher who had appeared on his path, even him, the highest and wisest teacher, the most holy one, Buddha, he had left him, had to part with him, was not able to accept his teachings. –loc. 407

I want to learn from myself, want to be my student, want to get to know myself, the secret of Siddhartha.” –loc. 425

The purpose and the essential properties were not somewhere behind the things, they were in them, in everything. –loc. 433

Because suddenly, he had also become aware of this: He, who was indeed like someone who had just woken up or like a new-born baby, he had to start his life anew and start again at the very beginning. –loc. 440

Beautiful was this world, looking at it thus, without searching, thus simply, thus childlike. Beautiful were the moon and the stars, beautiful was the stream and the banks, the forest and the rocks, the goat and the gold-beetle, the flower and the butterfly. Beautiful and lovely it was, thus to walk through the world, thus childlike, thus awoken, thus open to what is near, thus without distrust. Differently the sun burnt the head, differently the shade of the forest cooled him down, differently the stream and the cistern, the pumpkin and the banana tasted. Short were the days, short the nights, every hour sped swiftly away like a sail on the sea, and under the sail was a ship full of treasures, full of joy. –loc. 472

“Surely. This too, I have learned from the river: everything is coming back! –loc. 513

All are thankful, though they are the ones who would have a right to receive thanks. All are submissive, all would like to be friends, like to obey, think little. Like children are all people.” –loc. 516

You are learning easily, Siddhartha, thus you should also learn this: love can be obtained by begging, buying, receiving it as a gift, finding it in the street, but it cannot be stolen. –loc. 588

Everyone can perform magic, everyone can reach his goals, if he is able to think, if he is able to wait, if he is able to fast.” –loc. 653

“I am without possessions,” said Siddhartha, “if this is what you mean. Surely, I am without possessions. But I am so voluntarily, and therefore I am not destitute.” –loc. 667

“So it seems to be indeed. Everyone takes, everyone gives, such is life.” –loc. 674

“But if you don’t mind me asking: being without possessions, what would you like to give?” “Everyone gives what he has. The warrior gives strength, the merchant gives merchandise, the teacher teachings, the farmer rice, the fisher fish.” “Yes indeed. And what is it now what you’ve got to give? What is it that you’ve learned, what you’re able to do?” “I can think. I can wait. I can fast.” –loc. 674

But like this, Siddhartha can wait calmly, he knows no impatience, he knows no emergency, for a long time he can allow hunger to besiege him and can laugh about it. This, sir, is what fasting is good for.” –loc. 682

“This Brahman,” he said to a friend, “is no proper merchant and will never be one, there is never any passion in his soul when he conducts our business. But he has that mysterious quality of those people to whom success comes all by itself, whether this may be a good star of his birth, magic, or something he has learned among Samanas. He always seems to be merely playing with out business-affairs, they never fully become a part of him, they never rule over him, he is never afraid of failure, he is never upset by a loss.” –loc. 709

Kamaswami held against him that he had not turned back right away, that he had wasted time and money. Siddhartha answered: “Stop scolding, dear friend! Nothing was ever achieved by scolding. If a loss has occurred, let me bear that loss. I am very satisfied with this trip. I have gotten to know many kinds of people, a Brahman has become my friend, children have sat on my knees, farmers have shown me their fields, nobody knew that I was a merchant.” –loc. 719

Besides from this, Siddhartha’s interest and curiosity was only concerned with the people, whose businesses, crafts, worries, pleasures, and acts of foolishness used to be as alien and distant to him as the moon. However easily he succeeded in talking to all of them, in living with all of them, in learning from all of them, he was still aware that there was something which separated him from them and this separating factor was him being a Samana. –loc. 740

He saw mankind going through life in a childlike or animallike manner, which he loved and also despised at the same time. He saw them toiling, saw them suffering, and becoming gray for the sake of things which seemed to him to entirely unworthy of this price, for money, for little pleasures, for being slightly honoured, he saw them scolding and insulting each other, he saw them complaining about pain at which a Samana would only smile, and suffering because of deprivations which a Samana would not feel. –loc. 743

The source ran somewhere, far away from him, ran and ran invisibly, had nothing to do with his life any more. And at several times he suddenly became scared on account of such thoughts and wished that he would also be gifted with the ability to participate in all of this childlike-naive occupations of the daytime with passion and with his heart, really to live, really to act, really to enjoy and to live instead of just standing by as a spectator. –loc. 759

“You are like me, you are different from most people. You are Kamala, nothing else, and inside of you, there is a peace and refuge, to which you can go at every hour of the day and be at home at yourself, as I can also do. Few people have this, and yet all could have it.” “Not all people are smart,” said Kamala. “No,” said Siddhartha, “that’s not the reason why. Kamaswami is just as smart as I, and still has no refuge in himself. Others have it, who are small children with respect to their mind. Most people, Kamala, are like a falling leaf, which is blown and is turning around through the air, and wavers, and tumbles to the ground. But others, a few, are like stars, they go on a fixed course, no wind reaches them, in themselves they have their law and their course. –loc. 765

It is that Gotama, the exalted one, who is spreading that teachings. Thousands of followers are listening to his teachings every day, follow his instructions every hour, but they are all falling leaves, not in themselves they have teachings and a law.” –loc. 772

“It might very well be so,” Siddhartha said tiredly. “I am like you. You also do not love—how else could you practise love as a craft? Perhaps, people of our kind can’t love. The childlike people can; that’s their secret.” –loc. 782

It was still the art of thinking, of waiting, of fasting, which guided his life; still the people of the world, the childlike people, had remained alien to him as he was alien to them. –loc. 788

And yet, he envied them, envied them just the more, the more similar he became to them. He envied them for the one thing that was missing from him and that they had, the importance they were able to attach to their lives, the amount of passion in their joys and fears, the fearful but sweet happiness of being constantly in love. These people were all of the time in love with themselves, with women, with their children, with honours or money, with plans or hopes. But he did not learn this from them, this out of all things, this joy of a child and this foolishness of a child; he learned from them out of all things the unpleasant ones, which he himself despised. –loc. 812

It happened more and more often that, in the morning after having had company the night before, he stayed in bed for a long time, felt unable to think and tired. It happened that he became angry and impatient, when Kamaswami bored him with his worries. It happened that he laughed just too loud, when he lost a game of dice. His face was still smarter and more spiritual than others, but it rarely laughed, and assumed, one after another, those features which are so often found in the faces of rich people, those features of discontent, of sickliness, of ill-humour, of sloth, of a lack of love. Slowly the disease of the soul, which rich people have, grabbed hold of him. –loc. 816

He had been captured by the world, by lust, covetousness, sloth, and finally also by that vice which he had used to despise and mock the most as the most foolish one of all vices: greed. Property, possessions, and riches also had finally captured him; they were no longer a game and trifles to him, had become a shackle and a burden. –loc. 827

And whenever he woke up from this ugly spell, whenever he found his face in the mirror at the bedroom’s wall to have aged and become more ugly, whenever embarrassment and disgust came over him, he continued fleeing, fleeing into a new game, fleeing into a numbing of his mind brought on by sex, by wine, and from there he fled back into the urge to pile up and obtain possessions. In this pointless cycle he ran, growing tired, growing old, growing ill. –loc. 843

Tiredness was written on Kamala’s beautiful face, tiredness from walking a long path, which has no happy destination, tiredness and the beginning of withering, and concealed, still unsaid, perhaps not even conscious anxiety: fear of old age, fear of the autumn, fear of having to die. –loc. 856

But out of all secrets of the river, he today only saw one, this one touched his soul. He saw: this water ran and ran, incessantly it ran, and was nevertheless always there, was always at all times the same and yet new in every moment! Great be he who would grasp this, understand this! He understood and grasped it not, only felt some idea of it stirring, a distant memory, divine voices. –loc. 1082

“It must be beautiful to live by this water every day and to cruise on it.” With a smile, the man at the oar moved from side to side: “It is beautiful, sir, it is as you say. But isn’t every life, isn’t every work beautiful?” –loc. 1090

This was among the ferryman’s virtues one of the greatest: like only a few, he knew how to listen. –loc. 1115

See, you’ve already learned this from the water too, that it is good to strive downwards, to sink, to seek depth. –loc. 1127

Most of all, he learned from it to listen, to pay close attention with a quiet heart, with a waiting, opened soul, without passion, without a wish, without judgement, without an opinion. –loc. 1142

Oh, was not all suffering time, were not all forms of tormenting oneself and being afraid time, was not everything hard, everything hostile in the world gone and overcome as soon as one had overcome time, as soon as time would have been put out of existence by one’s thoughts? –loc. 1153

“Pardon me.” he said, “from a friendly heart, I’m talking to you. –loc. 1269

Would you think, my dear, anybody might perhaps be spared from taking this path? That perhaps your little son would be spared, because you love him, because you would like to keep him from suffering and pain and disappointment? But even if you would die ten times for him, you would not be able to take the slightest part of his destiny upon yourself.” –loc. 1302

This he had learned by the river, this one thing: waiting, having patience, listening attentively. –loc. 1371

Worthy of love and admiration were these people in their blind loyalty, their blind strength and tenacity. They lacked nothing, there was nothing the knowledgeable one, the thinker, had to put him above them except for one little thing, a single, tiny, small thing: the consciousness, the conscious thought of the oneness of all life. –loc. 1398

Slowly blossomed, slowly ripened in Siddhartha the realisation, the knowledge, what wisdom actually was, what the goal of his long search was. It was nothing but a readiness of the soul, an ability, a secret art, to think every moment, while living his life, the thought of oneness, to be able to feel and inhale the oneness. Slowly this blossomed in him, was shining back at him from Vasudeva’s old, childlike face: harmony, knowledge of the eternal perfection of the world, smiling, oneness. –loc. 1403

When he had finished talking, Vasudeva turned his friendly eyes, which had grown slightly weak, at him, said nothing, let his silent love and cheerfulness, understanding and knowledge, shine at him. –loc. 1439

The river sang with a voice of suffering, longingly it sang, longingly, it flowed towards its goal, lamentingly its voice sang. –loc. 1446

In this hour, Siddhartha stopped fighting his fate, stopped suffering. On his face flourished the cheerfulness of a knowledge, which is no longer opposed by any will, which knows perfection, which is in agreement with the flow of events, with the current of life, full of sympathy for the pain of others, full of sympathy for the pleasure of others, devoted to the flow, belonging to the oneness. –loc. 1469

“What should I possibly have to tell you, oh venerable one? Perhaps that you’re searching far too much? That in all that searching, you don’t find the time for finding?” –loc. 1492

“When someone is searching,” said Siddhartha, “then it might easily happen that the only thing his eyes still see is that what he searches for, that he is unable to find anything, to let anything enter his mind, because he always thinks of nothing but the object of his search, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed by the goal. Searching means: having a goal. But finding means: being free, being open, having no goal. You, oh venerable one, are perhaps indeed a searcher, because, striving for your goal, there are many things you don’t see, which are directly in front of your eyes.” –loc. 1494

“A ferryman, yes. Many people, Govinda, have to change a lot, have to wear many a robe, I am one of those, my dear. –loc. 1505

Look, my dear Govinda, this is one of my thoughts, which I have found: wisdom cannot be passed on. Wisdom which a wise man tries to pass on to someone always sounds like foolishness.” –loc. 1522

Knowledge can be conveyed, but not wisdom. It can be found, it can be lived, it is possible to be carried by it, miracles can be performed with it, but it cannot be expressed in words and taught. –loc. 1524

That’s like this: any truth can only be expressed and put into words when it is one-sided. Everything is one-sided which can be thought with thoughts and said with words, it’s all one-sided, all just one half, all lacks completeness, roundness, oneness. –loc. 1528

But the world itself, what exists around us and inside of us, is never one-sided. –loc. 1531

The words are not good for the secret meaning, everything always becomes a bit different, as soon as it is put into words, gets distorted a bit, a bit silly—yes, and this is also very good, and I like it a lot, I also very much agree with this, that this what is one man’s treasure and wisdom always sounds like foolishness to another person.” –loc. 1560

I can love a stone, Govinda, and also a tree or a piece of bark. This are things, and things can be loved. But I cannot love words. Therefore, teachings are no good for me, they have no hardness, no softness, no colours, no edges, no smell, no taste, they have nothing but words. Perhaps it are these which keep you from finding peace, perhaps it are the many words. Because salvation and virtue as well, Sansara and Nirvana as well, are mere words, Govinda. There is no thing which would be Nirvana; there is just the word Nirvana.” –loc. 1566

love, oh Govinda, seems to me to be the most important thing of all. To thoroughly understand the world, to explain it, to despise it, may be the thing great thinkers do. But I’m only interested in being able to love the world, not to despise it, not to hate it and me, to be able to look upon it and me and all beings with love and admiration and great respect.” –loc. 1581

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Pandora’s Star

Author: Peter Hamilton
Rating: 7/10
Last Read: June 2016
Recommended Reading? If you’re looking for a good sci-fi read and have lots of time on your hands.

Quick Summary:  Excellent universe building and a great sci-fi plot.  Very long book, could definitely have been shortened – but enjoyable nonetheless.

Note – While this book was good, I will not be reading the sequel.

My Highlights

I can sit here at night and look where we’re going. You look at the stars, Dudley, you know what marvels there are to be seen out here. And those cretins behind us, they never look. Where we are now, this was what our ancestors thought was heaven. Now I can look out from their heaven and see where our future lies. Do you not think that’s a thing of glory?” (Loc 478)
 

This was where the real rot set in, the despair and dead ends, where human lives were wasted, sacrificed to the god of economics. (Loc 568)
 

“He’s a creature of habit. They might be good habits, but any routine will betray you in the end.” (Loc 961)
 

“They can evolve,” Ozzie said quickly. “They can throw off all their primitive instincts. After all, we leave a lot of our shit behind us.” “You also generate a great deal of new ‘shit,’ ” the SI said. “All of which is depressingly similar to your old ‘shit.’ (Loc 1377)
 

These days he was a fully paid-up member of the establishment, and finally at ease with himself and his role. (Loc 317)
 

“Because now is where we are. This should be faced, whatever it is.” (Loc 3840)
 

“All paths are one, Ozzie, they lead to themselves. To start is to finish.” (Loc 4300)
 

An ideal kept alive in the darkness can flourish if it has the chance, no matter how long the night lasts. Don’t give up on your ideals, Adam, not ever.” (Loc 4435)
 

Our company was doing well, it was taking up more and more of his time. Men are like that, always obsessing about the wrong things in life. (Loc 4593)
 

“How you humans survive so much experience is something I shall never understand. To do so much and react to it all in the way you do is as much a curse as a blessing. You never take time to digest and appreciate what happens to you.” (Loc 5827)
 

Wake up and smell the coffee, Kaz, you’re not going to live forever. And it’s such a beautiful life in the meantime, especially when it’s got breasts that size in it.” (Loc 6675)
 

You have to know what’s awful in the world before you can appreciate what’s good.” (Loc 11016)
 

Wonder begats not only the joy but the sorrow. Both must be for the other to live for ultimately they are twined into the one. (Loc 12876)
 

“Cast aside your numbers and your coarse voice and learn how to sing, sweet Ozzie. Song is the destiny of all who live who love to live.” (Loc 12884)
 

“The path we walk and love goes round and round, and thus it can never end, Ozzie,” the Silfen woman said. She sounded profoundly sad, as if she was telling him about death. “It begins when you begin. It ends as you end.” (Loc 12895)
 

“I believe that intelligence and rationality will always be primary no matter what shape sentient creatures take. To not think that would be to doubt the value of life itself.” (Loc 14405)
 

That was the trouble with freethinkers, they had overactive imaginations that made them uncertain. Maybe that’s why they’re always men, the Foundation just amplified their natural inability to make a commitment. (Loc 14591)
 

“It would appear to be a paradox only because as yet we don’t have all the information.” (Loc 14657)
 

“Ignore the time factor, it is an unknown you cannot outguess. (Loc 14670)