The Traveller: W: Background, & Personal Update

Quotes

George Orwell
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

Stephen Biko
"The oppressors' most powerful weapon is the mind of the oppressed."

Kevin A. Carson
"Ideological hegemony is the process by which the exploited come to view the world through a conceptual framework provided to them by their exploiters."

C. Spurgeon
“While I regarded God as a tyrant I thought my sin a trifle; But when I knew Him to be my Father, then I mourned that I could ever have kicked against Him. When I thought God was hard, I found it easy to sin; but when I found God so kind, so good, so overflowing with compassion, I smote upon my breast."

Madeleine L'Engle
"Truth is what is true, and it's not necessarily factual. Truth and fact are not the same thing. Truth does not contradict or deny facts, but it goes through and beyond facts. This is something that it is very difficult for some people to understand. Truth can be dangerous."

Troy Wisdom
"The truth needs no defense; it only needs witnesses."

Mark Horne
"There is no pleasure as exquisite as being told by someone with more income than you have ever had in your life that your politics are wrong because you don't have solidarity with the poor."

JRR Tolkien
"Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends."

Augustine of Hippo
"What are kingdoms without justice? They're just gangs of bandits."

Mark Horne
"The Bush-Obama killing continuum shows that there are no reformers; each successor builds on the power grab of the predecessor."

Robert A. Heinlein
"There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him."

BECAUSE IT STARTS WITH THE TRIVIAL LIKE THE ABOVE, BUT LEADS TO THE FOLLOWING:

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward."

Neal Stephenson
"The ancients who wished to demonstrate illustrious virtue throughout the kingdom, first ordered well their own states. Wishing to order well their states, they first regulated their families. Wishing to regulate their families, they first cultivated their persons. Wishing to cultivate their persons, they first rectified their hearts. Wishing to rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in their thoughts. Wishing to be sincere in their thoughts, they first extended to the utmost their knowledge. Such extension of knowledge lay in the investigation of things....From the Son of Heaven down to the mass of the people, all must consider the cultivation of the person the root of everything besides. "

Friday, December 18, 2009

W: Background, & Personal Update

I've been putting together background material and creating characters that I hope to use in some stories and a novel that I hope to write. Between that, the holidays, and work on my shift, I am just about spent and too tired to do much blogging. I try to avoid thinking too hard about the news (that is the real news, that I have sifted out from all the Pravdas out there), because the truth is terrible to behold as I see my civilization in irrecoverable decline. As I go through life expending my life-energy to accumulate enough capital to finish my education and write those novels, I see the material world just circlin' the drain.

It is good that there is at least a transcendent hope in the final resurrection unto salvation that will surely make our vaporous material history look like it had never happened.

So one must look to the sublime and good in our miserable short lives and really cherish those moments we still have together with our families and friends. This is a lesson my father never quite learned adequately, and not to be too smug, I have done much of the same in my neglects and omissions. I'd like to think that I have made an incremental improvement in my generation and that my son will even do better. But you know it isn't true, we all fail to truly live up to what we know is true as God has revealed ultimate truth to us. But the second great truth (after the first being made alive in Christ) is to love one-another, and my great need for Grace is in this area. I need to relax and just put aside my self more often in place of time and being with my loved ones.

But what does a storyteller do when no one has time to listen to a story?