The Unexpected Dimension

Amnesia was the price of immortality.

Wasn’t being a dilettante the result of an inner conviction that you were too good for routine living?

“Armies!” he burst out. “The day Freemen organize to invade another area is the day they stop being Freemen. They become soldiers, loyal to the army and their generals. They lose their identification with their homes and families. They become a separate class—an armed, organized class of military specialists no one family can stand against. And on that day, freedom dies for everybody.

It isn’t given to very many men to have their dreams come true in their lifetimes.

There has to be an end somewhere, he thought. Each thing has to end, or there will never be any room for beginnings.

Sentiment was the easy thing. But logic reminded a man that some people insisted on living their neighbor’s lives, that some people were offensive.

There were people with moral codes they clung to and lived by, people who worshiped in what they held to be the only orthodox way, people who clung to some idea—some rock on which their lives rested. Well and good. But if they tried to inflict these reforms on their neighbors, patience could only go so far, and the tolerance of fanaticism lasts just so long.

Once he’d been in his twenties, looking forward. Now he was a shade past fifty, and what he looked back on was subtly less satisfactory than what he had looked forward to.