The Fall of Hyperion

Doing a life study while drunk and in the process of being seduced is never a formula for quality art.

The modern universe, as machine and man had come to understand it, needed no Creator; in fact, allowed no Creator. Its rules allowed very little tinkering and no major revisions. It had not begun and would not end, beyond cycles of expansion and contraction as regular and self-regulated as the seasons on Old Earth. No room for love there.

It seemed that Abraham had offered to murder his son to test a phantom.

Have you considered that these prophecies were not divine revelations, but merely manipulation from some secular power?

Sol remembered the dream, remembered his daughter’s hug, and realized that in the end—when all else is dust—loyalty to those we love is all we can carry with us to the grave.

It was a dramatization of total chaos, a functional definition of confusion, an unchoreographed dance of sad violence. It was war.

The Great Change is when humankind accepts its role as part of the natural order of the universe instead of its role as a cancer.

“Sometimes,” said General Morpurgo, taking her hand, “dreams are all that separate us from the machines.”

“Gold,” says the Consul, knowing that this is the only syllable that has held its power over the ages.

He knew what had to be done. It is not always the same as knowing what to do.

There would be no more offerings. Not this day. Not any day. Humankind had suffered enough for its love of gods, its long search for God. He thought of the many centuries in which his people, the Jews, had negotiated with God, complaining, bickering, decrying the unfairness of things but always—always—returning to obedience at whatever the cost. Generations dying in the ovens of hatred. Future generations scarred by the cold fires of radiation and renewed hatred.

Not this time. Not ever again.

My own guess is that it’s a myth fueled by the same hunger for superstitious verities that drives other religions.

Those who ignore history’s lessons in the ultimate folly of war are forced to do more than relive them...they may be forced to die by them.

With a sudden clarity which went beyond the immediacy of his pain or sorrow, Sol Weintraub suddenly understood perfectly why Abraham had agreed to sacrifice Isaac, his son, when the Lord commanded him to do so.

It was not obedience.

It was not even to put the love of God above the love of his son.

Abraham was testing God.

By denying the sacrifice at the last moment, by stopping the knife, God had earned the right—in Abraham’s eyes and the hearts of his offspring—to become the God of Abraham.

We are created for precisely this sort of suffering. In the end, it is all we are, those limpid tide pools of self-consciousness between crashing waves of pain.

Religion and ethics were not always—or even frequently—mutually compatible. The demands of religious absolutism or fundamentalism or rampaging relativism often reflected the worst aspects of contemporary culture or prejudices rather than a system which both man and God could live under with a sense of real justice.

Christ may have lost his faith for a few seconds; He did not sell it in the marketplace for the trinkets of ego and curiosity.

The place was part museum, part library, and part archive; I loved it at first sight...and smell, for here there were thousands of printed books, many very old indeed, and nothing smells quite as wonderful as old books.

“I wish we had the technology to fight God on an equal basis,” he said in low, tight tones. “To beard him in his den. To fight back for all of the injustices heaped on humanity. To allow him to alter his smug arrogance or be blown to hell.”

“War does not call for judgment,” I said, “merely survival.”

Mobs have passions, not brains.

I learned that poets aren’t God, but if there is a God...or anything approaching a God...he’s a poet. And a failed one at that.

Human philosophy tends to shake down into values which might be categorizes as intellectual, religious, moral, and aesthetic.