The Hydrogen Sonata

Ah, dear. How fine the line is between acceptably defiant bravado and hopelessly delusional boasting.

The truth is the truth. You tell it even when it hurts or it loses value even when it doesn’t.

Promises take many shapes, and the more…momentous they are, the more they might look like threats. All great promises are threats, I suppose, to the way things have been until that point, to some aspect of our lives, and we all suddenly become conservative, even though we want and need what the promise holds, and look forward to the promised change at the same time.

One should never regret one’s excesses, only one’s failures of nerve.

We all think we’re special, and in a way we are, but, at the same time, that feeling of being special is one of the things that’s common to us all, that unites us and makes us the same as each other. And when that feeling of…specialness is questioned, we feel threatened, naturally.

“Well,” the voice said, seemingly oblivious, “one thing that does happen when you live a long time is that you start to realise the essential futility of so much that we do, especially when you see the same patterns of behaviour repeated by succeeding generations and across different species. You see the same dreams, the same hopes, the same ambitions and aspirations, reiterated, and the same actions, the same courses and tactics and strategies, regurgitated, to the same predictable and often lamentable effects, and you start to think, So? Does it really matter? Why really are you bothering with all this? Are these not just further doomed, asinine ways of attempting to fill your vacuous, pointless existence, wedged slivered as it is between the boundless infinitudes of dark oblivion bookending its utter triviality?”

“Uh-huh,” she said. “Is this a rhetorical question?”

“It is a mistaken question. Meaning is everywhere. There is always meaning. Or at least all things show a disturbing tendency to have meaning ascribed to them when intelligent creatures are present. It’s just that there’s no final Meaning, with a capital M. Though the illusion that there might be is comforting for a certain class of mind.”

“I take comfort in the loyalty and faith you display towards your crew, Captain.”

“My crew are loyal to me, Colonel; I am only loyal to the regiment and Gzilt. Also, faith is belief without reason; we operate on reason and nothing but. I have zero faith in my crew, just absolute confidence.”

I have lived ten thousand years; I am used to it. Lovers dying, civilisations dying…one develops a certain god-like indifference to it all, intellectually.

Obsession is just what those too timorous to follow an idea through to its logical conclusion call determination.

Ignorance can be interesting.

∞

Also fatal.

Never underestimate the sheer selfishness and stupidity of people.

She hadn’t forgotten all her military training; one point she certainly recalled being taught was that anything that looked like an outrageous coincidence was probably enemy action.

We are largely the sum of all we’ve done, and to dispose of that knowledge would be to stop being one’s self.

“So,” she said, “living all this time has been to no purpose, basically.”

“True, but that hardly distinguishes me from anybody else, does it?”

“But shouldn’t it, or there’s no point?”

“No. Living either never has any point, or is always its own point; being a naturally cheery soul, I lean toward the latter. However, just having done more of it than another person doesn’t really make much difference.”

Of course there were doubts about it, there always had been; when you found out about all the other holy books there had ever been throughout the histories of other peoples throughout the galaxy, you realised how common they were, and how fallible, how restricted they were by the usual tribal prejudices and traditions of the people who – it took real blind faith not to accept – had made them up.

“So why are we bothering?”

“Just in case.”

“Just in case what?”

“Just in case it turns out to be something we should have bothered about. Always try to avoid setting up future opportunities for kicking yourself.”

It rarely paid to frighten the masses, and it never paid to confuse them.

Here’s some thing we don’t know but we can maybe find out, and it’s something that other people don’t want us to know. How much more seductive can you get?

One should never mistake pattern…for meaning.