Ozymandias Replies
October 30, 2022 - Reading time: ~1 minute
So, friend, you think my face and legs in stone
Are signs that I have failed? Friend, think again.
When I ascended to my marble throne
The land was forest, meadow, lakeside glen.
I took it and I wasted it. This desert tract
Stands as my most expansive monument:
Dead-life, as blank as hope, as bald as fact.
I made a world of sand. And it's this spent
Stage-set, bleached clean, that I am proudest of—
More than my palaces and bling and war—
Because it's the perfection of my love
When my rule's push came to my people's shove.
We tyrants know what power's really for.
I made my desolation to endure.
—Adam Roberts
June 29, 2022 - Reading time: ~1 minute
When she saw that she waited in vain,
that her hope was lost,
she took another of her cubs
and made him a young lion.
—Book of Ezekiel 19:5
(I read this verse out of context and it arrested me completely. I've never read it before. There's a kind of poetry here, in this out of context snippet, that suggests a fascinating story.)
June 18, 2022 - Reading time: ~1 minute
All time exists. That is the truth beyond the legends the epopts tell. If the future did not exist now, how could we journey toward it? If the past does not exist still, how could we leave it behind us? In sleep the mind is encircled by its time, which is why we so often hear the voices of the dead there, and receive intelligence of things to come.
—Merryn,
The Claw of the Conciliator, Chapter XXXI,
Gene Wolfe
