(no subject)

I don't know any German beyond hello, good-bye, and thank-you, so I have no idea if this is true, but yes, oh yes:

"The Germans have a word to describe the chronic affliction many of us suffer from, that insistent urge to be somewhere out there and not here: "Fernweh". It's the opposite of being homesick; instead, it's a pining to be not-home, to be away, way away, because that's where you feel at home."
--Joe Robinson

Today is a quotation sort of day.

I thought I would share my favourite section from my favourite book: the part that makes me inestimably proud of my species.

The book is Stardance, and it's by Spider and Jeanne Robinson (and, if you're looking to buy a book and would like to buy one that would wind up giving them some money, this would be a very good time. Jeanne's got some sort of biliary cancer, and as both of them are self-employed, this has meant that money is getting to be a problem for them.)


"Her dance spoke of nothing more and nothing less than the tragedy of being alive, and being human. It spoke, most eloquently, of pain. It spoke, most knowingly, of despair. It spoke of the cruel humor of limitless ambition yoked to limited ability, of eternal hope invested in an ephemeral lifetime, of the driving need to try and create and inexorably predetermined future. It spoke of fear, and of hunger, and, most clearly, of the basic loneliness and alienation of the human animal. It described the universe through the eyes of man: a hostile environment, the embodiment of entropy, into which we are all thrown alone, forbidden by our nature to touch another mind save secondhand, by proxy. It spoke of the blind perversity which forces man to strive hugely for a peace which, once attained, becomes boredom. And it spoke of folly, of the terrible paradox by which man is simultaneously capable of reason and unreason, forever unable to cooperate even with himself.

...

This is what it is to be human: to see the essential existential futility of all action, all striving - and to act, to strive. This is what it is to be human: to reach forever beyond your grasp. This is what it is to be human: to live forever or die trying. This is what it is to be human: to perpetually ask the unanswerable questions, in the hope that the asking of them will somehow hasten the day when they will be answered. This is what it is to be human: to strive in the certainty of failure.

This is what it is to be human: to persist."

- Spider and Jeanne Robinson, "Stardance" (1977).


Not bad for a book that I bought because, at the time, I'd never had a chance to buy a book with a naked person on the cover before. I recommend all the books highly. Whoever says science fiction is not literature because it doesn't Say Anything needs to have their face shoved into the above paragraphs.