Last Train to Istanbul

by Ayse Kulin

Ok I have been making a few trips to Istanbul lately.  It’s a wonderful city.  I have come to love Turks.  They are very industrious, accommodating, fun loving, sincere, and live a wholesome life. So I thought I’d read up on Turkey and come to a deeper understanding of their country from a literary point of view.  Yes I’ve read some history on Turkey and am now going the novel route, books about Turkey by Turkish authors. 

Many novels in some way draw on history.  A novelist has license to color the story with one bias or another.  Reader beware of perspective… yours and theirs.  Ayse Kulin is the most popular modern author in Turkey today.  She captures the emotion of Jews in WWII and places it in a Turkish perspective.  This book is about fate on the stage of religion and war.  {reference my bibliography note Page 357}  The prime mover in the book is Selva Recit who demonstrates that you can influence your destiny.  It is also about the destiny of Jews. And finally the book is an eye opener to the average American: in our differences we are so much alike.  Ayse Kulin portrays Turkey as a country open to all walks of life.  To think that Turkey’s Muslim orientation does not welcome all people the same way America does is a mistake.  However, once again beware.  While Americans typically and conveniently turn a blind eye to their atrocities against Native American Indians, Kulin equally ignores their dark history with the Armenians and Kurds {read my Jan 2014 Review}. 

This book is set in a WWII time period.  It involves a prominent politically engaged family who are also devout Muslims.  At my age I still remember being a devout Catholic of the 1950/60s.  In reading this book, I found many more similarities in the meaning of devout than differences.  With regard to the story line in this book; it is about a Muslim woman and a Jewish man who marries against all family tradition and move to Paris to start a new life, only to have to escape back to Turkey.  It is to their misfortune that their new start gets foiled by Hitler’s invasion of France and the Anti Jew policy. When you tie the drama of Turkish Jews in Paris in 1940 with a religiously divided family you have the making of a family melodrama on a prime historic stage.

With regard to bigotry, in the 1940’s Americans were no better than the Turks on that subject.  I clearly remember my parents in the 1950’s making slurs on Negroes, and Arabs.  I do not know how they would have dealt with an inter-religious marriage and I am certain a black-white marriage would have at least one of my parents’ react the same way Selva’s father did when his Muslim daughter married a Jew.  And amazingly enough this book mixes the ingredients of time and space stirred in with the human drama of escaping life threatening Nazism to illustrate that experiencing the depth of desperation can glue back together a father and daughter that were divided by bigotry.  It begs the question, can society do this under less extreme circumstance than pure survival?

To add multiple dimensions of the tension the author uses Nazism, with an additional character, David, whose sole purpose is to add horror in an otherwise mundane family squabble.  This eighteen year old Jew with Turkish papers goes from happy-go-lucky to wishing he were dead and a  two months time, an eternity in a German camp.  {reference my bibliography note page 269}The book is yet another accounting of German atrocity, where no explanation justifies their black mark on a society let alone their individual actions.  It took the Turkish embassy’s efforts to extract this poor boy out of the camp.  He goes in to the camp a fit well stocked young man and comes many weeks later out an emaciated fearful old man.  This little segue ads intensity to the emotions of the people escaping Nazism on a train for Istanbul.

Then the book also captures the life of the Turkish ‘polito-crats’.  Macit, is totally consumed with government duty leaving his wife Sabiha to struggle with the depression that comes with being abandoned by her husband.  She has two close brushes with affairs.   And what impressed me was the author held her virtue in tact.  The close encounters, add a little human drama tension and keeps the reader turning the pages.  Sexual tension, one of the spices of life, weather reading it or actually experiencing it, the phenomena exists that still perplexes me.  

From the book: Suddenly his mood changes and he felt warm inside despite the drizzling rain and the cold weather.  He remembered how his wife had snuggled up to him at night he had returned form Cairo.  The way she had rekindled the fire in his body when he felt her naked breasts rubbing against his chest.  Her hot lips filled him with desire, making him feel the passion he hadn’t felt for ages.  He’d been taken aback by emotiojnal intensity between them that night.  Could it be that he had fallen in love all over again with this capricious and coy wife?

For the intrigue part, there is family drama as an undercurrent.  In Paris Selva becomes the patriarch in saving her Jewish husband.  She commands the same traits as her father who rejected her.  She not only goes to exceptional effort to save her husband, but she also brings in to her household many other Jews to make arrangements to board the Train to Istanbul.  She organizes passports, for non Turks, she teaches non Turks a little but of the Turkish language. She brings them in to her home and shelters them.  She ensures they can get on the train.  Then there is the diplomats arranging a train car and mapping its route through German territory.  They actually decide that the best route is through Berlin.  The train ride itself includes as much a story of how one lives on a train in the 1940s…that includes a little more dash of German atrocity.

Their history however is much different than ours.  In World War Two there were more countries involved than Americans, Germans, Italians and English, and French.  There is a Turkish story as well.  Time and distance allows for an American reader to see the contrasts to find our similarities.  Turks and Americans have a lot in common. Turkey’s constitution accepts all people as do Americans.  Though we both have our prejudices, they are openly criticized as opposed to being flaunted in some sort of supremacy scheme, as the Nazi’s did.   With regard to religion, divides ran deep in the 1940s in Turkey. With Americans, our prime blight was racism.   Turkish religions bigotry and American racism carried similar measures of social segregation. In my experience in Turkey these flaws do not jump out at you the way they do in the rest of the Middle East. 

It is therefore my opinion, reinforced in this book that the northern boundary of the Middle East, if selected by the trait of the people, is the Marmar Sea.  From the perspective of a 21^st century American in the august of years who has traveled the world many times over; I found this book to reinforce what I already knew in Turkish people.  They are very human in a sincere way. 

The characters:

Rafael Alfanderi: A Jew and a Pharmacist.  In a time period of the 1940’s men still wore the pants in the house.  Albeit through the course of history when the front door is closed many times the roles are reversed.  The author blends a passive man found in the clutches of life threatening horror to outwardly hand over the reigns to his destiny to his wife.

Selva Recat:  Blond and beautiful Rafael’s wife.  She is the hero of the story.  The storyline in the Turkish setting is told around her character.

Sabiha Recit:  Blond and beautiful.  In the book her character is mostly that of a victim. The storyline in the Turkish setting is told around her character.

Macit:  Sabiha’s husband and part of the cabinet making advising the PM on which side Turkey is to fall on in the war.

Fazil Resat Pasa: the politically charged father who remembers the revolution and respects Turkey’s new policy on secularism, but abhors the marriage of his Muslim daughter to a Jew.

Terik Arica: a Turkish official in the Paris embassy

Ferit:  A Turkish embassy officer in France who takes charge of the train to Istanbul. German Soldiers: Again history in this novel form records the war crimes of German soldiers doing atrocious things to Jews.  It was not just a leadership crime.  It was a large scale German crime on humanity.

Metaphors:  My bibliography marks metaphors, tools of great authors.  They convey much more than word alone.  This one below strikes the mood of the book.  The Jewish violinist, who played the piece, knew this was his swan song.  It speaks to humanity and the nature of all things to be complete That musician died on his final note.

The notes of the Paganini violin concerto flowed through the compartment like a stream rippling down a snow-covered mountain.  The adagio… it was as though the bow was playing the notes on their heartstrings, not the violin.  As the bow wandered through the chords

Bibliography:

Page 12:  He remembered the stories his war-hero father told about this darkness and the cigarette lights at night – one, two, three lights, ten lights – bodies without arms or legs, corpses without heads.  People miserable, hungry, covered in lice, like wounded, skinnt animals. Starving, abandoned children.  Women who’d lost their humanity; men who had no money, no home, and no hope.

Page 13:  Macit had contributed a lot toward the signing of the agreement with England and France in 1939.  According to that agreement, the French and the British would provide the Turkish army with its vital needs.  In return, Turkey was to sell the chrome she produced to France throughout the war.

Page 14:  One could understand a person fighting wit his bare hands to save his own country, but to fight for the British, who had stirred up the Arabs against the Turks in the First Worl War when they had their eyes set on Musul, and Kirkuk, was too much to expect.

Macit had not doubt that if, for some reason, Turkey was eventually forced to join the war, she have to foot the bill for the ambitions of the great powers.

Page 21: [metaphor]  The Germans penetrated everywhere, just like smoke.

Page 35: [metaphor]  Many young men took a shine.

Page 37:  [of Selva] She had even wished that she were a Catholic.  If she were, it would simply be a matter of confession, accepting whatever penance was meted out by the priest.  At least she would have been able to rid herself of this burden.

Page 38:  Macit was then asked to intervene.  Maybe the young rebel would listen to her brother-in-law, because she loved him very much.

“Macit, I am sure you know about the Jewish way of life.  They believe that children should follow the mother’s religion.  Can you imagine whart it would mean to them to have a daughter-in-law of a different religion?  Oh Macit, why is there all this fus?  Something that should bring joy has turned our lives into a nightmare.”

Page 42:  What a relief to be able to tell someone; what a weight off her mind.  Maybe her depression was caused from hiding the truth.  If only Macit wouldn’t stop her talking about it.  Macit behaved this way in order to stop his wife from getting upset.  What he hadn’t realized was that she needed to open the floodgates; she needed to cry, stamp, and kick to release all her pent-up tension.

Page 47:  Macit put his hand on Tarik’s shoulder. “Congratulations’,”  he said.  “ I’m sure you’ll be very successful.  Sabiha will be pleased, and sorry too.  You know she values your friendship, When are you off?  [to his new position in the Embassy in Paris]

Page  56:  “It’s fate, sir,” said the driver.  “Who knows when their number is up?”  The driver’s words sent a chill down Tarik’s spine, and yet, how typically fatalistic of a Turk.  Tarik had thought that abandoning to fate was a trait of the East, but here  this Istanbul driver thought along the same lines.

Page 63:  She [Selva]  couldn’t believe that a man [her father]she had respected and loved so much was a religious bigot.  What was all this fuss abiout religion?  Surely she thought, religion should be practiced without thought of race or color, with ceremonies carried out in mosques, churches, and synagogues.  God was worshiped in these communities, and people reached out to him and found peace in their soul.  Selva recalled the joy of Ramadan back home; the excitement of preparing the evening meals before break the fast, the special care not to miss prayers, the serenity of the order members of the household in their white headscarves before they prayed; the aura of mystery surrounding the muezzin’s call.  All these were exciting.  Yes religion was a many-spender thing; surely it should be a part of life and not used to separate people.  Couldn’t people from different religions love one another?  Oh dearest Father, she thought, is religion worth sacrificing your daughter?  Is it worth rejecting your son-in-law, just because he prays in a synagogue.

The pasa had often pointed out that the more people became interested in science, the pursuit of knowledge, and culture, the less importance they placed on religion.  He often told his daughter that most bigots or fanatics come from poor, ignorant backgrounds.

Page 69:  Not only was Rafael Alfandari no longer a Turkish Jew, he wasn’t even a French one.  Furthermore his decision not to circumcise his son had put his Jewishness in doubt.  Rafo had ended up without identity, country or religion.

Page 72:  “it isn’t possible to change your destiny, Selva.’”  “Isn’t it?”  As Rafo lowered his head to kiss Selva for the third time, he suddenly realized that he was passing the reins of their fate into Selva’s hands.

Page 75:  He was proud to be so loved by this girl he admired so much, and there was also the excitement of tasting forbidden fruit.  Many of his friends looked upon him with envy, as if her were the hero in a fairy tale.

Rafael did indeed have dignity, and that was precisely why he couldn’t give Selva up.

Page 82:  At first he was rather nervous of this elderly Ottoman gentleman who still dressed in the old style the pasa hadn’t been able to come to terms with the collapse of the empire and the fact that the sultan had been forced to run away. As far as he was concerned, the War of People living on Ottoman soil weren’t as cultured as the Europeans; they didn’t have the know-how to govern themselves.  Like most of the Ottoman pasas, Fazil Resat was a well educated man who hated fanatics.  All the same he was against being governed by those without religious authority; he was particularly against being ruled by the people.  He could never understand how cultured people, who adapted so well to modern living, could go on and on about the importance of a sultan.  Although Fazil Resat was an advocate of the sultan…

Page 83:  Although he never mentioned Selva and Rafo, he was  furious about the atrocities the Germans were inflicting on the Jews.  He was sure that one day history would judge them and they would have to pay for their injustices.

Page 84:  The British won’t be able to come to our aid if we’re attacked…”

“Well; well, just listen to them. We are expected to run to thei rescue but they won’t do the same for us.  Doesn’t still water run deep?  They have certainly mastered the art of back stabbing.”

Page 86:  “ He said, ‘as long as th German government doesn’t take measures that force Turkey to change their friendly attitude.’  Tit for tat, in other words.  Hitlet has always addressed the weaker countries harshly.  Perhaps Inonu’s proud, almost haughty, manner baffled him a bit.”

Page 101:  Didn’t you ask them why the hell they left Turkey to come here”

“No for God’s sake, how can you ask those questions at such a time?

Don’t we wish we were Europeans at times?  Don’t we envy the Europeans’ level of civilization, their knowledge, their order?  Those poor souls must have felt the same way. Well, they got up and left.  What a mistake!”

Originally, her ancestors had migrated from Spain to Istanbul in 1492.  That move was a direct result of the imperial declaration signed by the Spanish king, Don Ferdinand, and the queen Isabella, in March of that year.  It commanded the Jews – who were considered to be heretics – to leave.

 Page 106:  Ottomans sincerely greeted us and gave accommodation.  We were free to practice our religion and to speak our own language.  We were even protected from those who wanted to banish us yet again to foreign lands.

Beyazid II’s statement at the time was:   It is said that Ferdinand is a wise king.  However, the truth of the matter is that getting rid of the Jews, he has made his country poorer and mine richer.”

Page 111:  interesting, she thought, that one isn’t scared of death from a distance, but when it is staring you in the face it feels like a merciless enemy that you desperately want to avoid.

Page 120:  [ of the French]  Damn them! Thought Macit.  Damed thugs!  For years, we have considered them apostles of civilization and independence.  We have envied them and taken great pains to emulate them.  Just imagine this is the brave French nation that produced the best art, the best poetry, the best wine in the world!  What bravery?  They weren’t able to last more than forth-six days under German pressure.  The surrendered immediately!  Now they expect others to die for them to save their skin.  And if that weren’t enough, they look down on us.  Their arrogance is unbelievable!

He believed that they should protest against the Vichy government’s discrimination laws.  Surely there was no other way for an honorable country to respond. Maybe, in order to be more effective protesting the sending of Jews to labor camps, they should form a consensus with other countries.

Page 172:  Our offers go back to the fifteenth century, so I suppose you could call it traditional.  In 1492, when the Spanish Kind Ferdinand expelled the Jews from Spain and stripped them of everything they had, the Ottoman sultan offered the refuge in his country, and giving them freedom of religion, language, and commerce.  He even allocated whole districts to them.”

“Really! Why?”

“Probably he was sultan with an eye to the future.  Because of this, the Jews have been the most loyal of Ottoman subjects.  They made no attempts to stab their hosts in the back like the other minorities.”

Page 172:  “It could well be, Margot.  I don’t remember who it was that said Jews are like seeds scattered to the wind, cultivating the ground they fall upon.  It’s possible that Faith may have had similar thoughts.  And there’s something else European Christians don’t seem to understand.  We’ve never been bothered about different races and religions living among us.  We’ve never felt uncomfortable wit that, unlike Germans who claim to be pure Aryans.  For centuries has been a mosaic of different colors and creeds. Our Urfa, for instance, which was called Edessa in the olden days, was a city where both Christains and Islam flourished.

“Why do you say flourished, in passed tense?

“Since the declaration of the republic, we’ve all become more nationalistic.  Consequently the mosaic has crumbled in favor of the Turkish Muslims.  Like you, we too have had to put put our race and religion first.”

Page 180:  “Look Selva, you talk like this because you’ve never had to look death in the eye.  When your life is at stake, you have to think of yourself first, otherwise you don’t survive!”

“Oh! I’m sorry, Rafo, maybe there’s something I don’t know.  How many times have you faced death then?

“I haven’t but the fear of death is in my genes.  Death has haunted my race for thousands of years.”

“Exactly, That’s why I am struggling to save your people Rafo.”

Page 194:  The passengers had lost all notion of time; they had no idea how long they had been traveling.  All that could be heard now were th sounds of prayer.  The people continuously prayed, either aloud or to themselves, and an air of doom spread through the wagon.

Page 203:  Ferit has managed to be the go-between for his many Jewish friends and organizations, issuing passports or neutral contries.  Revently, the most sought-after passport was Turkish, because the Turks made a point of protectinf their citizens from the Gestapo.

“I wish I had the authority to answer you differently, Ferit,”  Tarik said.  “Every single person we can save from sorrow and death is a source of satisfaction for us.  But you know yourself the danger we face every time we visit one of those camps or police stations.  After all is said and done, we are an honorable and just nation, as such, can’t get involved with anything illegal.”

Page 204:  “Shall I tell you a secret my friend?”  Tarik said.  “The British and Americans can’t stand de Galle.  The can’t stomach the man at all.  Had there been someone else leading the national liberation, you might be able to get more support.

Page 205:  “Eventually the Allies will have to invade France to win the war.  When that day comes, they will have to recognize both de Gaulle and th National Liberation Committee, because without their support, they’d be unable to carry out the invasion successfully.

Page 211:  “Even the Urartu who lives in eastern Anatolia in the seventh century BC showed respect to the people whose lands they conquered, giving the freedom of faith.  I can’t understand what’s happening to the Germans, behaving in this way in the middle of the twentieth century!  Don’t get drawn into any confrontations, but of course try to do what you consider is right.”

Page 269:  [of David, the concentration camp prisoner] He had weighed sixty-five kilos when he arrives at the camp two months earlier.  Now he weighed only forty-seven.  He looked like a skeleton or a ghost walking between bare chestnut trees.  He felt nothing, neither happy nor hungry.  He wasn’t excited; he had no expectations.  It was as though he was just drifting toward the station where the train would take him home.  Who was he?  What was his heart…what of his whole being?  All he was now was a wretched number and old, very old even older than his father, whom he referred to as “old man.”  He was now 3,233 years old.

Page 305:  [metaphor] He saw his colorful and exciting early life flash before his eyes like the cascades of a waterfall.

Page 342:  [metaphor] There is a saying in Turkish, Monsieur Kohen,” said Rafo.  “he who falls into the sea will cling even to a serpent.”

Page 348:  [metaphor] The notes of the Paganini violin concerto flowed through the compartment like a stream rippling down a snow-covered mountain.

The adagio… it was as though the bow was playing the notes on their heartstrings,, not the violin.  As the bow wandered through the chords,

Page 355:  [metaphor] there is a saying we use in Turkish:  “Even the crows would laugh”

Page 357:  Waiting, escaping, hiding, and waiting again for another departure, another way out; going; going without resting; scattered to the four corners of te world, seeking refuge in every corner, struggling for survival.  Up rooting, having to go somewhere else again.  Was this the price to pay for not having a motherland?

The Israel Test

By George Gilder

What is your attitude toward people who excel you in the creation of wealth or in other accomplishment? Do you aspire to their excellence, or do you seethe at it? Do you admire and celebrate exceptional achievement, or do you impugn it and seek to tear it down? This in a nut shell is the Israel Test. In summary, some people admire success; some people envy it. The "enviers" hate Israel. I found while reading the book that those who fail the Israel test do so not with just Jews or Israelis but with all those who excel beyond their capabilities. It is rather the many people who collectively despise the minds of the few that this book is about. For it is the critical thinking mind that produces the fertile ground to advance mankind and the multitudes that envy the wealth they so justifiably earned.

But it is really more than that and this book peels back the layers of the onion and provides a cross-sectional view effect and cause. Specifically he describes accomplishments of Jews and then colludes with their causes. In the process he takes a critical view on leftward leaning thinkers like Barak Obama as they are never a cause for success in the form of a nurturing perspective. However they may be the cause from a survival or self defense perspective. In the mind of Gilder, Barak Obama and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad albeit one Sunni and the other Shea, find themselves of like minds. Notice both men advance their agendas, by attacking their opponent to distract from the flaws of their own agenda. With this thought in mind you can imagine the “pearl in store” for Israel and America and really appreciate what it is that is at stake should they lose their momentum.

The book does an amazing bit of enlightenment to readers not familiar with accomplishments of Jews in America, Jews in Israel, and then Jews of the world. Ironically, while the book is about Jewish contributions to the world and therefore their necessity in the world, it is just as much about the foundation of capitalism within a democracy that allows for a people to move mankind forward. There is always a nagging question on the readers mind; surely excellence cannot be the sole domain of Jews can it? Without a capitalistic economy on a free democracy, the world would be stuck in a time warp of pre-industrial revolution era....Where Islam had been until oil brought a new dynamic on world order. Gilder takes a high horse posture in his presentation of Jewish accomplishment to set the reader up for the test, to answer the opening questions of this review.

On capitalism Gilder writes, “What makes capitalism succeed is not chiefly it's structure of incentives but it's use of knowledge and experience... Under capitalism knowledge grows apace with wealth. Democracy without capitalism has no content, since no power centers outside the state can form and sustain themselves. Without capitalism and free trade, self determination is a pretext for constant civil war, as each shard of nationality is sharpened into a sword implanted in it's own holy specified agenda, presumably defended by the United States or the United Nations. The critical test for democracy is it's ability to free human energies and intellect on the frontiers of human accomplishment.” To test to see if there is something evidently in the human mind, even when carefully honed at Oxford or at Sorbonne, that hesitates to believe in capitalism?

The actual trial on Israel , a Test on mankind as Gilder calls it, of which is taking ample space above the fold on the front pages of world newspapers does not completely hold Israeli’s without flaw. But he demonstrates that not only could Jewish people make adjustments to their own mistakes they were able to for the first time in the history of Palestinian people provide for an improvement in their standard of living. Gilder provides statistics of the land prior to the State of Israel and then specifically illustrates that in the time post the 1967 Six Day War and prior to the 1987 intifada, Palestinians saw significant, 40% year over year, gains in their living standard as they worked side by side with Jews. The trial is not about a fight over a small piece of land, but rather the Muslim’s refusal to work for and acknowledge a Jew for his accomplishments. In this the Muslims fail the Test. At a higher level “The Test “is about all mans’ willingness to work for and in the graciousness of those few people that make the standard of life for all better.

Gilder at times may appear to come across as an “in your face Jew”. However he is everything but and you learn that what is in your face is likely your own denial that the facts. So what is in your face is not Gilder but your own subconscious as Guilder enlightens you with ample cause and effect to demonstrate the world’s dependence on our passing the Israel Test. Where Israel is at the apex of a test for man kind is the culmination of Jewish success second only to the United States against a world of Islamic hatred for them. In this gauntlet under the umbrella of the United States as US citizens Jewish entrepreneurial prowess was given birth in a new and modern world. They then made their pilgrimage to Israel and continued under the protection of Western powers to found a democracy underwritten by capitalism and perpetuated entrepreneurial contributions enhance the living conditions of mankind.

They did this on a small piece of unproductive land that laid fallow under Islamic rule for 1,500 years. Could this test be applied else where? Will time allow India to demonstrate the same prowess? Absolutely and the reason for this is India like many western powers that have found success, are based in the freedoms within democratic law that allow the engines of capitalism to produce the advancement required to meet the needs of a modern world. I bring India in to the equation so that you can read the book and when challenged by the word Jew simply substitute Indian. This is not to slight either peoples, but rather to help you over come the “Jew in your face” reaction and afford a little objectivity as the facts settle in. When you read Gilders final chapter on his own Israel Test, you will appreciate that it is not an insult to awaken to a need for recognition and acceptance of the hand that feeds you, whether it be America, Israeli, Chinese, Japanese, or Indian. Gilder’s Israel Test is just that wake up call.
 
My notes:
Page 26 after the Arabs refused all offers of land for peace in the wake of the 1967 war, the Israelis inherited it by default. Under Israeli management, economic growth in the West Bank and Gaza surged for some twenty years? And the number of Arabs grew for roughly one million to almost three million in some 261 new towns while the number of Jews in territories rose merely 250,000, settled on land not exceeding 2% of the area of the West Bank. As the Israelis spurred development, Arabs thronged in to participate in it. Between 1967 and the first intifada in 1987, Arab settlers moving in from Jordan and other countries out numbered Israeli settlers by a factor of ten.

Page 27 Hostility toward Jews stems not from any alleged legal violation or untoward violence but from there exceptional virtues. This is the essence of anti-Semitism.

Page 46. In the 19th century Jews purchased land in Palestine a barren land under Arab rule with a poor economy they built an economy that attracted Arab and Jew alike. Arab population surged to 1.35 million the Jews grew to 650 thousand. The peace-process brought millions of dollars in foreign aid which shifted Palestinians from entrepreneurs to codependent ghetto violent male gangs and welfare queens.

Page 59. The concept of economic autarky is the chief cause of the poverty in the world. No one can be rich alone. Wealth is an effect of sharing and collaboration between an elite of capitalists and the insurgent new business rising around them. It is an effect of willingness of the young and less educated or less talented to work for the educated and able. It is a product of apprenticeship and learning followed by entrepreneurial rivalry. The success of the Israeli economy is not an imbalance that crates invidious gaps, it is a gap that summons new energies and new wealth.

All capitalist advance generates imbalances and disequilibrium. Growth is an effect of the dis-equilibrating activities of entrepreneurs, the creative destruction unleashed by rate feats of excellence.

Page 75 by delving down deep in the atom we rise up to a level of mathematical abstraction only glimpsed in the previous experimental science of the visible world.

But we do not, as Von Neumann supremely understood, rise all the way up. As Kurt Godel demonstrated in early twentieth century, and Von Neumann’s Goedel's first interpreter and greatest prophet, repeatedly showed, the symbolic logic driving both math an science - the computer and the quantum - is ultimately axiomatic. It cannot prove itself in it's own term but must rely on a set of assumptions outside the system.

Wealth springs from the minds of men, and, above all from the minds of a relatively few men who operate at the nexus of word and world - on the boarders of math and manufacturer - in the realm of the algorithm.

Page 81 Mathematics ultimately would repose on a foundation of faith. The universe rests on a logical coherence that cannot be proven but to which men must commit if they are to create

Page 104 until 1957 Israel was a high wage, secure job economy. It's economy was not producing. The absence of competition was a result in part of virtually complete protection from foreign competition afforded by import and exchange controls

Page 106 in the mid 1980's Yitzhak Shamir followed Reagan’s example and shortly after the USSR folded and allowed millions of scientist Jews to flee ti Israel. Being anti communist and intellectual gave Israel the engine to jolt them to scientific achievement at first rate based on entrepreneurial capitalism. Their brain power drew in capital which produced technological advancement at pace with the United States.

Page 109. The same forces of freedom unleashed on Israel in the 1990's could well dictate that fortunes will disappear within a few generations. It is a rigid rule of capitalism lm that over funded banks, are disasters waiting to happen, while small sums in the hands of a few exceptional men can yield equally unexpected riches.

Page127 Von Neuman was the paramount figure of the twentieth century science because he was the li k between the pioneered of quantum theory and the machines that won WWII, that prevailed in the Cold War, and the enabled the emergence of a global economy tied together and fructified by the internet. The entire saga is one fabric, woven largely by Jews.

Page 139 the Arab-Israeli conflict everywhere understood (wrongly in my view) as an impossibility embittered dispute over absurdly small patches of geography. The promise of a global network seamlessly providing near-infinite bandwidth indifferent to application is the promise, like almost every major economic advance for the past two hundred years, to render geography trivial.

Page148 Biological beings partake of the Godel proof of the limitations of symbolic logic - it's dependence on axioms that it cannot prove. Like mathematics, biological science depends on and transcends an orderly cosmos of monotheistic faith.

Page 155 Biology is a set of living algorithmic entities. Compile the biological entities into a database and apply the algorithms, and you can find the pathways to the inner logic of life.

The algorithmic thinking that fuels such ventures comes naturally to the gifted few. Without permitting the gifted and diligent to emerge, prevail, create, and ultimately rule the cpanding heights, there is no way to have a successful system based on the algorithms of a new economy.

Page 155 the Talpion system needs to be captured verbatim in the review. The system has vaulted Israel and India in engineering prowess.

Page 165. The successful allocation of capital, like the launch of a new technology, is an elegant expression if the capitalist law that mind rules and matter serves, just as squandering of capital can create havoc far beyond that wrought by any scarcity of goods.

Page 167 in the Period fro 1984 - 1990 evry significant reduction in top marginal tax rates anywhere I. The world for which we have decent data: economic growth surged, inflation fell ( down to 11 percent by 1993$, and tax receipts rose. And Netanyahu's reduction in personal tax rates continues - to a planned 39 percent by year 2015 down from 60% in 1980.

Page 173 Crucial to Netanyahu's is the power as a global financial center to transform the economics of the Middle East. Israel can become the "Hong Kong of the Desert" ultimately reshaped the Chinese economy of it's own image when Deng Xiaoping mimicked it's free economics in his free-zone program. Even the Taiwan and Communist China became turned capitalist and most of Taiwan’s investment moved to the mainland. Under Netanyahu, Israel can become a similar force in the Middle East, reaching out ti Palestinians and other Arabs.

My challenge is why can't this same approach be made in Iraq, Iran or any other country in the Middle East? Is entrepreneurial spirit lacking in Muslim people? Or do their Imams subdue it? There exists an equal comparisons by analysis available between India and The Muslim world.

Page 184 Conspicuous weakness is a prime cause of war.

Page 195. Von Neuman was always concerned with dynamic processes and saw that economic systems could not achieve equilibrium outside an environment of growth. Capitalism by nature is a positive sum game, in which every transaction theoretically can yield two or more winners. As long as the exchanges are voluntary, they will not occur unless both parties believe they will gain from them

Page 197. Newman's message is that civilization depends on long time horizons in repetitive games. In a single exchange, the rational policy is predatory. If predatory action brings success, a player is never induced to extend the time horizon. By accommodating aggression, a nation invites it. Peace requires the imposition of penalties on aggression.

A crucial element in all games is the discount rate, which determines the time value of the reward, the terms in which one can trade benefits now for the benefits over the long run. In economics this factor is quantified as the rate is quantified as the rate of interest.

Capitalism works because if it's long time horizons and low discount rates that optimize behavior. The time element is crucial to the deepening of capital and the generation of positive sum games.

The more players focus on politics rather than on economics, the more the game tends to deteriorate. Without capitalism, democracy is a zero sum game that leads to conflict and war.

Page 217 Netanyahu told Congress after 9/11 that there is no international terrorism without the support of sovereign states...Terrorist are not suspended in mid air. The train, arm, and indoctrinate their killers fro safe havens in terrorists countries.... Iran, Pakistan, Egypt, Syria, North Korea. Until the world community applies 100% of their policy to not feed them in any way from business to negotiating with them terrorism will flourish at some level.

Over all notion of land for peace is in opposition to this idea.

Page 237 with regard to Israel' s survival not only are they the canary in the coal mine, they are an integral part of the coal mine

Anathem

By Neal Stephenson

 

This book was recommended by my son Tj.  His recommendation came with a general commentary that within it comes a moral code that he can identify with.  It is a classic sci-phi involving the cosmos and numerous civilizations, where one alien civilization is in search of a natural resource, lost on their own planet, but found on a new planet.  Hence the over arching dilemma of the rule of scarcity prevails.  The setting of the story takes place on what would be presumed as future Earth, Stephenson eventually gives it a different name Arbre.  Laced through the book are definitions of words inclusive of an epistemology that the reader must learn.  These definitions build on each other in order to construct Stephenson's moral code that has no bias to our history.    However the effort is thinly veiled rendering the effort as obviously taking his own stand on philosophy.  Which is oneness of societies.  None the less the reader should be ware to learn the definitions as you go in order to get the most entertainment value and philosophical moral message being conveyed by Neil Stephenson.   It would not be a sci-fi without a moral message involving multiple civilizations.

In one sentence: this book is about consciousness and cognition at brain, social and cosmos level rendering our thoughts with semantic content over and above the ones and the zeros, the black and the white that seem to define our thinking at theoric level

This book is a tale of two philosophies coming together to save themselves from destruction.  One magisterium is the Saecular Power.  The other is the Mathic World – in joining hands for sake of survival, thee two are well - running the world?  In shaping this dichotomy there is a theme of multiple upheavals in the history of man, that would amalgamate a set of rules for which peoples of certain Praxes and Concents (Stephenson defined terms) would abide by.  Generational learning that is somewhat parallel to tradition, only with a mathematical line of reasoning. Stephenson layers the civilizations first on earth and then about two thirds of the way through the book he adds a new dimension; aliens from the cosmos.  The prime characters hale from what is defined as a math.  Maths take on every characteristic of a monastery, turning the common dichotomy of religion and science upside down  whereby the main characters adopt the look and feel of a monk. The catch is monasteries and these monks in particular are science oriented with everything being mathematically explained.  This explains my son who holds a Masters In Quantative Analysis, and a love for the book.  While Math Monks live a reclusive life, seeing the outside world once every ten years, these main characters are expelled, or really sent out on a mission to save their world.  The reader has to read 250 pages of life in a monastery to get to the next layer of intrigue, which is how well they survive in the outside world with common civilization as their allies and at times secular foes.

Si-Fi’s usually have a quest so Stephenson uses a quest over the north pole to shape the alliance of Maths, and common folks. And then the plot turns on a dime with the smashing of giant rod into the earth, killing who up to then was the key protagonist and mentor to all those of the math.  Orolo like Gandalf in Lord of the Rings is vanquished; meanwhile his ‘math (philosophy)’ lives on in the minds of the ‘math monks’.  Now they in alliance with Arbre’s outside civilization, the mystery of Orlo’s movements and mission becomes real clear to the reader.  Arbre  has been invaded by an alien spaceship hovering above.  The key word in the story is hovering and not orbiting, as that point gives the Arbrelings a strategic advantage that makes no logical sense to a reader who does not appreciate the finer points of the time & space part of earth science. A puzzle within a puzzle.  That person puzzles over this fun fact only after finishing the last 300 pages of the book.  The law of physics and time spins around objects in motion. 

So the strategy to foil the alien ship’s attack on Arbre involves objects in motion, and the concept of space time.  It would be rude of me to go in to detail but suffice it to say that there is an incident that occurs in the planet saving mission that at the closing of the book, has the reader searching back to those critical pages for an explanation.  Entwined with this explanation, is the thread of Stephenson’s philosophy and moral message.  Alter realities are a theme of this book and in fact the alter reality or parallel plane exists through Jad in the end, where he lives and is a hero but in reality he dies.  It involves time, space, and Oneness of the Universe and a Hylean Flow of consciousness through a Wick that transcends cosmi.  All are intriguing subjects to me.

Consciousness:  “All it needs to do is to perceive – to reflect- the cosmos that it’s really in, as it really is.”   This is the theme of my book of poems.   And a quote from a recently read book, How Yoga Works:  “all things are themselves by themselves” for you to awaken to. Oddly and still coincidentally here again vouches the phrase.   Seek and ye shall find” … in everyplace you look …even if coincidentally.

My favorite metaphor:  I am tormented, or tantalized, by the sense that I’m almost in view of something that is at the limit of my comprehension.  I dream of being in the sea, treading water, trying to see a beacon on shore.  But the view is blocked by the crests of the waves.  Sometimes, when conditions are perfect, I can pop up high enough to glimpse it.  But then, before I can form any form impression of what it is I’m seeing, I sink back down of my own weight, and get slapped in the face by another wave.

Bibliography: I have many comments for which the bibliography note in conjunctions may invite you to respond

Page 40:  [metaphor] was like an ant of the wrong color

Page 52:  [time] He hadn’t seemed to have heard me.  “If there were another universe, altogether separate from outs- no causal linkages whatsoever between Universe A and B – would time flow at the same rate between them? 

“Well it depends on how you measure time”

“it depends on what time is! I’d said.  I had spent a few minutes going up various avenues of explanation, only to find each of them a dead end.”

“Well,” I’d said finally, “I guess I have to invoke the Steelyard.  In the absence of a good argument to the contrary, I have to choose the simplest answer.  And the simplest answer is that time runs independently in Universe A and Universe B.”

“Because they are separate causal domains.”

Orolo said” What if these two universes –each big and old and as complicated as ours –were entirely separate, except for a single photon that managed to travel somehow between them.  Would that be enough to wrench A’s time and B’s time into a perfect lockstep for all of eternity?”

My comment:  This hypothesis places each individual as the causal factor of time.

Page 53:  [time}“What if you found a way to sever links to the world extramuros?”

“That is utterly ridiculous.  You are giving Incanter like powers to these people.”

“But if one could do it, then one’s math would become a separate universe and its time would no longer be synchronized with the rest of the world’s.  Causal Domain Shear would become possible.

Page 57:  [metaphor]  like sparrows from a belfry

Page 88:  Orolo’s yarn about a math that floated freely in time, surfing on cocurrents of Causal Domain Shear, had really stirred my emotions, and so a few moments I let my imagination run away

Page 101:  [metaphor]  fact had been released, like a bubble of swamp gas deep in dark water.

Page 111:  [philosophy] I was claiming I saw a meaning in it.  But this meaning had no reality, outside my mind.

Returning to the Periklyne he had proclaimed his doctrine that all things we thought we knew were shadows of more perfect things in a higher world.

This had become the essential doctrine of Protism.  If Protas could be respected for saying so, then what was wrong with me thinking that our Mynster, and this machine hall were both shadows of some higher thing that existed elsewhere – a sacred of which were both shadows, and that cast other shadows in such places as Bazian arks and groves of ancient trees?”

Page 116:  [metaphor] I had feared that she and Cord were going to fall upon each other like two cats in a pillowcase.

Page 123:  We don’t think the ITA are dirty in a sense of not washing.  But their whole purpose is to work with information that spreads in a promiscuous way.

Page 126:  At the Convoxes following the first and Second Sacks, “ I said.  “You see, even after the end of the Praxis Age, the concents obtained a huge amount of power by coupling processors that had been invented by their syntactic facilities to other kinds of tools – in one case, for making new matter, and for another for manipulating sequences.  This reminded people of the Terrible Events and led to the First and Second Sacs.  Our rules concerning ITA, and which praxes we can and cant use, date from those times.

Page 129:  “Literally two thousand years ago, a Saunt put forth the idea tha- “ “ That every idea the human mind could come up with, had already been come up with by that time.  It is a very influential idea…”

Page 135:  Shortly before Rebirth, several maths took the unusual step of altering the Discipline to sanction the Perelithian liaison..

Page 137:  “Nothing is more important than that you see and love beauty that is right in front of you, or else you will have no defense against the ugliness that will hem you in and come at you in so many ways.”

Page 139:  “Beauty pierces through like that ray through the clouds, “Orolo continued.  “Your eye is drawn to where it touches something that is capable of reflecting it  But your mind knows that the light does not originate from the mountains and the towers.  Your mind knows that something is shining in from another world.  Don’t listen to those who say its in the eye of the beholder.”

Page 139: [metaphor]  like a butler counting his spoons

Page 151:  Cnous drew the conclusion that it was a mistake to worship physical idols such as the one he had been building, for those were only crude effiges of actual gods that lived in another realm, and we ought to woership those gods themselves, no artifacts we made with our own hands.

“ Hylaea said that Cnous had actually been having an upsight about geometry.  What her sister Deat had misinterpreted as a pyramid in heaven was actually a glimpse of an isosceles  triangle: not a crude and inaccurate representation of one such as Conus drew on his tablet with a ruler and a compass, but pure theorical object of which one could make absolute statements.  The triangles that we drew and measured here in the physical world were all merely more or less faithful representations of perfect triangles that existed in this higher world.  We must stop confusing one with the other, and lend our minds to the study of pure geometrical objects.

Comment:  Whether words, symbols, architectural expressions of nature or cosmos or thought: the true expression of higher self/god is through nature itself.

Page 170:  The only shard that lodged in my memory was his concluding line”  “If this all seems ambiguous, that’s because it is; and if that troubles you, you’d hate it here but if it gives you a feeling of relief, then you are in the right place and might consider staying.

Page 173:  “But the answer is well… geometry.  It’s pure.  It doesn’t matter what you are applying it to.”

And it turns out that the same is true for other kinds of theorics besides geometry,” I said.  “Your can prove something.  Later the same thing might be proved in a totally different way; but you always end up with the same answer.

These truths seem to come out of another world or plane of existence.  It’s hard not to believe that this other world really exists in some sense – not just in our imaginations!  And we would like to go there.

Page 173:  I just flashed on how weird the whole thing was – two of us both relating to this image – this model – of another person’s body that was in his and in my mind, but – Also seemingly in a third place,” I suggested, “a shared place

Pages 206,207, 208:  No nuance of sun, soil, or wind was too subtle for the library grape to take into account.  Nothing that the cultivator did, or failed to do, went in detected or failed to have its consequences in the flavor of the juice…The stuff was tremendous, like drinking your favorite book.

Page 228:  to go Hundres (Derogatory slang)  To lose one’s mind, to become mentally unxound, to stray irredeemably from the path of theoriescs.  The expression can be traced to the Third Centennial Apert, when the gates of several Hundreder maths opened to reveal startling outcomes, eg: at Saunt Rambalf’s a mass suicide that had taken place only moments earlier. …These and other mishaps prompted the creation of te Inquisition and the institution of hierarchs in their modern forms, including Wardens Regulant with power to inspect and impose disciplines in all maths.  THE DICTIONARY, the edition  A. R. 3000.

Page 233:  “once you open the door to these hypotheticals that don’t have to make internal sense, you quickly find yourself looking at arrange of possibilities that might as well be infinitely numerous,” Jesry said>  “So the mind rejects them as being equally invalid, and doesn’t worry about them.” 

So it is an intrinsic feature of human consciousness – this filtering ability.”

My comment:  Godel, Escher, Bach; recursive analysis.  How deep do you have to think to come up with the same outcome?  Which in this instance, is ironic because the author takes many subjects to their depths and is exactly why the book is worth reading.

Page 234:  “There’s no way to get from the point in Hemn space where we are now, to one that includes pink nerve-gas-farting dragons, following any plausible action principle. Which is really just a technical term for there being a coherent story joining one moment to the next.  If you simply throw action principles out the window, you’re granting the world the freedom to wander anywhere in Hemn space, to any outcome, without restrain.  It becomes pretty meaningless

My comment:  What the author is saying is that you are a  part of nature, but nature prevails over the propensity for  random creations of reality.

Page 235:  “but I think you have a Steelyard problem,  Bringing in Hemn space and action principles seems like unnecessarily heavyweight way of explaining the fact that the mind has an instinctive nose for which outcomes are plausible enough to worry about.”

My comment:  Mystics –v- Science.  Ironically theorics is a discipline of science.

Page 236:  [metaphor] And I don’t mean that in a bug under a microscope way

Page 237:  That’s right people have to feel that they are a part of some sustainable project. Something that will go on without them.  It creates the feeling of stability.

My comment:  Here is an argument for mystics, if feeling (intuition) has no place in science.

Page 259: [metaphor] being worried about these things was a little bit like attempting to see distant stars against the daytime sky.

Page 261: [metaphor] did create a negative association in one’s mind that bobbed to the surface at awkward moments

Page 272:  “Did Orolo have an answer?”

“It think he did, I said., he was trying to explain it to me at Apert.  Look for things that have beauty – it tells you that a ray is shining in from –well-“

“A true place?  The Hylean Theoric World

Page 307:  Anyway there was something about her physical form that matched her soul

Page 314:  But as time went by, and I thought about it harder, the real nature of the thing became clear:  I had made a mess inside someone else’s soul at a moment when that soul had been open to me.  Now it was closed.

Page 371:  Still if a group of religious fanatics had wanted to abduct a few carloads of avout, they couldn’t have done a slicker job of it.  That’s why I snapped awake when I heard Freman Bell mention God

Until now He’s avoided it, which I could no to understand.  If you sincerely believed in God, how could you form one thought, speak one sentence, without mentioning Him?  Instead of which Deolaters like Beller would go on for hours without bringing God into the conversation at all.  Maybe his God was remote from our doings. Or more likely the presence of God was so obvious to hem that he felt no more need to speak of it than I do to point out all the time, that I was breathing air.

Frustration was in Beller’s voice.  Not angry or bitter.  This was the gentle, genial frustration of an uncle who can’t get something through a nephew’s head.  We seemed so smart.  Why didn’t we believe in God?

Page 372:  We’re observing the Sonic Discipline,” Arisbalt told him – happy and a bit relieved, to’ve been given an opportunity to clear it up…..”It’s not the same thing as believing in God.  Though – hastily adds – I can see why it looks that way to one who’s never been exposed to Sonic thought.”

My comment: This is where Stephenson brings science and religion together. Separate disciplines thou the same pursuits of happiness and reality.

Page 373:  so Lady Baritoe was the only constant, She wrote books, bu, was careful to say, the ideas in them can’t be attributed to any one person.  Someone dubbed it Sonic thought and the name stuck.

My comment:  Sonic thought, Holy Spirit, collective thought; call it what you want.  It is the energy of thought transcending through many media, paper, radio, sound, sight, intuition etc… it is all One atom of energy.

Page 375:  Well, that ‘more’ is by definition outside of space of time.  And the Sconics demonstrated that we simply cannot think in a useful was about anything that, in principle can’t be experienced through our senses.  And I can already see from the look on your face that you don’t agree.”

I don’t Beller affirmed.

But that’s beside the point.  The point is that, after Sonics, the kinds of people who did theorics ane metatheorics stopped talking about God and certain other topics such as free will and what existed before the universe.  And that is what I mean by Sonic Discipline.  By the time of the Reconstitution it had become ingrained.  It was incorporated into our Discipline without much discussion, or even conscious awareness.”

“well, but with all the free time you’ve got – sitting in your concents – couldn’t someone be troubled in four thousand years to be aware of it?  To discuss it?

“we have less free time than you can imagine,”  Arisbalt said gently, “nit nevertheless, many people have devoted much thought to the matter, and founded Orders devoted to denying God, or believing in Him and  currents have surged back and forth in and among the maths.  But none of it seems to have moved us away from the basic position of the Sonics.”

“Do you believe in God?  Beller asked flat out.”

I leaned forward, fascinated.

“I have been reading a lot, lately,about things that are non-spatiotemporal – yet believed to exist.”  But this I knew he meant mathematical objects in the Hylean Theoric World.

Doesn’t that go against the Sconic Discipline?”  Beller asked.

“yes”  Arisbalt said.  “ but that is perfectly alright, as long as one isin’t going about it in a naive way as if Lady Baritoe had never written a word.  A common complaint made about the Sonics is that they don’t know much about pure theorics.  Many theoricians, looking at Baritoes’s works say wait a minute, there is something missing here – we can relate directly to non-spatiotemporal objects when we prove theorems and so on, ‘The stuff I’ve been reading lately is all about that.”

“So you can see God by doing theorics?”

“Not God,” Arisbalt said, “not a God that any ark would recognize.”

My Comment:  once again, in story, Stephenson makes my argument.  God is a metaphor.  It is a word symbol.  Take that away, and the disciplines can hold hands.  In fact in the rest of the book Arisbalt and Beller get along. 

This notion that religion is the cause of angst between men is no less valid than theoric science can cause angst among men.  But to a different point, mine, The fundamental difference I read in Stephenson’s story is religion institutes free will and theorics does not.  To correct Stephenson’s position I would suggest that only Christ’s teachings preach free will.  The church, temples, and mosques do not.

Page 388:  In spite of all my prejudices against extramurous culture, I kept being surprised by moments of beauty in these songs.

Page 394  “you think these people are like us. That they will be sympathetic to our point of view as followers of Our Mother Hylaea,” He said, trying these phrases on me for size.

Page 397:  We always opened our meals by invoking the memory of Saunt Cartus.  The gist of it was that our minds might be nourished by all matter of ideas originating from thinkers dataing all the way back to Cnous, but for the physical nourishment our bodies relied upon one another, joined in the Discipline that we owed to Cartas..

My comment:  This says a lot towards the ever expanded now as well ast the interconnectedness we all have with one another.

Page 397:  The four monks seemed to enjoy this very much, and when we’d finished they stood up and did an equally ancient sounding prayer.  It must have dated back to the early centuries of their monastic age, just after the Fall of Baz, because their Old Orth was indistinguishable from ours, and it had obviously been composed in a time before the music of the maths and the monasteries had diverged.  If you didn’t listen too carefully, you could easily mistake this piece for one of ours.

Page 401:  “Okay”, now some of the traps are suspended from strings.  The worms can’t reach them or feel their vibrations,”

Too bad for the worms! Beller said.

“The flies can’t see anything at night.”

“Poor flies.”

“Some parts of the cavern are so noisy that the bats can’t hear a thing.”

“Well it sounds as though the flies, the bats, and the worms had better learn to communicate with one another.”  Beller said.

How?  This was the sound of Arisbalt’s trap closing on his leg.

“Uh, by communicating I guess.”

Oh.  And what exactly does the worm say to the bat?”

What does this have to do with the Cousins”  Beller asked.

“It has everything to do with them!”

“you think that the Cousins are hybrid fly-bat-worm creatures?”

“No”, Arisbalt said “I think we are.”

“AAARRRGH” Beller cried, to laughter from everyone.

Page 404:  “Or brains are flies, bats, and worms that clumped together for mutual advantage.  These parts of our brains are talking to each other all the time.  Translating what they perceive, moment to moment, into the shared language geometry.  That’s what a brain is.  That’s’ what it is to become conscious.

Page 408: [metephore] a requiem for the stars that were being swallowed up in the dawn

Page 408: When you spend three houts singing the same note, something happens to your brain.  And that goes double when you have fallen into an oscillatory lockstep with others around you.

And if I were a craggy old Thousander – not a nintteen-year-old Teener – I might just have the confidence to assert that when your brain is in that state it can think things it could never think otherwise.

:Pag3 413:  “This cosmos, or causal domain represents a flow of information.”  Cause-and-effect relationship, was my guess recalling Orolo’s talk of Domain Shear.”  “Those two mean the same thing.”

Page 415: always moving in the same direction, as oil moves through a wick

Page 432: The night before, at the Basian monestary, I head accommodated certain new, odd facts in my mind just by sleeping.  A similar trick might work for me now:  by doing something completely different for a few days, I might chance upon a better understanding than I could get by kneeling in a cell and concentrating on it, or having a wordy discussion in a chalk hall.

Page 437:  Now that had changes, and instead of thinking of myself as a member of the Provener team, or of the Decenarian math, or the Edharian order, I felt like a citizen of the world and was proud to be doing my little bit to protect it.  I was comfortable with being a feral.

Page 440:  [metaphor]I was like an ape in a tree, looking at whatever moved fastest in my environment.

Page 458:  So I looked with fascination at those people in their mobes, and tried to fathom what it would be like.  Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organization where people  were interchangeable parts.  All of the story had been bled out of their lives.  That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy.  But it would be easy to see a will at work behind  this; not exactly an evil will, but a selfish will.

My comment:  Just stop a minute and think about this one.  Our 21^st century is not that far away  from this accusation on society.  Where is the selfishness?   Stephenson makes it sound bleak.  But is it?  Or is this simply an order, a divine order promulgated by the individuals marching in their places.

Page 480: “yes sort of a prophet, according to them who found a proof of the existence of God and was Thrown Back because of it.”

“That’s funny because if anyone actually did prove the existence of God we’d just tell him ‘Nice proof’, Fraa Bly’ and start believing in God, I said.

My comment:  So here Stephenson throws out the challenge.  If Religion threw out a proof that God existed, what would Since do.  Refute it outright?  Or counter it?

Page 514:  In any soul, the Condemned Man argued, was the ability to create a whole world, as big and variegated as the one that he and the Magistrate lived in.  But if this was true of the Innocent, it was true of the Condemned Man as well, and so he should not – no one should ever – be put to death.

Page 515:  If that-if our-world seemed, on balance, like a decent place to him, he would let the Condemned Man live and our world would go on existing in his mind.  If the world as a whole, only reflected the Condemned Man’s depravity, The Magistrate would have him executed and our world would cease to exist.  We could help keep the Condemned Man alive and thus preserve the existence of ourselves and our world by striving at all times to make it a better place.

Page 516:  Second, the Inspiration that had passed from the Innocent to the Condemned Man at the moment of her death was viral.  It passed from him into each of us.  Each of us had rte same power to create whole worlds.  The hope was that one day there would be a Chosen One who would create a world that was perfect.  If that ever happened, not only he and his world but all of the other worlds and their creators, back to the Condemned Man, would be saved recursively.

My comment:  The religion comments move into the true meaning of  our oneness that transcends  from man to man, over many generations.  There is no time in the solution.

Page 540:  Even as I was saying this, an old rattletrap coach was pulling off the road.  At its controls was Magister Sark.  It was one of those freakish coincidences that made some people believe in spirits and Psychic phenomena.  I explained it away by supposing that my unconscious mind had seen the coach out of the corner of my eye a few moments before I’d consciously recognized him.

My comment:  Right

Page 541:  Wast there really that much of a difference between the Lelex notion of having one’s story related to the Magistrate, and the Valor’s concept of emergence?  The seemed to produce very similar behavior; I owed my life to the fact that Sark and Osa and been of one mind.

My comment: the beginning of Stephenson’s suggestion that while different maths, or any other point of reliogo-phylso point of reference on this planet, in the cosmos of alter worlds we are all one energy.

Page 544: {mete[hor]  like warer that wants to find the ocean

Page 558:  the looked like jery on the hoof

Page 558: {metaphor]  made it glow like flesh in candlelight.

Page 563:  “ We’re speaking, remember, of Aboutness.  You and I can think about things.  Symbols in our brains have meaning.  The questions is, can a syntactic device think about things, or merely process digits that have no Aboutness – no meaning=.”

Page 564:  Reconstitution, Fann was the FAE of Syntactic Faculty – followers of Proc.  She took the view that Aboutness duidn’t exist – was an illusion that any sufficiently advanced stndev creates for itself.  By this time Evenedric was already dead but he like Halikaarn before him had taken the view that our minds could do things the syndevs couldn’t – that Aboutness was real-“

That our thoughts really did have semantic content over and above the ones and the zeros.”

Page 564:  “If it lacks Aboutness, it is incredibly vulnerable, so yes”  Sammann said.  “But systems with true Aboutness, or so  the myth goes, should be much more difficult to deceive.”

Page 577:  The ancient Prithenans suspected, but didn’t know how to prove, that the tiles of the Teglon would have been easy – it would have been automatic – with square or triangular tiles, or any tiles system that was periodic.  With aperiodic tiles, it was impossible, or at least very unlikely, umless you had some Godlike ability to see the whole pattern in your head at once.  Metekoranes had believed that the final pattern existed in the Hylaean Theoric World, and that Teglon could only be solved by one who had developed the power of seeing into it.

My comment:  Jad is the one which enables him to die on the way to the spaceship and at the same time be on the spaceship in the end.  But this is my unfounded theory at this point.

Page 579:  Ah, but that’s no what the fly-bat-worm says.” Said Orolo.  “it says that only pure thought alone doesn’t enable us to draw any conclusions one way or another about things that are non-spatiotemporal – such as God.

the same observations that the Sonics made about themselves must also be true of alien;s brains. No matter how different they might be from us in other respects, they must integrate sensory givens into a coherent model of what is around them – a model must be hung on a spatiotemoral frame.  And that in a nutshell, is how they come to share our ideas about geometry.

My comment:  I interpret this to mean that internal thought, not connected to those around you – the universe is not the path to God.  That path is the inevitable collision course of the energy that carries thought.

Page 580:  [metephor]  kicking away all the ankle-biters sent after him

Page 580:  {metaphor]  you fear that I am navel gazing

Page 592  [metaphor]  I am tormented, or tantalized, by the sense that I’m almost in view of something that is at the limit of my comprehension.  I dream of being in the sea, treading water, trying to see a beacon on shore.  But the view is blocked by the crests of the waves.  Sometimes, when conditions are perfect, I can pop up high enough to glimpse it.  But then, before I can form any form impression of what it is I’m seeing, I sink back down of own weight, and get slapped in the face by another wave.

Page 594:  I agree that thinking often feels that way, “Isaid.  “You have a jumble of vague notions in your mind.  Suddenly, bang!  It all collapses into one clear answer that you know is right.  But every time something suddenly, you can’t simply chalk it up to quantum effects.”

My comment:  Here you see that Stephenson, does not yet draw any conclusion on the argument of rationale thought and intuition..  But once again he provides a glimpse that perhaps dejavous events can be explained away by glimpses of the answer that finally presents itself.

Page 597:  “Yes, Now, in the polycosmic interpretation of how quantum theories works, what does all of this look like?”

“There is no longer superposition.  No wave function collapse.  Just a lot of different copies of me – of my brain- each really existing in a different parallel cosmos.  The Cosmos model residing in each of those brains is really, definitely in one state or another.  And they interface with one another.”

“You don’t even need a model any more”

“It’s so much simpler this way”

“My brain doesn’t have to support this hugely detailed, accurate, configurable, quantum-superposition-supporting model of the cosmos any more!  All it needs to do is to perceive – to reflect- the cosmos that it’s really in, as it really is.

“The variations – the myriad possible alternative scenarios – have been moved out of your brain,” Orolo said, rapping on his skull with his knuckles,  “and out into the polycosim, which is where they all exist anyway!  He opened his hand and extended it to the sky, As if releasing a bird.  “All you have to do is perceive them.”

My comment:  YEAS!!!  Knowing is only a matter of perceiving what already is..  Awaken to it through meditation ….and then learning a synonymous word for perceiving.

Page 625:  And it happened all the time that the compromise between two perfectly rational alternatives was something that made no sense at all. 

My comment:  I believe if I proposed this to a mathematician, he would look at me as thought I had a third eye.  Yet in reality this phenomena seems to be common place.  Why is that? …Perspective and the processing of the same observation.  But then When I get to the end of the book the author writes two alternative events at the same time.  In the story line Jad survives to meet with Erasmus in front of the alien leaders.  But in the re-cap at the end Jad dies en-route to the alien ship.

Page 637:  “Electronic behavior is basically synonymous with chemistry, “ Jesery put in.  “That’s why newmatter was invented:  because monkeying around with nucleosymthisis gave new elements and new chemistry to play around with.”

Page 638:  “And the functioning of living organisms is founded on chemistry.”

Page 664:  The givens that you and I are taking in all the time, simply by virtue of being conscious, and that we can observe and think about on our own, without any need for scientific instrument.”

Fraa Lodoghir blinked in fake amazement. “Do you mean to claim the the subject of your dialogue was consciousness?

Page 666:  “As to your first point.: I continued, “namely that we still don’t understand ourselves after six thousand years of introspection, I believe that Orolo was of the view that we might be able to settle some of those ancient questions now that we have access to conscious beings from other star systems.”

Page 682:  I shall play my role, and say this: we have nothing in common with the Geometers.  No shared experiences, no common culture. Until that changes, we can’t communicate with them.  Why not?  Because language is nothing more that a stream of symbols that are perfectly meaningless until we associate them, in our minds, with meaning: a process acculturation.”

Page 683:  the philosophy of Saunt Proc: put simply, that language, communication, indeed thought itself, are the manipulation of symbols to which meanings are assigned by culture- and only culture.

“Plurality of Worlds means a plurality of world cultures – cultures hermetically sealed off from one another until now – hence, for the time being, unable to communicate.”

My comment:  I believe he is speaking of the role of an archaeologist.  Therefore it is possible and perhaps in this futuristic setting it is possible in a matter of seconds.  But the real deal in this excerpt is his definition of meaning.  Acculturation in the dictionary means assimilation of cultures.  So does the author suggest that there is no meaning to anything until two disparate bodies agree on the same observation? Back to the archeologist; he looks at symbols along side many artifacts and constructs an interpretation of the symbols.  Interpretation is thus meaning.  Yet there is no one from the past to agree with the archeologist.  Does the fact that we a different people in a different time and culture find meaning?  And then is it possible that we are in conflict with the people of the past.  And then suppose we could time travel and meet up with this civilization would we clash?  Would there be Acculturation, only when the dominant civilization forces assimilation of the weaker civilization.  Is that how meaning is constructed?  If you read Dr. Jarad Dimond’ book Guns Germs and Steel you would agree. 

Page 683:  “ The purpose of this messal, accordingly, is to develop and, I would hope, implement a strategy for Saeular Power, assisted by the avout, to break down the plurality – which is the same thing as developing a shared language.  We shall put ourselves out of business by making the Plurality of Worlds into One World.

My comment:  And then if religion (Secular Power)  cannot agree on a common language for fear of ‘going out of business’ how can we meat John Lennon’s Imagination of living all as one.  This is the essence of my book, Love is a Blooming Rose.

Page 687:  Except for Jad.  “The words fail.  There is one universe, by the definition of universe.  It is not the cosmos we see through our eyes and our telescopes – that is but a single Narrative, a thread winding through Hemm space shared by many other Narratives besides ours.  Each Narrative looks like a cosmos alone, to any consciousness that partakes of it.  The Geometers came from other Narratives – until they came here and joined ours.”

Page 688:  And te vast stok of knowledge that she, as a Lorite, carried around in her head made he good at explaining things; she could always reach back to a useful analogy or clear line of argument that some fraaa or surr had written down in a distant past.

Page 689:  “ The point I was getting at wa that you can string the lergitimate points – ones visited by our world track, but that makes sense – inot other world tracks that make as much sense as ours,”  “But they’re not real,  Emman said.  Or are they?” 

I balked.

Arisbalt said, “ That is rather a profound question of metatheorics.  All of te points in Hemm space are equally real – since they are nothing more than lists of numbers.  So what is it that imbues on set of those points – one worldtrack – with one that we call realness?”

Page 690:  “Use of Narrative is somewhat – well – loaded.”…”what do they mean by it” …”and is it associated by lineage, in some peoples minds, with Lineage.”…what is the link you see between the f of different kinds of matter, and the worldtracks?

Page 703:  “are you saying that there would be one-to –one correspondence between our Saunts  an theirs?  Like the same mind shared across multiple worlds?

Page 704:  “How might the knowlwdge propagate from a common Theoric World – I won’t call it Haylean, since presumably there was no person named Hylaea on Quator – to minds of different Saunts in different worlds?  And is this still going on at this moment – between us, and them?”

Page 705:  The configuration of the cosmos encoded in that point, I said, “includes – along with all the stars and planets, the birds and te bees, the books and speelies and everything else – one star that happens to have a big chunck of ice in the middle of it.  That point, remember, is just a long string of numbers – coordinates in space.  No more or less real than any other possible string of numbers.”

“its realness – or unrealness in this case – has to grow out of some other consideration.”

Page 706:  See, It’s not just about what is possible- since anything is possiblein Hemn space- but what is copossible, meaning all other things that would have to be true in that universe, to have a block of ice in a star.”

Page 707:  “but it’s a way of answering the question ‘what other things would have to be true about a cosmos that included a block of ice in a star? 

So those numbers and recordings, you’re saying, are themselves parts of the configuration encode by that point in Hemn Space

“yes.  When you go all praxic on me and dream up the ice missile delivery system, what you’re really doing is figuring out what Narratives would create the set of conditions – the traces left behind in the cpsmos by the execution of that project – that is compossible with ice in a star.”

Page 708:  That’s what a world track is – a sequence of Hemn space points strubg together just so, to make it look like the laws of nature are preserved.”

My comment:  The key and operative words in this statement are ‘look look’; in other words perspective.  The narrative construct of realness.  One could through layers upon layers of recursive thought, or close your eyes and simply accept what is.  If you did one over the other, would the meaning be the same?

Page 718:  there is a Hylaen Theoric World, that is populated by mathematical entities – coons, as we call them – that are non spatial and non temporal in nature, and that our minds have some capacity off accessing them.

The discussion so that it can’t be touched by rational.  I can’t prove you’re wrong any more than I can prove the non-existence of God!

Page 720:  Over the speaker, Paphlagon was saying: “the Adrakhonic Theorem is true here.  It’s apparently true in the four cosmic the Geometers came from.  If their ship had turned up in some other cosmos, the same as ours, but devoid of sentient beings, would it be true there?

“Not until the Geometers arrived to say it was true,” said Lodohir

…”the more I hear of this, the less I understand your position, Praa Lodighir.  Three is a prime number. It is prime today, was prime yesterday.  A billion years ago, before there were brains to think about it, it was prime.  And if all the brains were destroyed tomorrow, it would still be prime.  Clearly its primeness has nothing to do with our brains.”

“It has everything to do with our brains, Lodoghir insisted, “because we supply the definition of what it is to be a prime number!

“No theor who attends to these matters can long escape the conclusion that the coons exict independently of what may or may not be going on in peoples’ brains at any given moment”’ Paphlagon said.  “It is as simple application of te Steelyard.  What is the simplest way of explaining the fact that theors working independently in different eras prove the same results – results that do not contradict each other, even though reached by different proof- chains-results, same of which can be turned into theories that perfectly describe the behavior of physical universe?  The simplest answer is that coons really exist, and are not of this causal domain.”

Page 721:  “A fully generalized Directed Acyclic Graph, with no distinction made any more between, on the one hand, so called theoric worlds, and, on the other hand, inhabited ones such as Arbre, Quator, and the rest.  For the first time, we have arrows leading away from Arbran Causal Domain towards other inhabited worlds.”

“Do you mean to suggest,” Lodghir asked, as though not quite believing his ears, “that Arbre might be the Hylaen Theoric World of some other world that has people living on it?”

Page 733:  “Turns out that once you get an organization started, it takes on a life- lives by a logic – of its own

Page 746:  ”This percolation you speak of:  until now, I fancied it was all thoers seeing timeless truths about isosceles triangles, “  Lodoghir said.  “ I oughtn’t to be the ever-exca;ating grandiosity of these claims, but aren’t you now asking us to believe something even more colossal?  Correct me if I’m wrong: but did you just try to link percolation of information through the Wick to biological evolution?”

An akward pause.

“You believe in evolution, don’t you?” Lodoghir continued.

“yes, though it might have sounded strange to someone like Protas, who had frankly mystical pagan views about HTW and so on,” said Paphlagon, “but any modern version or Protism must be reconcilable with long-established theories, not only of cosmpgraphy, but of evolution.  However I disagree with the polemical part of your statement Fraaa Lodoghir.

I am only claiming what is reasonable.  That – as yourself pointed out during your Plenary with Fraa Erasmas – tends to be the smallest, in the sense of least complicated, claim.  What I claim is that information moves through the Wick in a manner that is somehow analogous to how it moves from past to present.  As it moves, one of the things that it does is to excite physicall measurable changes in nerve tissue…

Page 748:  “We agree on something!” said Lodoghir.

“ A much more economical claim, in Gardan’s Steelyard sense, is that the mechanism – whatever it is- acts on any matter whether or not that matter is part of a living organism – or a theor!  It’s just that there is an observational bias at work.”

“Yes, Papllagon said, “and just as cosmographers can only see stars in a dark sky, we can only observe the Hylean Flow when it manifests itself as perceptions of coons in our conscious minds.  Like starlight at moon, it is always present, always working, but only noticed and identified as something remarkable in the context of pure theorics.”

Page 750 [metaphor] like seaweed killing a swimmer

Page 751:  …we are going to have to toil in the laboratory of consciousness, which is the only setting we know of where effects of the Hylean Flow are observable.”…:Though instead of one single HTW we should now speak of the Wick instead: the Flow percolates through a complex network of cosmic ‘more theoric than’ or ‘prior to’ ours.”

Page 752  And that was how I came to spend the entire course recounting my two Ecba dialogs with Orolo:  the first about how, according to him, consciousness was all about the rapid and fluent creation of counterfactual worlds inside the brain, and second in which he argued that this was not merely possible, not merely plausible, but in fact easy, if one thought of consciousness as spanning an ensemble of slightly different versions of the brain, each keeping track of a slightly different cosmos.  Paphlagon ended up saying it better:  “ If Hems Space is the landscape, and one cosmos is a single geometric point in it, then a given consciousness  is a spot of light moving, like a search-beam, over that landscape- and brightly illuminating a set of points – of cosmic- that are close together, with a penumbra that rapidly feathers away to darkness at the edges.  In the bright center of te beam, crosstalk occurs among many variants of the brain.  Fewer contributions come in from the half-lit periphery, and none from the shadows beyond.

Page 755:  “I should tell you first that he wa knowledgeable about theorics.  He knew the laws of theorics were time-reversible, and that the only way to determine the direction of time’s arrow was to measure the amount of disorder in the system.  The cosmos seems oblivious to time.  It only matters to us.  Consciousness is time constituting.  We build up time out of instantaneous impressions that flow in through our sensory organs at each moment.  Then they recede into the past.  What is this thing we call the past?  It is a system of records encoded in our nerve tissue – records that tell a consistent story.”

Page 756:  “ I understand Atamant’s point, Lodoghir said, “ but making such a move does he not exile himself from rational theoric discourse?  This power of consciousness takes on a sort of mystical status – it can’t be challenged or examined,  it just is.

But the nub of it is this:  Consciousness is enacted in the physical world, on physical equipment-“

“Equipment?  Igentha Floral asked sharply.

“Nerve tissue, or perhaps some artificial device of similar powers.  The point being that it has what Ita would call hardware  …  The full cosmos of the physical stuff and consciousness.  Take away consciousness and it’s only dust; add consciousness and you get things, ideas, and time.

Page 757:  Lodoghir said’ “ Please explain something to me.  I was under the impression that the kind of crosstalk you are speaking of could only occur between two cosmic that were exactly the same for a difference in the quantum state of one particle.”

Page 758:  Fraa Jad threw his napkin on the table and said:  “ Consciousness amplifies the weak signals that, like cobwebs spun between tree, web Narratives together.  Moreover, it amplifies them selectively and in that way creates feedback loops that steer the Narratives.”

…If you don’t agree with the polycosmic interpretation, you must find some other explanation for those effects.  But if you agree with it, then, to make it compatible with what we have long known about quantum mechanics, you must buy into the premise that cosmic interfere with each other when their world tracks are close together.  If you restrict yourself to one particular cosmos, this cross talk may be interpreted as a signal – a rather weak one, since it only concerns a few particles.  If those particles are in an asteroid out in the middle of nowhere, it hardly matters. But when those particles happen to be at a certain critical locations, in the brain, why, then, the signals can end up altering the behavior of the organism that is animated by that brain.  The organism, all by itself, is vastly larger than anything that could normally be influenced by quantum interference.  When on considers societies of such organisms that endure across long spans of time and in some cases develop world-altering technologies, one sees the meaning of Fraa Jad’s assertion that consciousness amplifies the weak signals that web the cosmic together

Consciousness is spatiotemporial in nature

Page 760:  They [our brains] are not merely crystal radios!  They compute.  The cognate. The outcomes of those cognitions can my no means be easily predicted from their inputs.  And those outcomes are the conscious thoughts that we have, the decisions we put in to effect, our social interactions with other conscious beings, and behavior of societies down through the ages.”

Page 761:  “But recall that the signals in question only pass between cosmic whose world tracks are close together. There is your feedback! Crosstalk steers world tracks of consciousness bearing cosmic; world tracks that steer close together exchange more crosstalk.”

Page 791:  The loaf had been made by braiding several ropes of dough together in a non-trivial pattern that, I feared, had a deep knot-theoretical significance and was named after some Elkhazgain Saunt.

Page 794:  Plurality of Worls Messal about the Wick and the idea that Arbre might be the HTW of other worlds, such as Urnud.  … “you’re saying that’s like what it might have been like to the Urndon theors on that ship,” I said, when the received – I don’t know- emanations, hints, signals, percolating down the Wick from Arbre.”

Page 807: philosophical musings with which I’d whiles away the time: that Orolo’s death, and Lise’s, had prepared me to accept my own.  That it was good I’d sent that message to Ala.  That even if I died in this cosmos I might go on living in another.

Page 830:  [metaphor] My brain had become like an old sponge that has sopped up more water than it can hold.

Page 831:  [metaphor] But now all I could see was the back side of a crinkley blanket, as if I were poultry in a roasting pan.

Page 851:  We’ve become like Fraa Orolo’s wondering 10,000-year math,” Arisbalt proclaimed.  “A causal domain cut off from the rest of the cosmos.”

“Whew”

“But there was a side effect that Orolo never warned us of,” he continued, “ which is that we have gone adrift.  We don’t exist in one state or another.  Anything.’s possible, any history might have happened, until the gates swing open and we go Apert.”

Page 861:  Fraa Osa was answering:   “To my fraas and surrs of t Ringing Vale I have a loyalty that can never be dissolved precisely because it is no rational thing but a bond like that of family.  And I will not waste oxygen by discussing all of the nesting and overlapping loyalty groups to which I belong: this cell, the Mathic World, the COnvox, the people of Arbre, and the community, extending even beyond the limits of this cosmos, that unites us with the likes of Jules Verne Durand.”

Page 862:  “ This is dangerous, Jesry said flatly.  “It leads to saying that we may abandon the Rake and behave like a bunch of Enthusiasts, and everything will work out just fine because we have achieved holistic oneness with the polycosim.”

Page 863:  Not even Jad.  He did say this:  “Those who think through possibleoutcomes with discipline, forge connections, in doing so, to other cosmic in which those outcomes are more than mere possibilities.  Such a consciousness is measurably, quantitivly different from one that has not undertaken the same work and yes, is able to make correct decisions in an Emergence where an untrained mind would be of little use”

“I think it has already gotten somewhere, I said.  “ When you and I re-joined this dialog a few minutes ago, passions were inflamed and people were still trying to frame the decision in terms of allegiances and loyalties.  Fraa Osa has shown that any such approach will fail because we all belong to multiple groups with conflicting loyalties.  This made the conversation less emotional.  We’ve also developed an argument that it’s not possible to work out all the moves in advance.  But as you yourself pointed out, going on naive emotion is bound to fail.

Page  896:  “ I suppose not.  But it is easy, after all this time, to harbor doubts.  To think of it as a religion whose god has died.”

Believe then, that information – the Hylean Flow – passes between cosmic.

Page:  908:  “This happened after you left Arbre.  One magisterium is the Saecular Power.  The other is the Mathic World – now the Antiswarm.  The two of them are well - running the world?”

Page 927:  The Hylean Flow brings about convergent development of consciousness-bearing systems across world tracks!”

Page 949:  “he mystic nails a symbol to one meaning that was true for the moment but soon becomes false.  The poet, on the other hand, sees that truth while it’s true but understands that symbols are always in flux and that their meanings are fleeting.”

Page 956:  Orolo said that the more he knew of the complexity of the mind, and the cosmos with which it was inextrably and mysteriously bound up, the more inclined he was to see it as a kind of miracle – not in quite the same sense that our Deolaters (common folks with little discipline)use them, for he considered it altogether natural.  He meant rather that the evolution of our minds from bits of inanimate matter was more beautiful and more extraordinary than any of the the miracles catalogs down through the ages by religions of the world.  And so he had an instinctive skepticism of any system of thought, religious or theorical, that pretended to encompass that miracle, and in doing sought to draw limits around it.  Thai’s why he’d chosen the path that he had.  Now the coming of our friends from Urnud, Tro, Earth, and Fthos has demonstrated certain things about how polycosim works that who had only speculated about before.  We must all of us re-examine everything we know and believe in the light of these revelations.  That is the work hat begins here now it is a great and gradual beginning that encompasses smaller but no less beautiful beginnings – such as the Union of Ala and Erasnus.