After the parables

When I finished reading The Parable of the Talents, I saw that I had turned down the corners of four pages. I’ve been taught that’s a very naughty thing to do to a book, but since it’s my own, I did it anyway. I remember as a college student, using used texts to save money, I always enjoyed seeing what the former users had inked in the margins and I learned much from their notations. Likewise, I like seeing the evidence someone has turned down a page in any pre-read books I choose to read myself. I like to figure out why that page was turned down, whether for a bookmarker to know where to pick up reading, or for the content on those two pages. 

My post today is simply to write what was on the pages I‘d turned down. You get to decide why I turned down these pages.

Page 181

“Choose your leaders

with wisdom and forethought.

To be led by a coward 

 is to be controlled

by all the coward fears.

To be led by a fool

is to be led

by the opportunists

who control the fool.

To be led by a thief

is to offer up

your most precious treasures

to be stolen.

To be led by a liar

is to ask

to be told lies.

To be led by a tyrant

is to sell yourself 

and those you love

into slavery.”

Page 263

“…I dreamed of doing great, heroic things, but all I really tried to do was hide, vanish, make myself invisible.

It should have been hard for an oversized kid like me to hide that way, but it wasn’t. If I did my chores and my homework, I was encouraged to vanish—or rather, I wasn’t encouraged to do anything else. In my neighborhood there were only a few kids, and they were all older than I was. To them I was either a nuisance or a pawn. They ignored me or they got me into trouble. Kayce and her friends didn’t appreciate any attempts I made to join in their adult conversation. Even when Kayce was alone, she wasn’t really interested in anything I had to say. She either told me more than I wanted to know about Kamaria, or she punished me for asking questions about anything else. 

Quiet was good. Questioning was bad. Children should be seen and not heard. They should believe what their elders told them, and be content that it was all they needed to know. If there were any brutality in the way I was raised, that was it. Stupid faith was good. Thinking and questioning were bad. I was to be like a sheep in Christ’s flock—or Jarrett’s flock. I was to be quiet and meek. Once I learned that, my childhood was at least physically comfortable.”

Page 305

Beware:

All too often,

We say

What we hear others say.

We think

What we’re told that we think.

We see

What we’re permitted to see.

Worse!

We see what we’re told that we see.

Repetition and pride are the keys to this.

To hear and to see

Even an obvious lie

Again 

And again and again

May be to say it,

Almost by reflex

Then to defend it

Because we’ve said it

And at last to embrace it

Because we’ve defended it

And because we cannot admit

That we’ve embraced and defended

An obvious lie.

Thus, without thought,

Without intent,

We make

Mere echoes

Of ourselves—

And we say

What we hear others say.

Page 356

“…We keep falling into the same ditches, you know? I mean, we learn more and more about the physical universe, more about our own bodies, more technology, but somehow, down through history, we go on building empires of one kind or another, then destroying them in one way or another. We go on having stupid wars that we justify and get passionate about, but in the end, all they do is kill huge numbers of people, maim others, impoverish still more, spread disease and hunger, and set the stage for the next war. And when we look at all of that in history, we just shrug our shoulders and say, well, that’s the way things are. That’s the way things always have been.”

“It is.” Len said.

“It is,” I repeated. “There seem to be solid biological reasons why we are the way we are. If there weren’t, the cycles wouldn’t keep replaying. The human species is a kind of animal, of course. But we can do something no other animal species has ever had the option to do. We can choose. We can go on building and destroying until we either destroy ourselves or destroy the ability of our world to sustain us. Or we can make something of ourselves. We can grow up…”

Again, it is amazing to me that Octavia L. Butler wrote these things in the mid-90’s. What a visionary!