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Love is love, and there will never be too much
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The city’s a heart, I said, and in that a heart and a city were sutured into a third thing, a heartish city, and cities are heart-stained, and hearts are city-stained too.
Embassytown, China Mieville -
In our version, Icarus falling into the ocean wasn’t the final chapter. We believe that he washed up on a beautiful deserted island, and he looked for his father in the sky and didn’t see him. So he started a fire on the beach, and tried to think about how he might get back to the sky. And at that moment he looked toward the sky and he saw his destiny, and his destiny was to forge new wings of steel and fire so that he could try again. And he wouldn’t repeat the mistakes of his father, who after all had fashioned the original wax wings. He would improve on his father’s design.
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Are some things still worth dying for? Is the American idea one such thing? Are you up for a thought experiment? What if we chose to regard the 2,973 innocents killed in the atrocities of 9/11 not as victims but as democratic martyrs, “sacrifices on the altar of freedom”? In other words, what if we decided that a certain baseline vulnerability to terrorism is part of the price of the American idea? And, thus, that ours is a generation of Americans called to make great sacrifices in order to preserve our democratic way of life—sacrifices not just of our soldiers and money but of our personal safety and comfort?
In still other words, what if we chose to accept the fact that every few years, despite all reasonable precautions, some hundreds or thousands of us may die in the sort of ghastly terrorist attack that a democratic republic cannot 100-percent protect itself from without subverting the very principles that make it worth protecting?
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Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge.
Paul Gauguin -
