Babel

Victory is not assured. Victory may be in the portents, but it must be urged there by violence, by suffering, by martyrs, by blood. Victory is wrought by ingenuity, persistence, and sacrifice. Victory is a game of inches, of historical contingencies where everything goes right because they have made it go right.

Death is nature’s greatest good. Death is a better state. Death frees the immortal soul. Death is transcendence. Death is an act of bravery, a glorious act of defiance.

How did one make peace with one’s own death?

What an anchor she was, he thought, an anchor he did not deserve. She was his rock, his light, the sole presence that had kept him going. And he wished, he wished, that was enough for him to hold on to.

Violence was the only thing that brought the colonizer to the table; violence was the only option.

If the people could not be won over by words, they would be persuaded by destruction.

The seed ye sow, another reaps;
The wealth ye find, another keeps;
The robes ye weave, another wears;
The arms ye forge, another bears.
P ERCY B YSSHE S HELLEY , ‘Song to the Men of England’

‘We’re dead men walking.’

‘But that’s what makes us frightening.’ She set the lamp down between them. ‘We’ve nothing left to lose.’

He hoped. He hoped until hope became its own form of torture.

And he did not want to feel anything else, did not want to sink into his body and register its hurts, because that physical pain would mean he was alive, and because being alive meant that he had to move forward. But he could not go on. Not from this.