Heretics of Dune, by Frank Herbert: 5 stars

#35 for 2011:

Heretics of Dune, by Frank Herbert

This is a really strong series!  It keeps going strong- better, even. 

Random thought, or clarification:  I've always been drawn to the Bene Gesserit, because of their extreme self-knowledge and self-control.  I've always been repelled by them by their aim to manipulate other people.

Humans live best when each has his place to stand, when each knows where he belongs in the scheme of things and what he may achieve.  Destroy the place and you destroy the person.  (p. 41)

What we must strive for always! is to find the natural flow and go with it.  (p. 97)

At the quantum level our universe can be seen as an indeterminate place, predictable in a statistical way only when you employ large enough numbers.  Between that universe and a relatively predictable one where the passage of a single planet came be timed to a picosecond, other forces come into play.  For the in-between universe where we find our daily lives, that which you believe is a dominant force.  Your beliefs order the unfolding of daily events.  If enough of us believe, a new thing can be made to exist.  Belief structure creates a filter through which chaos is sifted into order.  (p. 131)

Law always chooses sides on the basis of enforcement power.  Morality and legal niceties have little to do with it when the real question is:  Who has the clout?  (p. 151)

Some people never observe anything.  Life just happens to them.  They get by on little more than a kind of dumb persistence, and they resist with anger and resentment anything that might lift them out of that false serenity.  (p. 154)

He felt his awareness constricted to its tightest purpose and yet that purpose filled his universe.  He was open to infinity.  (p. 157)

... was a two-edged sword.  You might learn to flow along the edge of the blade but you could be cut by it.  (p. 167)

What was it that we spent and what was it we bought?  (p. 331)

Historians exercise great power and some of them know it.  They recreate the past, changing it to fit their own interpretations.  Thus, they change the future as well.  (p. 380)

Yes, it was a matter of opening doors, he thought.  You opened one door and that let you into a place where there were other doors.  You chose a door in this new place and examined what that revealed to you.  There might be times when you were forced to try all of the doors but the more doors you opened, the more certain you became of which door to open next.  Finally, a door would open into a place you recognized.  Then you could say:  "Ahhhh, this explains everything."  (p. 388)

Memory never recaptures reality.  Memory reconstructs.  All reconstructions change the original, becoming external frames of reference that inevitably fall short.  (p. 404)

It occurred to Lucilla that the people of these streets pursued a fleeting dream, that the fulfillment they sought was not the thing itself but a myth they had been conditioned to seek the way racing animals were trained to chase after the whirling bait on the endless oval of the racetrack.  (p. 405)

"To those out there, a great issues is:  'Will I eat today?'
Do I have shelter tonight that will not be invaded by attackers or vermin?' Luxury?  Luxury is the possession of a drug or a member of the opposite sex who can, for a time, keep the beast at bay."
And you are the beast, he thought.
....
"It's just that you think of the muck in the wrong way," she said.  "Luckily, they are the most self-limiting.  They know this somewhere in the damps of their deepest consciousness but cannot spare the time to deal with that or anything else except the immediate scramble for survival."
"They cannot be improved?" he asked.
"They must not be improved!  Oh, we see to it that self-improvement remains a great fad among them.  Nothing real about it, of course."
"Another luxury they must be denied," he said.
"Not a luxury!  Nonexistent!  It must be occluded at all times behind a barrier that we like to call protective ignorance."  (p. 444)

It was a smile full of compassion, of understanding and real pleasure in his own existence.  He knew it for the most deadly insult he could hurl at them and he saw it hit.  (p. 446)

It was true, Teg thought then, that the process of arranging conflicts involved the hoodwinking of large masses.  How easy it was to fall into the attitude of the Honored Matres.
Muck!
The hoodwinking was not as difficult as some supposed.  Most people wanted to be led...  There were deep tribal instincts (powerful unconscious motivations) to account for this.  The natural reaction when you began to recognize how easily you were led was to look for scapegoats. .... How easy it was to produce scapegoats and how readily they were accepted!  This was especially true when the alternative was to find yourself either guilty or stupid or both.  (p. 467)

There were no words in the language, only a moving, dancing adaptation to a moving, dancing universe.  You could only speak the language, not translate it.  To know the meaning you had to go through the experience and even then the meaning changed before your eyes.  (p. 480)

Theodore Roethke (The Vigil)

Moonwalking with Einstein, by Joshua Foer: ~3 stars

#34 for 2011:

Moonwalking with Einstein, by Joshua Foer.
Jots and thoughts:

Monotony collapses time [I'd say compresses it; zip-files it, even]; novelty unfolds it....  If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next- and disappear.  That's why it's important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exciting locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories.  Creating new memories [actually, anchoring memories to memorable events- we are ALWAYS creating new memories; they just don't stick if we judge them unimportant.  At least this way they can be important in context of an important event/time in our life.] stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perceptions of our lives.  (p. 77)

This shows in a way why the writing doesn't grab me; he says one thing and then when he restates it, he actually undermines or distorts what he just said.

And he doesn't clarify or integrate points often, for example in the continuing excerpt:

William James first wrote about the curious warping and foreshortening of psychological time in his Principles of Psychology in 1890:  "In youth we may have an absolutely new experience, subjective or objective, every hour of the day.  Apprehension is vivid, retentiveness strong, and our recollections of that time, like those of a time spent in rapid and interesting travel, are something intricate, multitudinous, and long-drawn-out," he wrote.  [See, here is where he needs to explain, or refer too, or at least later in the book tie together, why it is so difficult to remember early childhood, when everything is REALLY really new:  because our brains are still forming.  I don't know why, but the lack of qualification is disorienting and off-putting.]  "But as each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine which we hardly note at all, the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to contentless units, and the years grow hollow and collapse."  Life seems to speed up as we get older because life gets less memorable as we get older.  (p. 77)

It is hard not to feel as though a tremendous devolution has taken place between that Golden Age [of memory] and our own comparatively leaden one.  People used to labor to furnish their minds.  They invested in the acquisition of memories the same way we invest in the acquisition of things.  But today, beyond the Oxford examination hall's oaken doors, the vast majority of us don't trust our memories.  We find shortcuts to avoid relying on them.  We complain about them endlessly, and see even their smallest lapses as evidence that they're starting to fail us entirely.  (pp. 134-5)

When the Egyptian god Toth presented his gift of writing to King Thamus, the king's response was:
"If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls,: he told the god.  "They will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful' they will rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from withihn themselves, but by means of external marks.  What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminding.  And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them anything, you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they will know nothing.  And as men filled not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellow-men."  (pp. 138-9)

Well, there's the modern world summed up for you, eh?


The OK Plateau
Rhetorica ad Herennium
Phoenix by Peter of Ravenna

God Emperor of Dune, by Frank Herbert: 5 stars

#33 for 2011:

God Emperor of Dune, by Frank Herbert.

How anyone can take a story and a character this bizarre and unfathomable and make it work, much less make it great, is amazing.  I mean, really:  a prescient boy whose every ancestor is alive and conscious within him, and turbulently so, enters into a physical symbiotic partnership with the great sandworm of Dune, allowing him to live thousands of years in exchange for the slow inevitable loss of his humanity and a fate perhaps more terrible than death, in order to have the time (and means) to bring about an evolutionary change in humans without which humanity will violently cease to exist at all.  Nobody likes the arrangement, or the absolute political and religious reality it necessitates, least of all him. 

In the immortal words of the L.A. Times:  "Heady stuff."

There is a lot of sophistry involved, but mercifully this is mostly from the mouths of the characters and thus itself a commentary.

"Lady, we all have to live," he protested.
"You are not alive," she said.  "Be gone!"  (p. 52)

"Rules change with each surprise." 
----
"For what do you hunger, Lord?"  Moneo ventured.
"For a humankind which can make truly long-term decisions.  Do you know the key to that ability, Moneo?"
"You have said it many times, Lord.  It is the ability to change your mind."  (p. 66)

Your soul suffices this day as a reckoner against you.  I need no witnesses.  You do not listen to your soul, but listen instead to your anger and your rage.  (p. 70)

[T]he struggle with humankind's view of itself- a sweaty contest on a field where motives from our darkest past can well up out of an unconscious reservoir and become events with which we not only must live but contend.  (p. 79)

[The trance state of prophecy] is an ultimate pragmatism in the midst of Infinity, a demanding consciousness where you com at last into the unbroken awareness that the universe moves of itself, that it changes, that its rules change, that nothing remains permanent or absolute throughout all such movement, that mechanical explanations for anything can work only within precise confinements and, once the walls are broken down, the old explanations shatter and dissolve, blown away by new movements.  (p. 180)

"The mind imposes this framework which it calls 'reality.'  That arbitrary framework has a tendency to be quite independent of what your senses report."  (p. 19)

"I try to dispense with casual laws and prisons wherever possible."
"You have to have some prisons!"
"Do I?  Prisons are needed only to provide the illusion that courts and police are effective.  They're a kind of job insurance."
---
"You talk of prisons and police and legalities, the perfect illusions behind which a prosperous power structure can operate while observing, quite accurately, that it is above its own laws."  (p. 225)

"You always know the creative because it is revealed openly.  Concealment betrays the existence of another force entirely."  (p. 227)

"Here's an interesting fact about that story:  Eve was not the first to pluck and sample the apple.  Adam was first and he learned by this to put the blame on Eve."  (p. 233)

"Reason is valuable," he said, "only when it performs against the wordless physical background of the universe."  (p. 258)

"Words are often almost useless in sentient affairs," Leto said.  (p. 266)

"The insect has no more freedom from its hive than we have freedom from our past," he said.  (p. 325)

"Nothing is certain," he said.
This dropped her into despair.
That had not been Leto's intention, but he knew that it often happened- an accurate, though ambiguous, answer was taken as confirmation of one's deepest fears.  (p. 344)

"There's a lesson in that, too.  What do such machines really do?  They increase the number of things we do without thinking- there's the real danger."  (p. 346)

These poor creatures lived on the margins, trying to retain parts of an ancient wholeness.  And all the while, that lost reality slipped farther and farther from their grasp.  ... [They] were lost to everything except a bare existence and the rote mouthing of old words which they did not understand and which they did not even pronounce correctly!  (p. 369)

"Now, you're beginning to know the responsibilities which come as a result of actions. ....  It is human to have your soul brought to a crisis you did not anticipate.  That's the way it always is with humans."  (p. 419)

Children of Dune, by Frank Herbert: 5 stars

#32 for 2011:

Children of Dune, by Frank Herbert. The quality, the caliber, keeps going strong.  Sure, it's weird as hell, but revealing, and compelling, and it stays with you.

"An army," she said, "is composed of disposable, completely replaceable parts.  That is the lesson of the Levenbrech."
"Replaceable parts," he said.  "including the supreme command?"
"Without the supreme command there is seldom a reason for an army..."  (p. 47)

"The universe as we see it is never quite the exact physical universe," she said.  (p. 75)

"A large populace held in check by a small but powerful force is quite a common situation in our universe.  And we know the major conditions wherein this large populace may turn upon its keepers-
"One:  When they find a leader.  This is the most volatile threat to the powerful; they must retain control of leaders.
"Two:  When the populace recognizes its chains.  Keep the populace blind and unquestioning.
"Three:  When the populace perceives a hope of escape from bondage.  They must never even believe that escape is possible!"  (p. 108)

This is the age of the shrug.  He knows I've heard all the stories about him and he doesn't care.  Our civilization could well die of indifference within it before succumbing to external attack.  (p. 149)

"All proofs inevitably lead to propositions which have no proof!  All things are known because we want to believe in them."  (p. 150)

The universe neither threatens nor promises...  [T]he realities of the universe... must be faced regardless of how you feel about them.  You cannot fend off such realities with words.  They will come at you in their own wordless way and then, then you will understand what is meant by "life and death".  (p. 179)

In all major socializing forces you will find an underlying movement to gain and maintain power through the use of words.  From witch doctor to priest to bureaucrat it is all the same.  A governed populace must be conditioned to accept power-words as actual things, to confuse the symbolized system with the tangible universe.  In the maintenance of such a power structure, certain symbols are kept out of the reach of common understanding- symbols such as those dealing with economic manipulation or those which define the local interpretation of sanity.  (p. 201)

He gave the impression of being self-contained, an organized and firmly integrated whole.  (p. 217)

I think this just spelled out my greatest wish...

The generalist looks outward; he looks for living principles, knowing full well that such principles change, that they develop.  It is to the characteristics of change itself that the mentat-generalist must look.  There can be no permanent catalogue of such change, no handbook or manual.  You must look at it with as few preconceptions as possible, asking yourself, "Now what is this thing doing?"  (p. 221)

"If you would possess your humanity, let go of the universe!"  (p. 223)

"Is your religion real when it costs you nothing and carries no risk?  Is your religion real when you fatten upon it?  Is your religion real when you commit atrocities in its name?  When comes your downward degeneration from the original revelation?"  (p. 225)

"Abandon certainty!  That's life's deepest command.  That's what life's all about."  (p. 226)

"To exist is to stand out, away from the background," The Preacher said, "You aren't thinking or really existing unless you're willing to risk even your own sanity in the judgement of your existence."  (p. 227)

Daly would say, away from the Foreground; and I bet that The Preacher would reply, yes, away from the foreground and the background both- to be in your own space, in a life of your own creation, your own world, never again to be repeated in all of eternity and only existing now if you make it so!

"The future remains uncertain and so it should, for it is the canvas upon which we paint our desires.  Thus always the human condition faces a beautifully empty canvas.  We possess only this moment in which to dedicate ourselves continuously to the sacred presence we share and create."  (p. 305)

The patterns could guide and they could trap.  One had to remember that patterns change.  (p. 307)

[T]here exist no intransigent opposites except in the beliefs of men....  You know then that the universe is a coherent whole and you are indivisible from it.  (p. 377)

"It is my strength as a human  that I can make my own choices of what to believe and what not to believe, of what to be and what not to be."  (p. 384)

Dune Messiah, Frank Herbert: 5 stars

#31 for 2011:

Dune Messiah, by Frank Herbert.

Profound and strange enough to allow one to see reality reflected in it.  Not so strange that one can't recognize the reality, either.

One could wish Herbert hadn't chosen "Jihad", but one recognizes it as merely a vehicle which fit the setting and purpose, not a commentary on that specific religion.

This sequel is as good as Dune.

"I was enjoying the silence," Scytale said.  "Our hostilities are better left unvoiced."  (p. 14)

"It requires only the slightest shift in emphasis, a glissade of the emotions, to transform envy into enmity," Scytale said.  (p. 27)

He felt that some element of himself lay immersed in frosty hoar-darkness without end.  His prescient power had tampered with the image of the universe held by all mankind.  He had shaken the safe cosmos and replaced security with his Jihad.  He had out-fought and out-thought and out-predicted the universe of men, but a certainty filled him that this universe still eluded him.  (p. 81, emphasis mine)

And so it is with all human power.

Here lies a toppled god-
His fall was not a small one.
We did but build his pedestal,
A narrow and a tall one.  (p. 141)

"You can't stop a mental epidemic.  It leaps from person to person across parsecs.  It's overwhelmingly contagious.  It strikes at the unprotected side, in the place where we lodge the fragments of other such plagues.  Who can stop such a thing?  Muad'dib hasn't the antidote.  The thing has roots in chaos.  Can orders reach there?"  (p. 187)

No matter how exotic human civilization becomes, no matter the developments of life and society nor the complexity of the machine/human interface, there always come interludes of lonely power when the course of humankind, the very future of humankind, depends upon the relatively simple actions of single individuals.  (p. 209)