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)
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