📚Marginalia

Lack of fear is not the mark of courage. It is the mark of idiocy.

What is the real? When the blades of your enemies are slashing ferociously at you, and your life hangs in the balance, you will know.

If you do not, you have lived your life in vain.

He would die without fear, drenched in his own heart’s blood, in the embrace of a beautiful woman, and she would weep for him.

What samurai could hope for more?

It was easy to pretend that all was right with the world. It never is, of course, and never was, but you have to steal a few hours now and then, and pretend that the rest of the world isn’t going to hell.

The problem with society today is its singular lack of communication. We live in the information age. We talk to each other all the time - on the net, on the phone. But we’re not communicating. We seem to be amassing so much garbage, but we’re not conveying what’s really important.

There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else (parents in the case of children, God in the case of adults) has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point.

War was beautiful, when you had the good fortune not to be engaged in it. It was sound and fury, colour and movement, a massed assault on the senses. It was bravura and theatrical, something that made you gasp. It was thrilling and romantic, when you were a spectator.

The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance… logic can be happily tossed out the window.

Show me a man or a woman alone and I’ll show you a saint. Give me two and they’ll fall in love. Give me three and they’ll invent the charming thing we call ‘society’. Give me four and they’ll build a pyramid. Give me five and they’ll make one an outcast. Give me six and they’ll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they’ll reinvent warfare. Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home.

You couldn’t get hold of the things you’d done and turn them right again. Such a power might be given to the gods, but it was not given to women and men, and that was probably a good thing. Had it been otherwise, people would probably die of old age still trying to rewrite their teens.