"'It ain't the work, it's them damn decisions.'" (p. 149)
Where is this quoted from? Nothing comes up when I googled. (I asked this before but no one came up with an answer.)
The decision is where the fugitive Flandry should go. Brechdan rightly thought that we would go either to Starkad or to Betelgeuse. Now Flandry must choose. He considers the options which I don't feel like setting down. He decides on Starkad when it seems that he might be able to hitch a ride in a merchant ship.
Imagine an alternative Ensign Flandry in which the decision was to go to Betelgeuse. Succeeding chapters would have had to be different. We make a choice and specific consequences follow that would not have happened otherwise. In Poul Anderson's "Flight to Forever," time travellers, literary successors of Wells' Time Traveller, travel into the far future, stopping in many specific periods. For each period, Anderson has to imagine particular conditions that differentiate that period from every other. In each case, the general or abstract "future" becomes a future.
In Hegelian philosophy, the most abstract category is "being" because everything is. However, being is identical with its opposite, nothing, because to say of anything only that it is is to say nothing about it. Being and nothing are synthesized in the more concrete category of becoming, the transition from nothing to being. However, this being is not abstract but determinate because it has become one thing as against another. We experience this process continuously. The potential journey either to Starkad or to Betelgeuse, which does not yet exist, becomes the specific journey to Starkad, not to Betelgeuse, which Flandry and Persis experience because it happens whereas its alternative does not.
13 comments:
We make decisions, but even in retrospect we don't know precisely -why- we make the decisions we do.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
But we can have reasons for making a decision. And I think some of those reasons will be at least partly true.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: true, but the process is partly subconscious -- and the faster you have to make the decision, the more that is.
I have been told that, in some experiments, neurologists detecting brain functions can predict which choice the subject will make before he himself is conscious of it.
Paul: but yet again, you can 'decide what to decide' in advance.
Some years ago, a friend tried to kick me -- not seriously, a 'horsing around' gesture.
Before I was aware of what was going on, I'd knocked the leg aside with the flat of my right palm, grabbed his trouser leg behind the knee and yanked forward sharply, at which point he yelled and came down on his shoulders.
I acquired that conditioned reflex by deliberate choice over the course of a long spell of practice; it had no more conscious thought behind it than yanking a finger back from something hot.
So... did I decide to yank him off his feet, or not? 8-).
I would say you didn't decide to yank him off his feet but you had decided to gain self-defence skills.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
That is true. I have often decided to do something without first working out in a verbal way why I made that decision.
Ad astra! Sean
I suspect that one of the major differences between us and other mammals is that we verbalize/formally think more.
Not that other mammals don't sometimes ponder things. I've seen my cat halt halfway between two things and look back and forth, rather obviously thinking (non-verbally, of course) "Do I want a snack, or do I want to go curl up in my catbed and have a nap? Snack or nap? Nap or snack?"
And in a book I read once, a man described being followed by a couple of lions as he was walking home (this was in Kenya before 1914).
They were definitely interested, but halted rather than come too close to the house, where there was noise -- people tending horses, chopping wood, etc.
He looked back over his shoulder, and one of them was sitting about twenty yards away. It looked at him and licked its chops -- that gesture cats use when they're thinking about food.
Obvious what was going through its feline brain at that moment...
He also noted that he didn't have his rifle with him, and that if he -had- had it with him, they wouldn't have come that close in open country, since they knew perfectly well what a gun was.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Very alarming! I would be wise to learn how to use guns in places which has grizzlies, lions, tigers, etc. And always carry a rifle!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: one of the things that "1923", the Yellowstone prequel, gets right is that the cowboys automatically tuck a rifle into their saddle-scabbards whenever they leave the vicinity of the ranch-house.
In "1923" they also automatically buckle on their gunbelts when they go out, like putting on their hats.
That's for possible confrontations with people; the rifles are for wolves, coyotes, bears and (possibly) people.
In the modern incarnation of the Yellowstone Ranch, the cowboys still carry rifles in saddle-scabbards, but usually don't wear pistols, unless they've got specific reason to expect a fight. Changing times; but the grizzlies haven't changed.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree there are going to be times and places where sensible, law abiding people should customarily be armed. Either for protection against aggressive predators or bandits and/or personal enemies.
Ad astra! Sean
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