Thursday 16 March 2017

Waking And Waiting

"It's amazing when you think of it," said Adell. His broad face had lines of weariness in it, and he stirred his drink slowly with a glass rod, watching the cubes of ice slur clumsily about. "All the energy we can possibly ever use for free.
-copied from here.

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
          But to be young was very heaven!
-copied from here. 

"'It was an air. For a bit, while the human race waited, it felt kind of like wakin' after a fever had broken.'"
-Poul Anderson, World Without Stars (New York, 1966), Chapter XV, p. 110.

These quotations are from:

a science fiction short story by Isaac Asimov;
a poem by William Wordsworth;
a science fiction novel by Poul Anderson.

They are about:

unlimited solar energy;
the French Revolution;
the imminent production of the antithanatic.

In each case, a major change for the better is imminent and there is a short period of joyous anticipation. Sometimes we as individuals experience such a period. Less often, an entire society experiences it. Slavery was ended. Apartheid was ended. Starvation will be ended.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

Except the French Revolution brought NO major changes for the better. Wordsworth and other fellow sympathizers of the Revolution were soon to be bitterly disillusioned by the tyranny and cruelty of the Revolutionaries, the Reign of Terror, mass executions, aggressive wars waged against France's enemies, the military dictatorship of Napoleon, etc.

Sean