"'More to it than that,' Everard answered. 'A gift, a power - real leadership has a touch of mystery, something transhuman.... But I wonder if also the time stream isn't bearing her along.'"
-Poul Anderson, "Star of the Sea" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2006), pp. 467-440 AT p. 556-557.
SM Stirling's Father Ignatius comments that leadership is a "'...heavy burden...,'" then adds:
"'Yet leadership has something else to it,' Ignatius said. 'To be a true King is to be touched by something beyond the human. By the finger of God, as David was when he danced before the Tabernacle of the Lord.'"
-SM Stirling, Lord Of Mountains (New York, 2013), Chapter Four, p. 91.
Leadership has "More..." or "...something else...":
"...a touch of mystery, something transhuman..."
"...touched by something beyond the human..."
Parallel thoughts: probably not one text directly influencing the other.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
And Everard's comment about Veleda and the timestream somehow "bearing" her along, makes me think he was starting to grope towards the insights about quantum chaos we see in THE SHIELD OF TIME.
And one thought I had about Fr. Ignatius' remarks was that Montival was acquiring the kind of "ideology" its monarchical form of gov't needed in order to be accepted as legitimate. Something which the pre-Byzantine Roman Empire never quite gained. With all too disastrous results for Rome!
And of course ideologies of political legitimacy would take different forms for different nations and types of government.
Sean
Post a Comment