A Time Patrol instructor says that the Academy had to give its Babylonian trainees:
"'...a battle-of-the gods routine.'
"'What routine are you giving us?' asked Whitcomb.
"The spaceman regarded him narrowly. 'The truth,' he said at last. 'As much of it as you can take.'"
-Time Patrol, p. 14.
A long time later, both chronologically and experientially, Manse Everard asks a Danellian whether the affair of the alpha and beta timelines was:
"'...truly an accident, a quirk in the flux, that we, we had to straighten out?'
"'It was. Komozino explained matters to you correctly, as far as you and she are capable of comprehension.'" (p. 434)
There it is again. Everard's understanding has advanced immensely but there is still a limit to his comprehension. Needless to say, when the Danellian has completed one part of his explanation:
"The wind cried, the sea growled nearer." (ibid.)
I do not share Wanda's misgivings about mutable reality. She herself exists in the moment when she expresses her misgivings. Why should it matter if there is another point of view according to which she does not exist or has never existed? How does this differ from a point of view from billions of years before our births or after our deaths - if we assume just a single temporal dimension?
It looks like we will be off the Time Patrol tomorrow.
8 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
But, I see a contradiction here with this mentioning of trainees recruited from ancient Babylon. If my memory is correct, it was mention in "Ivory and Apes and Peacocks" that there were few recruits for the Time Patrol before the 1500's and 1600's, because men and women from earlier times simply could not grasp time travel and mutable timelines. Pummairam, the Tyrian youth we see being recruited in "Ivory" was a RARE exception because, intellectually, his mind had not yet become so hardened and set that he became unable to make sense of radically different ideas.
Ad astra! Sean
C.S. Lewis once remarked that when reading medieval sources, you should bear in mind that the people you were reading lived in a different perceptual universe.
That is, when Thomas Aquinas looked up into the night sky, he didn't see distant suns.
He saw lights in crystal spheres pushed by angels.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree with you and Lewis. We ALL of tend to think and perceive as our current "universe" does.
Albeit this is the first time I came across the notion that the lights in crystal spheres were pushed by the angels. I thought educated people like Thomas Aquinas, in his time, would go by what Ptolemaic astronomers thought was true.
Ad astra! Sean
Is that a "perceptual" or a "conceptual" difference?
Kaor, Paul!
I was going by the word Stirling used.
Ad astra! Sean
Paul: both. We're not seeing -- perceiving -- the same thing. Because our perceptions are physically shaped by our conceptions.
Or take the example of the Puritan clergyman, Cotton Mather. If you read his diaries, he was perpetually worried about "signs and portents" -- the birth of a two-headed calf might be a precursor of God's wrath, for example.
His perception of the environment around him was different from ours -- he barely has any idea that things might "just happen", for instance. Hell is just beneath his feet, heaving just above his head, spirits are whispering in his ears for good and ill continually. These things were real as rocks to him.
I visited Zanzibar in 1964 -- I was 10 going on 11 -- and played a rather cruel joke on the boatmen; I wore an eyepatch leaving the ship (which had to anchor offshore) and then when I was back on the ship and we were about to leave, I lifted it and looked at them from the railing.
They weren't seeing an obnoxious kid goofing on them; they were seeing a real, threatening case of the Evil Eye, and they went bananas, obviously both enraged and frightened.
We don't see the "real world"; we see a collage put together by our brains, working from memory and assumptions.
Right.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
As a Westerner, like you, I seriously doubt I would have reacted as did those boatmen. I might not even have noticed you wearing and then not wearing an eye patch. Different perceptions and assumptions from those Zanzibaris.
Ad astra! Sean
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