But at this point the four hundred richest people on the planet owned half the planet’s wealth, and the top one percent owned fully eighty percent of the world’s wealth. For them it wasn’t so bad.
Capital, having considerably more liquidity than water, slid
“Human dignity is something one need not look for in the world of capitalists."
- V. I. Lenin
As modern tyrannies are swept away (and every honest heart delights), the quick-thinking servants of the world’s great powers still proffer plans to intervene, to jostle, scheme and sponsor factions that they barely understand.
“Sometimes a scoundrel is useful to our party precisely because he is a scoundrel."
- V. I. Lenin
Kerensky he dismissed in yet another snappy line, describing him as ‘a balalaika on which they play to deceive the workers and peasants’.
The history of Lenin’s train is not exclusively the property of the Soviets. In part, it is a parable about great-power intrigue, and one rule there is that great powers almost always get things wrong.
An oppressed class which does not strive to learn the use of weapons [the Russian word, oruzhiia, contains another wonderful long r], to practice the use of weapons, to own weapons, deserves to be mistreated … The demand for disarmament in the present-day world is nothing but an expression of despair.
A wise man once told me that mystery is the most essential ingredient of life, for the following reason: mystery creates wonder, which leads to curiosity, which in turn provides the ground for our desire to understand who and what we truly are.”
Mysteries precede humankind, envelop us and draw us forward into exploration and wonder. Secrets are the work of humankind, a covert and often insidious way to gather, withhold or impose power. Do not confuse the pursuit of one with the manipulation of the other.
“Yeah, he'd said, maybe it's just my idea, but really it always hurts, the times it don't hurt is when we just forget, we just forget it hurts, you know, it's not just because my belly's all rotten, everybody always hurts. So when it really starts stabbing me, somehow I feel sort of peaceful, like I'm myself again.”
“And just because I've written this book, don't think I've changed. I'm like I was back then, really.”
When I went on anyway, my body began to grow cold, and I thought I was dead. Face pale, my dead self sat down on a bench and began to turn toward my real self, who was watching this hallucination on the screen of the night. My dead self came nearer, just as if it might want to shake hands with my real self. That's when I panicked and tried to run. But my dead self pursued me and finally caught me, entered me and controlled me. I'd felt then just the way I felt now. I felt as if a hole had opened in my head from which consciousness and memory leaked out and in their place the rash crowded in, and a cold like spoiled roast chicken. But that time before, shaking and clinging to the damp bench, I'd told myself, Hey, take a good look, isn't the world still under your feet? I'm on this ground, and on this same ground are trees and grass and ants carrying sand to their nests, little girls chasing rolling balls, and puppies running.
I put the thin fragment of glass, dripping blood, in my pocket, and ran out into the misty road. The doors and windows of the houses were shut, nothing was moving. I thought I'd been swallowed by a huge living thing, that I was turning around and around in its stomach like the hero of some fairy tale.
