If you haven’t read these, and you like literature, fiction, and the creative use of languages, you’re missing out on treasure. From what I’m reading today, I offer this little gem.

…but what [the captured enemy soldier] had said set me thinking of the North, and I found I knew next to nothing about it.

When I had been a boy, scrubbing floors and running errands in the Citadel, the war itself had seemed almost infintely remote. I knew that most of the matrosses who manned the major batteries had taken part in it, but I knew it just as I knew that the sunlight that fell upon my hand had been to the sun. I would be a torturer, and as a torturer I would have no reason to enter the army and no reason to fear that I would be impressed into it. I never expected to see the war at the gates of [the City]…I never expected to leave the City, or even to leave [my own] quarter of the city called the Citadel.

The North…was then inconceivably remote, a place as distant as the most distant galaxy, since both were forever out of reach. Mentally, I confused it with the dying belt of tropical vegetation that lay between our own land and theirs, although I would have distinguished the two without difficulty if [my teaching Master] had asked me to in the classroom.

But of [the North] itself I had no idea. I did not know if it had great cities or none. I did not know if it was mountainous like the northern or eastern parts of our Commonwealth or as level as our pampas. I did have the impression (although I could not be sure it was correct) that is was a single land mass like our South; and most distinct of all, I had the impression of an innumerable people…an inexhaustible swarm that almost became a creature of itself, as a colony of ants does.

…to think of those millions and millions without speech, or confined to parroting proverbial phrases that must surely have long ago lost most of their meaning, was nearly more than the mind could bear. Speaking almost to myself, I said, “It must surely be a trick, or a lie, or a mistake. Such a nation could not exist.”

And the [Northerner], his voice no louder than my own had been, and perhaps even softer, answered:
“How shall the state be most vigorous? It shall be most vigorous when it is without conflict. How shall it be without conflict? When it is without disagreement. How shall disagreement be banished? By banishing the four causes of disagreement: lies, foolish talk, boastful talk, and talk which serves only to incite quarrels. How shall the four causes be banished? By speaking only the Correct Thought. Then shall the state be without disagreement. Being without disagreement, it shall be without conflict. Being without conflict it shall be vigorous, and strong, and secure.

I had been answered, and doubly.

Seriously, read these books. They make me cry for joy and love of humanity every time I read them, as well as weep for all that we’ve exchanged with our old and defunct “enemies” of the Cold War era. Do you too ever wonder: was this the real KGB plan? To make us become like them, as a result of our “victory” over them? I swear, I really do wonder…

…and if I’m being too dense, I mean this post to relate to the war, our SCLM and the Village bobblehead discourse, and how it is we Little People are told to understand (and don’t) the “enemy.”