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movedkagen · 4 years ago

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right back at ya, @guroshi !

He’d never been caught before.

Despite his very obvious restriction regarding cursed energy, Toji Zen’in ( ‘Fushiguro’ was a name that would come later ) had never been caught by a person he was pursuing. He moved soundlessly, like a panther in the nocturne jungle, and struck precisely. It was the one reason why despite his lack of ability, calling him weak was a sore mistake. They therefore treated him like he were a curse himself; they loathed him, they were disgusted by him, but they dare not say his name lest he appear in their midst. Toji Zen’in had a tendency to appear like a bad omen. When people caught him, it was only when he wanted them to, and it rarely ever ended well.

It turned out that being the boogeyman paid pretty well; he’d made a living out of that rejection. And maybe, just maybe to a certain extent he felt a sense of vindication whenever he closed in on a sorcerer. Outwardly, thriving off of the disdain was a survival tactic. I’m just not a likable guy, he’d say, usually with a sardonic laugh. But inwardly … sinking his blade into the flesh of someone who he knew thought him worth little more than an animal brought him a slight sick sense of pleasure. The jobs mean nothing to me: truth. But it would be a lie to say that he didn’t like fucking up the order of the food chain just by drawing breath. When his very existence served as a shameful thorn in the side of his family, Toji made sure to do so with an expertise that made it so that even ridicule was too dangerous an acknowledgement. If you’re going to be bad, be the best at it. If he was hopeless as a Zen’in, he would therefore be a source of hopelessness to them in turn.

In nearly all other things, Toji was a man who lived aimlessly; fighting, fucking, food, fortune. Those were the only motives that propelled normal men, and for Toji his motives were no different. So, when his phone rang and revealed the voice of his uncle, Toji nearly hung up. They’d provide him no benefit, after all.

“Toji?” The voice echoes again when his initial greeting doesn’t earn a response.

“Ojisan.” His voice is groggy, but the snide way he calls him uncle is still palpable. “If you’re calling me because my old man finally decided to kick the bucket, save your breath. I’ve no interest in his funeral.”

He can hear the way his uncle grimaces on the receiver. “That’s not why I’ve called. We want you to come to the estate.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

“We have a job for you ------”

“Not interested.”

“------ and we will pay.”

Toji paused at that. His family was shit, sure, but they were also swimming in cash. Inversely, looking over his shoulder at the woman he’d been sleeping with in exchange for a bed in January, he couldn’t be any less liquid. “...How much are we talking?”

“Name your price and we’ll negotiate.”

It was the right answer; he knew if he went, strong - arming the amount he wanted would be easy. “I’ll be there in an hour. You waste my time, I walk.” Without waiting for a response, he hangs up and pushes up off the bed, disappearing to shower.

He arrives at the estate feeling tense. He’s got bad memories of this place; being born without an ability meant he’d spent most of his early teenage years serving the family, but looking at the other servants, it could have been worse. I could have been born a woman, he thought, watching with morbid horror as a cousin he barely spoke to struggles to soothe fussing children as her husband glances at her with annoyance without daring to lift a finger to help.

The Zen’in estate was like a sepulchre; opulent and pristine from the outside, but filled nothing but rotting stench and decay internally.

He hides his unease well, despite it all. Bile builds in the back of his throat, but in the room appointed to be their meeting place, Toji stands with a bored expression and seems as though nothing bothers him at all. The door slides open, and he smirks when only his uncle walks through. Typical. His father didn’t show.

“So … what did you do for them to dump this meeting on you? They must not like you these days. Have you fallen out of favor, Ojisan?”

His uncle ignores his comments, taking it as an obvious ploy to provoke him. Instead, he simply sits and folds his arms. “You’re a man who always has his ear to the ground. Have you heard the rumors?”

“You’re going to need to be more specific.”

“About the Gojo clan.”

The mention of the Gojo surname reaches deep into a past Toji barely remembers; not only is this history old, but it’s also near inconsequential. It’s only ever been mentioned in the story of their great victorious ancestor who killed the vengeful spirit that fathered that clan, and how while the Zen’in clan grew in glory, the Gojo clan continued to fall from it. But oddly enough, Toji does recall something he’d heard, which he only remembers because it’s odd to mention the burnt - out family in the first place. “I heard they have a new kid.”

His uncle gracefully pulls out a kiseru and lights it, then puffs on it lazily before continuing. “...The rumor is that he possesses both the limitless and the six eyes technique.”

Toji frowns. The longer he’s here, the less he understands why he’s been called. “Get to the point.”

“It’s been years since you’ve left, Toji, but you surely can’t forget one of the most prolific battles of our family history. The ten shadows shaman versus the limitless many - eyed spirit.”

“Spare me the lecture, old man.”

“We want you to verify the rumor.” Seeing Toji pause, his uncle doesn’t need to wait for him to ask ‘why me?’ before continuing. “Your lack of cursed energy means that if it’s true, you’d be able to get in easily without being noticed. Since the birth of this boy, the family has been in utter seclusion. It’s almost as though they’re trying to hide him from the world.”

For a moment, Toji is silent. But slowly, he chuckles. The chuckle builds until it’s a booming laugh, bordering on a cackle.

“Is this funny to y ------”

“Oh, this is rich! A little kid has you all shitting yourselves, is that it? What’ll happen if the rumors are true? Will you all go sick with grief because you don’t have anyone with the ten shadows ability? Is that it? Are you sure you want to know, old man? After all, if it’s true, then your prolific battle story means dog shit. Unless … you’re asking me to off the kid? Because if that’s the case, I won’t do it. Not because it’s a kid, but because watching a primary schooler ruin your entire dynasty just by being alive is too funny to let pass by.”

Clear irritation is written across his uncle’s expression, but he forgoes an argument. “No one is asking you to kill anyone. We are confident the perfection this family produces is enough to rival one person. The Gojo clan can’t be rebuilt on the shoulders of a single man.”

“------ But?”

“But, that hasn’t stopped them from trying. They’ve managed to weasel their way back into the upper ranks based off of these rumors alone. If they’re a threat to our own influence, we must know.”

Toji waves his hand dismissively. “I don’t care about any of that. How much are you offering?”

“Five million yen.”

“I want twenty.”

“And yet you’ll only get ten.”

Toji pauses. Ten million yen. He would have walked with the five, but to give him this much … they really were uneasy about this, weren’t they? It didn’t matter. These politics didn’t matter to him; it was a job, and it paid well. With ten million yen, he’d never have to sleep at that dingy apartment in Kabukicho again. “...Deal.”

This all brought him back to the beginning point: being caught for the first time. Sneaking into the estate was so easy it was almost comical, and dressed properly, he was easily believed to be a servant himself. The Gojo estate was different from the Zen’in estate. The Zen’in clan was big, lively compared to this place, where he could hear a pebble being kicked across the gravel he walked upon. This place was a graveyard. If the Zen’in estate was like a palace of bones, the Gojo estate was like the temple of a god that had died centuries ago. Big, but brittle. Quiet. Prayed to only by the wind that passed through it, as if out of pity, echoing the hollowness of it all.

But it would seem that god had returned at long last.

He made sure to keep a safe distance behind the boy; he was followed by two men on either side of him at all times, who Toji deduced to be bodyguards. If that was the case, he could only assume the rumors were indeed true. Why else would a child need to be guarded in his own home? As he walks behind him, Toji feels something unpleasant. Pity is too noble a word; but it was like gazing upon a lovely bird in a zoo. Did it know that it was captive, or was it content with the magnificent cage it lived in?

This kid is going to be one hell of a puppet, he thinks.

It is at that moment that the boy stops walking, then turns and looks at him. There’s no mistaking it. His eyes lock with Toji’s, and Toji halts in his tracks. It’s not like him to stop like that, but his body freezes of its own accord. Fighting, fucking, food, fortune. He’d always believed those were the four things that motivated the average man, but he forgot the last motive; maybe because he didn’t remember the last time he felt it, if he’d ever felt it at all before this moment.

Fear.

The boy’s face is pale and listless, nothing like that of a child. His hair and eyelashes are bone - white, and his eyes, large and owl - like, are a crystal clear blue that shimmers in a manner that makes it seem as though his irises swirl, like pools of fate. Toji shouldn’t be able to see that from here, but for some reason distance doesn’t seem to matter between them. He is several feet away from the child, but he sees him as though he’s inches in front of his nose. Curse … sorcerer … those words didn’t suit this boy at all.

This child is a demon.

The child doesn’t blink. The guards beside him seem to keep walking, but the boy also never seems to move from his place. Did he stop time? Did he pull Toji into another dimension entirely? The boy gazes at him with neither curiosity nor contempt; he simply looks at him, looks through him, and Toji feels as though his soul is being stripped bare. There’s no doubt. This boy knows everything; Toji wasn’t a paranoid man in the slightest, but he felt as though this child had known about it all ------ the zen’in’s, the exchange, the ten million yen, the rumors and the eyes on him, and the task to verify it all.

Well?, his eyes seemed to say. Have you seen enough? You have someone waiting for you. Go and tell them.

Toji would never forget that boy again.

He’d never been caught before.

As the knife is pulled from his flesh, Satoru feels the strange, unfamiliar sensation of being unable to support himself enough to stand. Is this what weakness felt like? He falls to the floor, finding himself incapable of processing that this attack even happened in the first place. He watches his blood pool around him ------ strangely enough, he feels no pain. As his vision goes dark, he knows the truth; the shock is preventing him from feeling a thing. Maybe he wasn’t as untouchable as he thought. “Su …” The name is not even half spoken before he falls silent.

He must be dead.

He stands in an expanse that extends forever, an endless void of vantablack that is maddening to look at. Didn’t people get a rush of endorphins before they died? Why, then, did he see a past that only made him miserable? He watches his life flash before his eyes; he sees his own birth. He sees the countless days he spent in his family estate, learning mathematical theory and physical nonsense all because they hoped he would awaken this latent infinity within him. He sees his arrival to Tokyo tech ------ his first time away from the prying eyes of his family. His first time meeting kids who weren’t hand selected to be his friends. The thrilling sensation of being disliked, being a delinquent. Breaking rules and laughing from his chest. It was a fun way to end things, he thought. I just wish I’d gotten to have a lot more of it.

He’s shown the moment of his demise, and Satoru grimaces. Ugh, how uncool. He looks like a deer with its throat in the maw of the wolf; helpless, surprised a second too late. He sees the horror in Suguru’s expression, and he feels just a tinge of guilt. The strongest duo’s broken up. Sorry I couldn’t stay and help you in the end.

He wants to look away ------ really, who wanted to watch themselves die twice? ------ but just as he thinks to, Satoru’s eyes stop on the face of the man who killed him. Why does he look familiar? He looks at his life laid before him, and watches a bright white string extend from this image and go back, back, back into a very peculiar day in his childhood. He sees himself, six years old, turning and locking eyes with him.

No. Not him. This man.

He met him before.

Great, he thought bitterly. So I was more perceptive when I was a first year.

But then, all of the images hit him at once. They condense and slam him with such force that Satoru feels pain all over his body, like the wind has been knocked out of him. He’s drowning in this knowledge ------ this infinity. Maybe that means in the physical world, his lungs are taking their last shallow breaths. The images continue to condense until they make a small orb; the single source of light in this place. Slowly, the orb opens and reveals an iris that reflects his own: too blue to be human, dimly shimmering in a way that makes them seem like a flowing spring. Satoru feels his own gaze turned upon him. His own voice echoes in his ears. Get up, it says. Or are you really that weak? If you can’t get up, you were never strong. You deserve to die here. Satoru’s hand extends towards the orb.

Get up, dickhead.

Satoru wakes up with a gasp, bolting upright with a shock that could wake the dead. And hadn’t it? No … he looks down at himself, and sees the still - warm blood staining his shirt. Satoru realizes in that moment, he never died at all.

Gojo Satoru had touched infinity for the first time.

He stills himself and thinks. Or, more accurately, perceives. He allows those six eyes to see for him. He’d forgotten that so much of his power worked without his effort, if he let it. Riko is dead. Suguru is alive. He’s still bleeding from his leg. And Toji is …

The rest is a blur.

“Yo. Long time no see.” It’s all he can say, when he’s intercepted Toji. Why is he here? The job is done. They failed. There’s no reason for Satoru to come here.

Ah, that was a lie. He was here to kill Toji. Infinity … he’d touched it and seen it; he’d be the strongest, now. No more goofing off, no more avoiding his own holiness. But the thing about being a god is that gods can’t be killed. And if there was someone who could kill him, that person had to fight him. Yes, that would be his true trial of divinity; he and Toji would fight here and now until one of them died, and whoever left standing would be the one truly bound to heaven.

The shock on Toji’s face doesn’t matter to him at all. ... Are you serious?, he says, but Satoru hears it like a dull echo. He’s barely listening to him.

Toji is weak, after all. And he hates weak people.

The shock is enough to make Satoru giddy, however, so he grins and pushes his hair up to show him the healed wound to his head. “Oh, yeah. I’m alive and well.” His eyes are owl - like and large again, though they don’t shimmer like quiet pools. They churn like a riptide, and they focus on Toji with malicious intent.

“A reverse technique,” Toji breathes, more to himself than to anyone else.

“Correct!” Satoru chirps. “I gave up on fighting back when you crushed my throat. I poured my all into perfecting this technique. Cursed energy uses negative energy. It can fortify the body, but it can’t cause regeneration. That’s why it’s necessary to multiply it with more negative energy to create the positive. That’s the reverse technique!” He laughs and his grin widens, and he can tell his elation is too much for Toji to understand. But it can’t be helped ------ this isn’t about Toji. He’s giddy because all along, the secret to reverse technique was math. Simple math, whereas Satoru had mastered complex number theory ages ago. All this time, the ability’s secret had simply flown over his head. If he had known it was just the application of a basic mathematical principle, he could have used reverse technique ten years ago. “The theory is easy enough, but I couldn’t do it at all ... until now. The only person I know who could do it can’t explain for shit, either. But I finally got it when I was on my deathbed … the core of cursed energy.”

Satoru grins and sighs euphorically before continuing on. “You lost because you didn’t cut off my head, and because you didn’t use a cursed tool when you stabbed me in the head.” Doesn’t Toji understand how funny that is?

Apparently not. Toji’s eyes flash all of a sudden. “Lost?” He says, pulling a cursed blade from the throat of his worm of an accessory. “The fight has just begun.”

“------ Huuuuuuuuuuuh?! Ah, yeah, I guess so!” Satoru realizes he’s right; he’d already seen the end of this in infinity, but he supposed he couldn’t say it happened until it did, right? He was getting ahead of himself. It’s not like Toji could see the future. He starts to laugh. “I guess you’re right!”

Toji gives him no time to even finish his sentence. He’s a real warrior, Satoru will give him that. He flies at him with the same beast - like grin from before, only this one is different. They both fight with the full intent to kill, and it’s not a matter of work. It’s a battle for the crown; one that Toji was for better or worse proud to have, and not willing to give up easily. Good. Toji understands.

He slashes at Satoru with terrifying force, but he has evolved since their last fight. The once devastating prowess of the sorcerer - killer is little more than a mild inconvenience to him, now. By the time Toji’s slash reaches the end of its arc, Satoru is in the sky above him, and even more terrifying than when he gave him that maddening smile, he looks upon him with a wide - eyed, barely perceptible grin. Though he’d already reached a new height, it would seem he was evolving again, right before Toji’s eyes. He was fortunate to witness it.

The positive energy that is born from the reverse technique … that energy is channeled into the infinity technique I’ve carved in myself. He understands, now. Reverse rotation technique.

“Red.”

It repels Toji back hundreds of feet, through a building and into the side of the concrete.

One: “The power to stop.” The neutral infinity jutsu. Up until this point, an ability that required vigilance and effort, and why he’d fallen to Toji.

Two: “The power to attract.” The reinforced infinity jujutsu, “blue”.

Three: “The power to repel.” The reverse jujutsu, “red”.

Satoru watches him attach his blade to a chain and create a vortex with it. Toji believes that he can fight this. And why wouldn’t he? Satoru had the power to stop from the start, and Toji circumvented it. The power to attract, he could negate either from afar with the spear, or he could outrun it. The power to repel could be blocked with the spear, so long as he got the timing right.

But Satoru still appears on the rooftop with the same peaceful grin from before, appearing madder than ever. He knows all of Toji’s thoughts already. He knows his heart. He knows that unease is slowly settling into his foe, but that despite that, Toji believes he still has a chance.

“No,” Toji tells himself. “It’ll work.” Satoru knew that Toji would say that. “------ I’ll kill you!”

Satoru knew he’d say that, too.

Time seems to go still, for a moment. Satoru reigns himself in, a sobering clarity coming forward in the midst of it all; he would not be a foolish god, after all.

I’m really sorry, Amanai, he thinks. I’m not angry on your behalf. I don’t hate anyone. All I’m feeling right now … Is the pleasantness of this world.

Satoru grins again, and extends his hands forward. This would be the final blow. “Throughout the heavens and earth, I alone am the honored one.”

Toji whips the bladed chain at Satoru, but it’s less effective than flailing a cotton rope at him, at this point. You don’t understand what’s going to happen yet, he thinks. That’s okay. I saw it in the void. You’re going to die here, Toji. Thank you for sending me into myself. I understand everything, now.

The good thing about jujutsu techniques that have been passed down over generations is that the instructions on their usage are clarified by the predecessors. The bad thing is that the information about the technique can be leaked much more easily.

You’re from one of the three great clans … the Zen’in clan, am I right? Satoru recalls the day he met Toji, all those years ago. The man who came to see him for ten million yen. How could he forget? He’d seen infinity before.

You know about “blue” and “red” … and everything about my infinity, I’ll bet, Satoru thinks. But this … even among the Gojo clan … only a select few know about. When the infinity collides with the forward and reverse rotation techniques … this is born. The expulsion of imaginary mass …

And I’m using it to kill you. You should be honored, Toji.

“Imaginary Technique: Purple.”

It is spoken like a final rite; like the decree to end all decrees. The opposing forces converge and destroy everything in their path … Toji, and anything unlucky enough to be behind him.

Satoru fixes that impenetrable gaze on him again. That soul stripping, all - knowing gaze. “I don’t wanna work for free.” ------ you’d usually just have said that and ran away. But the person in front of you is a user of the infinity jutsu, who probably just became the strongest shaman of this generation. You wanted to deny it. To go against it. Against the Zen’in clan that denied you, against the apex of the jujutsu world. In order to reaffirm your identity … you warped your usual self.

You already lost at that point.

“I thought I had discarded that pride …” Toji breaks the silence for them, finishing the thought that Satoru had heard from the depths of Toji’s soul.

Satoru heard every thought leading up to that declaration, but he feels strangely peaceful in the moment. He’d made this prophecy come true; Gojo Satoru emerged victorious, conquering death and the god - killer himself. There would be a new era from now on; for better or for worse, Satoru would be the head of it. “... Do you have any last words?”

“ … Nah.” The look on Toji’s face says he knows that Satoru’s seen everything. But, just in case … “In two or three years, my kid will get sold to the Zen’in clan.” Why was he telling him that? Maybe because he was understanding that if anyone could fuck up the natural order of things, it wasn’t him at all. It has always been this kid. Maybe it was because, in his final moments, he realized that he’d left behind nothing, and given his blessing to the very place that had sculpted his demise. Maybe it was the “regret” those damn shamans never shut up about. Whatever it was, Toji couldn’t bring himself to beg, even on Megumi’s behalf. “... Do whatever you want.”

Before the light left Toji’s eyes, Satoru watched something else die first. What broke then … was the heart. What, did he think he would go and right his wrongs? That he would protect his kid? It seemed his six eyes hadn’t anticipated him doing that. Honestly, what was Toji thinking? It was too late to ask that now, but Satoru only knew one thing for certain.

Satoru would never forget this man again.

#* GOJO » study.#* HOWL » saved.#i have to give u a tag now.#guroshi #* GOJO » rel : guroshi.

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atariince · 5 years ago

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What do you think would have happened if Fingolfin had arrived un Hithlum and found his brother still living?

Hi and thank you for your very interesting question! I assume it is for the mun, but if it was for the muse, feel free to ask again – in any case here are the mun’s long considerations on that subject (enjoy), based on what we know of the characters, the situation, and of course on my headcanons.

[Usual disclaimer: Blahblah those assumptions are based on my reading of the texts, my interpretation and my headcanons - therefore it’s totally okay to disagree (and I’d love to have your opinion), just don’t be a dick about it blahblah]

So what do we know? What does the published Silmarillion tell us about Fingolfin at that point?

First of all, at the end of chapter 9 “The flight of the Noldor”, we learn about Fingolfin’s (legitimate) “bitterness”, but also that the main motive behind his decision to cross the Helcaraxë is precisely this bitterness against Fëanor:

“Then Fingolfin seeing that Fëanor had left him to perish in Araman or return in shame to Valinor was filled with bitterness; but he desired now as ever before to come by some way to Middle-earth and meet Fëanor again.”

Now the question would be : Why? What exactly does he have to say to Fëanor? What would he do to him? Fight a duel? Kill him in cold blood? Yell at him? Or does Fingolfin just want to prove his half-brother that he and his people would not surrender so easily? That he and his people are stronger, nobler and much more resistant than Fëanor might have thought? (when you think of the pride of the Noldorin princes that would make real sense, tbh).

And yet.

What is the first thing Fingolfin did when he set foot upon Middle-earth?

He marched on fucking Angband.

When you come to think about it, it is quite surprising, right? He crossed the Ice to meet Fëanor, but although he doesn’t know yet that Fëanor’s dead (unless he met some Sindar before he reached Mithrim – aaaaaaaaand I’ll come back to that bit later), he first decides to knock on Morgoth’s gates. I did find it surprising for quite a long time. But, now I think I’ve come to understand it; Let’s return to this dear Noldorin pride, shall we? Fingolfin and his people have just accomplished a deed unprecedented in terms of resistance, survival, strength and determination. They’re to be admired. And Fingolfin must know it. How could he not acknowledge their own courage, how could he not be proud of their accomplishment?

And how do you think he would feel about the idea of showing up in front of Fëanor crowned not only with that exceptional accomplishment in the Helcaraxë… but also with the Silmarils?

Doesn’t it sound like a good way to avenge himself and his people?

It does make sense if he actually wanted to prove Fëanor that “Loook, I’m so much worthier than you’ll ever be. You might have left us to die, but in the end we found a way, and we didn’t only survive, we also kicked Morgoth’s ass and recovered your stones. Suck my entire cock. bitch.” Well maybe he wouldn’t say it like this, but you see what I mean. Honestly, that’s just one of the ways to analyse his motives, and do you know what makes me think that’s part of his initial plan? This:

“Fingolfin unfurled his blue and silver banners and blew his horns (…) and the Elves smote upon the gates of Angband, and the challenge of their trumpets shook the towers of Thangorodrim.”

Obviously, it’s not like they try to pass quietly through the lands. Obviously they’re not betting on a surprise attack; Fingolfin and his people want to be heard, they want to be seen and acknowledged, they’re showing up as fuck and I do believe that they don’t simply want to challenge and impress Morgoth; the challenge and the impressive display is also a warning (?) for the Fëanorians. (Did it work? Spoilers: Pretty much.)

But Fingolfin eventually withdraws and goes to Mithrim because “he had heard tidings that there he should find the sons of Fëanor”…

[in “The Grey Annals“ (The War of Jewels) Fingolfin learns about Fëanor’s death when he meets his sons in Mithrim. Nevermind.]

So, according to the Silm, when he marched on Angband he already knew Fëanor was dead. maybe that’s why he didn’t instantly try to find his nephews, and walked to Angband instead. Maybe not. Maybe the information about Fëanor’s demise increased his bitterness because:

1. His half brother died. I mean yes he thinks Fëanor’s a dick but STILL.

2. Morgoth’s troops must be freaking powerful if they managed to kill Fëanor - “Must see!”

3. “Who the fuck am I going to yell at if Fëanor is dead?”

So instead of drowning into his bitterness, he attacks. Not the Fëanorians, but Melkor. Best way to express your rightful anger, right? And of course, it’s also a strategic move: he needs to see by himself and test the defence of Angband.

In any case, he was prepared to deal with the sons of Fëanor since According to the Silmarillion, he didn’t learn about Fëanor’s death the moment he met Maglor, but long before. And that point doesn’t invalidate what I said: Since “Fingolfin held the sons the accomplices of their father”, they can also suck his entire cock. And it would still have been AWESOMe to show up with the Silmarils in one hand and Morgoth’s head in the other. YES. Even if Fëanor isn’t here to see it. It’s not as fun but it’s still fun. bitch.

Aaaaand since he judged the sons “the accomplices of their father” I’m pretty sure he dealt with them more or less like he would have dealt with Fëanor. Therefore, with Fëanor alive, the situation at this point would have been pretty much the same ON FINGOLFIN’S SIDE, and probably his followers; “no love was there in the hearts of those that followed Fingolfin for the House of Fëanor”-> Fëanor, the sons, their people… I believe the presence of Fëanor in Mithrim wouldn’t have changed much of their reaction at this point.

But Fëanor’s reaction to his half-brother showing up would have probably led to a very interesting and tragic situation… which I can but try to imagine.

Obviously, when Fingolfin marched forth against Angband with his trumpets and banners, the Fëanorians must have been quite impressed, completely dumbfounded and relatively horrified. That was something they had never expected. I’m certain Fëanor wouldn’t have been less impressed. And quite honestly, I also think he would have been very much admiring. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if Fëanor would have reconsidered his judgement and came up with much more respect for Fingolfin and his people (“maybe he’s not that useless after all.”) (I’m exaggerating, yes. But you get it.)

On the other hand, the presence of Fëanor in Mithrim wouldn’t have helped alleviate the tensions between the hosts. We know that “many of Fëanor’s people indeed repented of the burning at Losgar and were filled with amazement at the valour that had brought the friends whom they had abandoned over the Ice of the North”. Would they openly repent with Fëanor around? I’m not so sure. Moreover, “they would have welcomed them [Fingolfin’s people], but they dared not, for shame”. With Fëanor alive, it is not only shame which would have hindered them. As for Fëanor himself, if he repented (which he probably did, somehow. Maybe.), shame and pride and fear of treachery and his claim of the crown would have mingled into something pretty ugly and I’m fairly certain that he wouldn’t have even accepted to withdraw to the other side of the lake. Which would have obviously increased the tensions. Because remember: it’s not only about Fëanor and Fingolfin, but also about their respective followers… which were, well, numerous. And angry. And bitter.

Now, if you ask me: would Fingolfin have killed Fëanor? Attacked his people? I think not. Because if that was his plan he would have attacked the Fëanorians no matter what. And he would have done it with Fëanor dead. But he didn’t. He gave them a chance to repent and to make things better.

But I believe that if Fëanor had been alive, the situation would have eventually escalated into an actual strife, if not war, but only after a moment, an accumulation of tensions. Little by little. Fingolfin would have done the exact same things, yes, but I doubt Fëanor would have had his sons’ reactions as they are depicted in the canon. Not only because Fëanor is Fëanor, but also because of the emotional state of the Fëanorians: in the canon, at this point, the Fëanorians are not only outnumbered, they’re also mourning. Their father is dead. Their brother, if he’s not dead, is being tortured. They’re not in a psychological position to challenge Fingolfin’s host. But with Fëanor alive (and Maedhros still with them), this very situation would have been different precisely because they would have felt stronger. More hopeful, somehow.

Now we must also keep in mind the intradiegetic bias ; Fingolfin is a revered king and most often he’s portrayed as the “good guy” in comparison to Fëanor who is the son of Finwë always associated with wrath. Therefore, the elven chroniclers would not portray Fingolfin as wrathful, if only for a question of relevant narratives rules (one character = one main personality trait -> I oversimplify the thing, but you see my point, right?). What I’m trying to say is that Fingolfin will always be portrayed as noble. We ought to see him as wise, and even when dealing with the worst (i.e. the face to face combat with Morgoth) he must not be depicted like his wrathful half-brother (check the difference of treatment between the last fight of Fëanor and that of Fingolfin and you’ll see my point). And when you have that in mind, you can question most of the elements I’ve expressed so far.

Yup. That’s what unreliable narrations do. I love them.

Actually I do believe that there might have been some use of euphemisms in the depiction of the situation in the Quenta Silmarillion as we know it, and you just have to look at some older drafts to detect some hints; In The Grey Annals, it is not a peril of “strife” between the princes, but of ”war”, a semantic difference which is relevant, if you want my opinion… In the pre-LOTR Quenta Silmarillion, not only “there was little love between those that followed Fingolfin and the house ofFëanor”, but here again “their hearts were filled with bitterness”. The same bitterness that led Fingolfin through the Helcaraxë precisely to find Fëanor…? Maybe. And you know bitterness is a double-edged motive, right?

Besides, if the main reason Fingolfin crossed the Grinding Ice was to find Fëanor, you can be sure that the feud around the lake doesn’t only rely on bitterness. There must be anger, dismay, wrath and a little wish for revenge. And honestly, if it took the rescue of Maedhros + the surrender of the crown by the Fëanorians (that is a complete humiliation) + the gift of their best horses to assuage the feud, then the latter must have been driven by something much heavier, much more dreadful than bitterness. It is not simply a political disagreement, they left them to FUCKING DIE. So thank you for the noble portrait of Fingolfin, but the guy must have felt much more revengeful than the narrator wants us to believe (and honestly, Fingolfin is probably one of the most interesting character to look at through the perspective of narrative bias).

But those are pure assumptions and I wouldn’t base my arguments on that… I just believe it is important to keep it mind.

Another element that is essential (and that will be my last point), is that this episode exists from the very first draft of the Silmarillion (see the “Earliest Silmarillion” in The Shaping of Middle-earth, in which the main difference is that Fingolfin doesn’t march on Angrand after his arrival and goes directly to meet the House of Fëanor). This early existence implies that Fëanor’s death is crucial for the unfolding of the story, and it is crucial for it to happen at this point of the timeline – and when you come to think about it, it makes sense ; if Fëanor doesn’t die, Maedhros would have hardly been taken by Morgoth, so no rescue by Fingon, which is by essence, the tool that healed the feud between the two Noldorin hosts. Without Fingon’s rescue of Maedhros, you can be pretty sure the “peril of strife between the hosts” would have ended in an actual strife, with or without Fëanor - but with Fëanor, Maedhros would haven’t been captured, sooooooo…. No rescue, no peace. QED

After all, don’t forget that “Morgoth arose from thought, and seeing the division of his foes he laughed” and the old pre-LOTR Quenta Silmarillion reminds us that “they achieved nothing” while the feud lasted, although Melkor was hesitating and thus was vulnerable… can you imagine the rest of the story if the Noldor couldn’t have put their bitterness and resentment aside to cooperate?

Basically:

Fëanor survives -> no ambush -> no capture of Maedhros -> no rescue -> no healing of the feud -> no cooperation between the Noldorin princes -> no agreement as to who would be the king -> more tensions (war?) -> victory of Morgoth through the Noldors’ own incapacity to work together…

#fingolfin #feanor #silmarillion meta #silmarillion #headcanons #meta #ooc #Anonymous

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melissatreglia · 5 years ago

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First Date

(After waaaaay too damn long, I managed to edit @southerndragontamer‘s and my first-ever roleplaying session into a proper fic for ease of reading. Back in December 23, 2017, Dark and Grace went on their first date at a coffee shop. Be warned: you’re gonna lose a filling or two on this sweetness. :D )

Dark waited patiently at a wrought-iron table outside the charming little café for Grace to arrive. His aura was pulled in so as to not draw unwanted attention to Himself… or potentially cause panic among the people drifting in and out of the cozy establishment.

It was an unseasonably warm day for late December, and there was no chilly breezes to cut through the balmy air. In sharp contrast, Annie Lennox’s voice drifted over from the speakers inside the shop, and her pre-recorded tune was a sweet melody about building snowmen and walking in a winter wonderland.

To anyone watching, He looked like an ordinary – if handsome and rather well-heeled – young man expecting His date to arrive at any moment.

He absently brushed imaginary lint off the shoulder of His light woolen jacket, nodding in thanks to the waitress as she refilled His coffee mug. He did a quick inventory to make sure that not a single thread was out of place on His business casual suit. He then began to tap His fingers lightly against the container, stopping when He realized He was fidgeting.

Why was He getting restless? There was no rationale whatsoever for this bout of nerves. She’s just a girl, after all, He reasoned to Himself with cold logic. Only one of billions of humans on this planet.

He also knew that, in addition to the public setting, that Melissa and Ulysses were both already here somewhere. He couldn’t see where they were hiding precisely, but He could definitely sense their presence nonetheless. No doubt in an effort to protect their friend, because they suspected ill of Him.

He could scarcely blame them. It wasn’t like He’d given cause for them to think otherwise.

But He had no desire to harm this one. She had appealed to Him from the first, her quiet and soft nature a balm. And her blushes were quite charming, to say the least.

His gaze continued to scan the crowd, anticipating Grace’s arrival. He was finally gratified to see her walking down the street, sneakers thudding softly against the pavement. He saw her take a deep breath, shoving her trembling hands into her pockets. When she looked up from watching her own feet on the ground and her eyes met His, her breath caught in her throat as their eyes met. A lovely pink blush coloured along her face, but she closed the distance between them as He rose to His feet.

The smile on her face warmed His cold heart. "Hello again, Sir," she said, her voice soft and shy. The blush deepened noticeably when He took her hand and kissed the back of it in a chivalrous manner.

A smile spread on His face, mirroring hers. "Hello, Grace. You look lovely this evening." His voice lacked the echo and white noise, but was still fairly deep with His signature coolly polite tone. “How have you been faring since we last spoke?”

“Th-Thank You Sir, you look handsome as well. I’ve been well, getting ready for the holidays.” She sighed tiredly, pushing her glasses up her nose. “And dealing with an unruly family member along with that...”

He pulled out her chair for her, silently entreating her to sit with Him. She took the offered seat, smiling in gratitude for the kind gesture.

“Ah, yes. Family can be difficult from time to time,” He replied, as He wandered back to His seat across from her. “But they are still family, nonetheless.”

Grace nodded in agreement, adding, “That reminds me of a quote from the Disney film 'Lilo and Stitch': Ohana means family. Family means no one gets left behind or forgotten.” She then giggled. "And I agree. Family is family, even if they are difficult."

Amused by her response, He gave a low chuckle. “I’m afraid I have never seen that film, but I can appreciate the sentiment."

Dark signaled to the waitress, who came over to their table for Grace's order. Grace tucked a long lock of her brunette hair behind her ear, looking up at Dark with a hesitant expression. “I’ve never been here before, Sir. What would You recommend?”

“The coffee is really quite excellent, as are the croissants.” He took a judicious sip from His own hot beverage.

Grace smiled and laughed teasingly. "I'll take your word on it, Sir." She then turned to the waitress. "I'll just have a glass of water and a croissant, please ma'am." When the waitress left, Grace took a deep breath to study an obvious bout of nerves. "Dark, there's... there's something important I should tell You..."

He placed His mug neatly on the table and folded His hands together. “And what would that be, My dear?”

There was nothing to suggest anything beyond a mild curiosity in His demeanour, but she nonetheless recognized the hidden bite in that question. She swallowed and took another deep breath, meeting His deep, dark eyes.

“Dark, Sir... Do You remember the rescue operation in October that was launched for Miss Melissa, when she was Your... ah, house guest?”

“Indeed. I remember everything.” He considered her for a long, silent moment that was heavy with unspoken meaning. “You were involved in that, weren’t you?”

She nodded. "Yes, Sir. I was." She slowly took her glasses off, ignoring as best she could how everything around the table blurred without them, and set them on the table. She then met His gaze again, letting Him see the emotions in her eyes without the thin glass shield. "I'm sorry, Sir, but I was the one who provided the consecrated acid. I'm not ashamed of it, because I did it to protect Melissa. She's my friend and I'd do it again, if I had to, even though it probably wouldn't work again. I also suggested using cold iron against You."

“I see.”

For a split second, a feeling of pressure and electricity pervaded the air, as if lightning were about to strike. The hairs on her arms and neck stood up as His power uncoiled around them with His anger. But reality instantly snapped back on itself so quickly, it was almost as if it never happened.

He closed His eyes for a brief moment, before opening them again to gaze at her calmly. “Forgive me,” He said in a carefully neutral tone for the fright it may have caused her. “I am sure your only concern was for the welfare of your friend. That is quite commendable, even noble.”

She released a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding. She fumbled for her glasses, her hands shaking as she put them back on. Giving herself a moment to calm her racing heart, she allowed herself a small smile.

“It's alright, sir. I understand. And I was very worried for Miss Melissa; that’s why I did it in the first place. I don't really like hurting anyone, even a Hellgod, without a good reason."

He nodded at this, His expression softening into the hint of a smile. “I know you are not a violent person by nature, dearest Grace. And I should only expect such a thing from a lady who bears the name of a prized virtue."

She blushed at the compliment, squeaking, “Th-Thank You, Sir.”

He briefly sipped from His drink again, then added with a smirk, "I’m quite certain I have done something deserving of such recompense in My long and, one might say, chequered existence. Purity is for the angels, after all, and I am far from that.”

She giggled. “No. You’re no angel, Sir. I can agree on that.” She worried at her lower lip, reaching up to tuck the disobedient lock of hair back once again. “Dark, I’ve got to be a bit blunt. Why did You remember me, Sir?"

He considered her question for a long moment, as He struggled to decipher His own feelings on the matter. For one moment, the silver-tongued demon was at a rare loss for words… but then inspiration came to Him. He had found in Himself part of a strange but beautiful truth.

“There’s nothing so captivating as meeting one’s opposite,” He finally said. “Two selves fuse together to become one whole, as if you are two different sides of the same coin. You are as close to an angel as I will ever find in this world, or any other. My only hope is that I am worthy of your affections.”

Grace's jaw dropped at His words, and she stared at Him in shock for a moment. "Dark, Sir... I... I think that last part is mixed up. I'm the one who should be saying that." Her face turned bright red, and she clapped a hand over her mouth.

He chuckled at this, a genuine sound of merriment. “Then we are at an impasse, My dear. If we both feel less than the other, perhaps we should agree that we are equally worthy and unworthy at the same time.”

"Sounds like a good idea, Sir." The heat in her blush wasn't fading, and she let out a tiny cough as the moment between them seemed to draw itself out. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, she perked up. "This is gonna sound odd, maybe. But, what do Anti and Meg like for dessert?"

He tilted His head, regarding her curiously, then gave a shrug of His broad shoulders. “Meg has a preference for ice cream, and Anti has a taste for Yorkshire pudding. I rather like them both together. Why do you ask?”

Grace gave a quick, awkward laugh and rubbed at the back of her neck sheepishly. "I just wanted to make the three of you a little something for Christmas. I'm planning to bake a little something, anyway, and I thought it'd be nice for all of you to have a treat for the season too. A gift, you know?"

He smiled slightly, adding in a mild tone, “What do you prefer for a treat?”

She grinned. "Like you, I have a fondness for chocolate."

“That is very thoughtful of you, dearest Grace, to think of the three of us during this time of year.” His gaze met hers again unerringly. “It has little significance for Me, of course, but it is still a special occasion for them.”

He reached across the table, open palm up in a silent entreaty to bridge the gap between them, if Grace so chose. Grace reached over, hand shaking slightly, to grasp His hand in her own much smaller one.

She gave Him a shy smile, and His responding glance was pleased as He grasped her hand gently, enveloping her fingers as if she were made of fine porcelain. Her hand was warmer than His, and He held onto that sensation. When their eyes met, her cheeks pinkened further but she didn’t look away.

“And it is good to be thought of fondly,” He added.

“You’re welcome, Dark. I figured you’d all like a little something… even if human food doesn’t really sustain You.”

“As I said,” and one of His fingers gently brushed against the pulse point of her wrist. Her pulse was racing, but not out of fear, and this pleased Him more than He was likely to admit. “You are very thoughtful.” More on impulse than plan, He reached up with His free hand, tucking the dark strand of her hair that had fallen forward back behind her ear.

She felt a little shiver at the contact, eyes widening in surprise at how intimate such a simple touch felt, before finally registering that He had stopped talking.

“Oh, I almost forgot. Would Meg be alright with some kind of baked treat? I don’t know how well I can make ice cream if this unseasonably warm weather keeps up.”

He smirked a little at this. “Well then, if you wish to have a back-up, Meg also enjoys strawberry shortcake.” But then His moment of humour died. “Unfortunately, I will not be able to spend very much time with you until after the New Year’s celebrations have passed. I hope you are amenable to this.”

“Y-yes, Sir. That’s perfectly alright. Can I pass the gifts through Melissa, so you all get them on Christmas? And, um... maybe give You one early?” That last bit slipped free unbidden, and she covered her mouth with her free hand. Her face was burning once more, and He chuckled gently at the bright pink in her face.

“An early gift? I must admit, I am intrigued.” He purred, charmed and delighted by her shyness. “What might that be, sweetest Grace?”

She lowered her hand and said softly, throat suddenly dry, “Umm… You’ll need to lean over for it, Dark. I can’t reach You from here… a-and close Your eyes? Please, Sir?”

He shrugged, and decided to humour her.

Taking a deep breath, she swallowed her nerves and leaned over the last bit of distance to reach Him. She whispered, “Merry early Christmas, Dark.”

She kissed His cheek, His skin cool to the touch of her lips. He smiled as He felt her lips brush against the stubble of His beard. When His eyes opened again, there was a hot longing behind the near-black irises. A moment later, she pulled back, fighting a silly grin.

“On second thought, I believe I can arrange for us to have an appointment with a sprig of mistletoe.” He reached up again, this time to lightly brush His fingertips along the soft curve of her jaw. “Would you like to spend a little time with Me on Christmas Day?”

She trembled slightly at the touch. “O-only if I don’t take up too much of Your time, Sir. I… I know You’re busy, and You have Meg and Anti to look after.”

“That I do,” He replied, deep voice a pleasantly soft rumble. “But, if you are willing to put up with them for one day, I suppose we can manage.”

“I don’t mind, Sir. I’d like to get to know them both better. Especially Meg. Anti, I know well enough from Jack’s channel. But Meg’s something of a mystery to me. I hope they won’t mind my presence, though. I’m human, after all.” This last was said with a little smile and a bit of a teasing tone, mischief seeming to glint in her eyes at that moment.

“They will be on their best behaviour with you. If they are not, they will reap the consequences.” He sighed. “Such is the price of parenting.”

“You have all my empathy, Sir. I’m not a parent, so I can’t relate. But I sympathize.”

Dark chuckled. “But it does seem I have monopolized your attentions this evening, and you no doubt need some rest and quiet before the festivities begin. Perhaps, I could walk you home?”

“I thought You said You’re not an angel, Dark.” She giggled. “You’re such a gentleman.”

“Haven’t you heard, My dear?” He added with a quiet laugh. “It is often told I’m a humourless ponce with a makeup fetish. Truly, such is the worst of creatures.”

She burst out with a peal of laughter at His self-effacing description. “I-I’ve never heard that one before, Sir.” She then quieted. “But yes, please. I’d like it if You walked me home. Thank You, Sir.”

He stood, offering His hand to her, an invitation to walk with Him. “Shall we?”

She smiled, sliding her hand into His and standing as well. She was no longer shaking, and she actually grinned up at Him. “We shall.”

The walk was quiet, the streets darkening with the encroaching night. Constellations danced above their heads, and the kindly moon lit the way where the streetlamps failed. He did not let go of her hand until they reached her doorstep, where He kissed the back of her hand a second time.

“Until Monday, dearest Grace. ‘Parting is such sweet sorrow.’“ There’s the vaguest hint of an echo, but He otherwise held Himself back.

She blushed at the courtly gesture, her voice a near-whisper. “Until Monday, Dark. ‘That I shall say good night till it be morrow.’” There was a brief moment of silent thought, before she added, “Sir, You don’t have to keep holding Your powers back. Especially if it hurts.”

He smirked. “Next time, I won’t. Good night, My Grace.”

“Good night, Dark,” she replied as she slipped into the door of her home.

He waited until she was safely in her dwelling before taking His leave. A creaking like an oak threatening to fall lingered in the empty street as He vanished.

Alone in the comfort of her own home, Grace slid back against the door and sighed. Oh my god, she thought as she slowed her breathing. I survived a date with the Devil. I kissed Him on the cheek, and now I’m going to see Him and His kids for Christmas! She gave a little giggle that verged near hysterics.

Nobody will ever believe this!

#markiplier fandom #darkiplier fandom #markiplier fanfiction #darkiplier fanfiction #darkiplier #author insert #dark x grace #christmas fic #edited from an rp #fan fiction #my writing #collaboration

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permets-tu-not-permettez-vous · 6 years ago

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Awake My Soul

Chapter Two: Mind on Fire

Enjolras clutched his messenger bag like it was a shield, his scuffed converse nervously tapping a rhythm he couldn’t name as he allowed himself to smoke one cigarette to calm himself down. He could see the tiny ballet studio from across the street - had stopped right across from it and found himself unable to cross the street and enter. He was a little early so he had ducked into a small corner shop and bought a cigarette with trembling fingers. The act of smoking calmed him immensely, releasing tension he didn’t even know he had. What Combeferre didn’t know wouldn’t kill him. Besides, he was going to throw the pack away first chance he got. It was his first day - he should get cut some slack for that.

Enjolras couldn’t even remember the last time he had done something different. It seemed that everything in his life had followed a pattern, almost always the same drill: play the piano and enthrall the audience. Whether it was a competition, a symphony, an audition - it was always the same process. But this time it was different. This time he would not be the only contender; he’d be working with dancers, notorious for being temperamental. He wondered what Combeferre had talked him into, not for the first or the last time. He finished his cigarette, and regretfully dropped the butt on the ground, crushing it with his heel. He took a deep breath, squared his shoulders and crossed the street, not allowing himself a moment of hesitation before opening the door with a confidence he did not feel.

He approached the receptionist and asked for directions. She was businesslike, professional, and did not treat Enjolras like a celebrity. He was relieved; it was refreshing to be treated as normal once more, a good reminder of how small the classical music scene was, even though it often brushed shoulders with ballet. He was directed to a small studio towards the back. He entered the mirrored room with a small and simple piano in the corner. A couple dancers were there warming up, various articles of clothing thrown on top of their tights, their bodies contorting into impossible positions. Enjolras hesitated in the doorway. A slight dancer’s eyes alighted on him and a smile immediately came to their face. They made their way over and stuck their hand out to shake Enjolras’. “Hi! I’m Jehan! You’re Enjolras?” Their voice had a pleasant musicality about it.

Enjolras nodded. “We spoke over the phone, I believe.”

Jehan smiled even more brightly and nodded even more enthusiastically. “Yes! I am so honored that you would work with us! I’ve been to a few of your performances and you are brilliant! You’re a little shorter than I expected.”

Enjolras huffed a laugh. “Are you the choreographer?”

Jehan made an extensive gesture with their arms. “Indeed I am. Make yourself at home. I don’t know if you need to warm up or anything or if you’ve already starting working on the pieces for the performance, but I was hoping you could play some of the pieces on the piano for a short warmup before we start.”

Enjolras nodded. This was business, familiar territory. “Of course I can.” Jehan nodded and excused himself, going over to a few dancers that were putting talc on their pointe shoes to convey some information them. Enjolras walked across the room towards the piano, feeling curious eyes on him. He dropped his bag near the piano and scanned the room but it seemed everyone was busy getting themselves ready for rehearsal. Curious. He could have sworn someone was watching him. He shook himself and returned to the matter at hand. The piano - it’s keys were slightly yellowed and chipped. A piano with character. Enjolras smiled, pleased, until his eyes fell on the stool. No cushion. Oh well, he thought to himself, he’d just bring one tomorrow.

He cracked his knuckles and sat down, running a few scales to warm up his hands before turning his attention to the sheet music before him. Jehan had picked some interesting music for warmups. He tapped out the tune of a few of the songs, nothing too difficult, but interesting enough to keep him occupied. He felt adequately prepared and sitting on a piano stool, albeit cushion-less, calmed him down. He was always at home in front of a piano. Pianos he could understand. Everything else that was happening - maybe not. While he ran through arpeggios mindlessly, he scanned the room again in order to better acclimatize himself with it. For the most part people were now ignoring him as more dancers entered and a conversational buzz entered the room. Enjolras saw the man he recognized as Courfeyrac, lithe frame accentuated by his springing copper curls. He was the center of attention, holding court of a cluster of dancers as he regaled them with some stage mishap or other. He recognized no one else. They were all young, incredibly fit, and in various states of dress and exercise. A cluster were stretching at the barre, others on the floor. A few were outside the small room, visible through the window at the water cooler, eating a last-minute snack or hydrating before their session, which would last several hours. In a corner several dancers were sewing their shoes, both old and new, making exasperated gestures over their minuscule stitches. One or two were practicing various moves in the middle lazily, marking choreography that only other dancers must have understood because to Enjolras it didn’t make much sense. It was certainly a different crowd from what he was used to.

Jehan cleared their throat, and Enjolras was surprised at how quickly the room went silent. Jehan welcomed everyone cheerily, and made a few remarks about Giselle, practice times, roles, and other business before introducing Enjolras, who just waved from behind the piano but made no move to give a speech of any sort. He was happy to remain out of the spotlight which was so often shoved on him. Jehan moved briskly into warmup, instructing them in various steps before rattling off the name of the piece to Enjolras, who dutifully played the piece, one eye on the music, and the other on the dancers. Jehan walked amongst them and gave slight corrections here and there, turning out a foot more, adjusting the position of an arm, straightening the back. It was in all honesty quite fascinating. Enjolras had never seen this side of ballet before, the warming up, the eccentric fashions, the quick and hurried instructions before each warm-up exercise. The barre was interesting, but what he really liked to watch was the center part of warming up, where they moved away from the barre and did various steps across the room, going two by two. He heard Jehan say various words that he vaguely associated with ballet - plie, pas de borre, jette, tombe, pirouette.

Enjolras found himself increasingly watching the dancers instead of his music, quickly finding a pattern to the music that allowed him to play it while only paying a little attention to the sheet music. It was like watching a flower bloom - the class started slowly, the dancers preparing their bodies for the beauty that was to come. As the moved through the class and away from the barre, their bodies became more expressive, their cheeks flushed, their jumps higher and more precise, becoming fully fledged dancing flowers in the center of the room. Enjolras liked ballet better this way, seeing the dancers’ faces etched with concentration, wiping sweat from their brows and stopping to stretch and perfect their form between pieces. This was the kind of ballet he could get behind - not the bite-sized perfection that was presented at all of the great performances. After seeing how much effort it took to go through all of the steps, Enjolras had much more respect for ballet dancers. In fact, he saw nothing that affirmed the conception that ballet dancers were all prima donnas and impossible to work with. He’s worked with other pianists more spoiled than this bunch, and pianists didn’t really have to sweat to perform.

After about an hour, Jehan transitioned into teaching the ballerinas the choreography that they had envisioned for Giselle. Here, Enjolras saw them divide into their respective roles. Enjolras had, of course, done his research. He had read a synopsis of the story of Giselle. It was about a girl, so named, who fell in love with a noble man in disguise named Albrecht, though the local game keeper Hilarion, who was in love with her, warned her not to fall in love with a stranger. When she discoveres that Albrecht was already betrothed to a noblewoman named Bathilde, she dies of heartbreak. In the second act, Giselle meets the Wilis, ghosts of virgins who died of heartache. They take their revenge by making unsuspecting young men dance to their deaths. The Wilis chase Hilarion until he drowns himself, but when try to make Giselle dance Albrecht to death, she instead aids him in making it to daybreak alive and in so doing, saves herself from becoming one the vengeful spirits. Enjolras had also listened to the score and watched a couple of Youtube videos of some of the more famous pieces. Enjolras was never underprepared; he made it his job to know things, especially when it came to the arts.

Jehan had mentioned that they wanted to do a fresh take on the ballet, and Enjolras was intrigued to see what it would look like. A girl named Eponine was Giselle, a slim and tall dark-haired beauty with an air of mystery, who would be perfect for the part. The noblewoman Bathilde was a girl named Cosette, who seemed the exact opposite of Eponine - short and cheery and soft where Eponine seemed to be edges. The nobleman was played by Courfeyrac, who played the part of a seductive and charming stranger all too well. Hilarion was named Grantaire, a man who was on the shorter side with a stocky build, an overly large wine-colored t-shirt draping itself over his frame, and expressively honey-colored eyes framed by shocks of raven curls. The others all played roles in the ensembles, as wisps, villagers, families, even animals - to Enjolras’ surprise.

Jehan had Enjolras play the first song in full, dancing throughout the room to show Eponine what her steps as Giselle would look like. Jehan’s steps were light and airy, their gestures expansive and their choreography was most certainly different than the videos that Enjolras had watched on Youtube. Where those videos tended to stick with traditional patterns and moves, with clean-cut lines and floating arms, Jehan’s choreography incorporated things that Enjolras had never seen before - less turn out, less pointe shoes, less pirouettes. Instead Jehan’s movements were natural, but in no way less impressive, contorting their body into various shapes that conveyed an array of emotions that Enjolras felt he hadn’t seen in ballet before. He had to admit that he was impressed - perhaps this hadn’t been a mistake after all.

After Jehan gave them the preview, followed by a polite applause and excited murmuring, Jehan began to instruct various dancers as to their positions and their movements on different counts. Counting in eights, he first showed Grantaire and Eponine their roles in the initial scene, before Courfeyrac’s entrance, directing other dancers who’re in the background as well. Enjolras didn’t have to play much at this point, so he just observed, carefully taking in this world that he now had a window into.

All too soon, rehearsal had wrapped up - three hours having flown by. They were only four eights into the first song, because Jehan had them run it over and over it again, needing to see how they all worked together so they could make both major and minor adjustments to the choreography now that they could see it clearly in front of them. The dancers wearily picked up their various accoutrements and headed towards the door in pairs of twos and threes, clearly tired. Enjolras kept his head down and collected his music, putting it into an order that made sense in his head.

“You are friends with Combeferre, right?” a voice startled Enjolras, and he almost dropped his entire stack of music, ruining all of the sorting he had mostly finished. Courfeyrac stood before the piano, bag slung over one shoulder, his curls decidedly more mussed after the three hours he had just spent dancing.

Enjolras smiled in spite of himself. “Yes, I am. I heard you two are close.”

A smile brightened Courfeyrac’s face. “Really? He said that?”

Enjolras laughed. “I don’t know if he said it, but he definitely implied it. He clearly respects the work you put into your dancing.”

Courfeyrac seemed to deflate slightly. “The work I put into my dancing? I guess that’s a start,” he said, more to himself than to Enjolras. Then he seemed to remember that Enjolras was still there, in the middle of a conversation that Courfeyrac had started. “Anyway, a couple of us are going out for celebratory drinks tonight. Come with? They’re on me. Any friend of Combeferre’s is a friend of mine.”

Enjolras found himself surprised at the ease in which he answered yes, the way that he already felt close to Courfeyrac even though he barely knew him. There was something so warm and open that endeared him to everyone, it seemed. Perhaps it was the freckles, Enjolras mused as he finished packing his bag, Courfeyrac still mindlessly chattering away about how he and Combeferre had met on the opening of Cinderella in Lyons.

Courfeyrac took him to a bar called the Musain, apparently a favorite among dancers. A raucous cheer erupted when Courfeyrac walked in, and for the first time, Enjolras felt that perhaps he should have declined the invitation. Maybe musicians and dancers didn’t mix well. They seemed to all know each other well, and he hoped he didn’t spend the evening as the odd one out. He attempted to push his nerves aside as he found a seat beside Courfeyrac, across from the dancer he recognized as Grantaire, who was closely in conference with Eponine.

“Let me introduce you to everyone,” Courfeyrac said, slinging his arm casually around the back of Enjolras’ chair - an oddly reassuring gesture to Enjolras despite the fact that physical touch wasn’t his go to. “You know me of course, from my illustrious dancing career. That’s Eponine, Grantaire, Jehan, Cosette, Feuilly, Bahorel, Musichetta, Joly, and Bahorel. You probably recognize Cosette, Eponine, and Grantaire from rehearsal. They have the lead roles with me, an honor for all of them. Musichetta is queen of the wisps, so she wasn’t at rehearsal today since we were doing Act I. She is lucky enough to be dating the company’s nutritionist, Joly, and the charming Bossuet, who works in props and scenery. Bahorel and Feuilly work in costuming. So there you have it. We are not only dancers, but we don’t discriminate in friendships. Though you will be the first musician in our motley crew. Convince Combeferre to join us?”

The entire table burst into protestations at various points that Courfeyrac had made, but Enjolras just laughed. “Jehan, I have to say that your choreography is absolutely fascinating. I’ve never seen ballet quite like that. Tell me a little more about how you envision the ballet going. How are you going to change the status quo?”

At this, the dancer Grantaire looked at him incredulously. “You mean you agreed to do this job without asking Jehan that question first? Aren’t you kind of a big deal? That’s all Courfeyrac has been reminding us of the last week.”

Enjolras felts cheeks go hot. “I do pretty well. But I needed a change of pace, so when Combeferre told me you were looking for a pianist, it seemed like a sign. It’s only for half a year at most depending on how well ticket sales do, so I figured I’d shoot my shot.”

Grantaire’s eyes, darkened in the lighting of the bar to the color of mahogany, scanned Enjolras, and he had the feeling he was being assessed. He never got to hear what Grantaire thought of him, the conclusions that he reached, if any, because Jehan enthusiastically launched into a feminist interpretation of the wisps - that they didn’t dance boys to death over resentment over their virginity or their broken hearts, but rather an anger at the patriarchal system that allowed men to take advantage of defenseless young girls, and how in the end, Giselle would not only learn to forgive, but also get to say her piece. Enjolras was enthralled - he felt the thrill of a new project coming on and found himself liking all of them, even Eponine and Grantaire, who seemed prickly and sarcastic but were also a brilliant pair. Enjolras wondered to himself if they were dating. He made a mental note to ask Courfeyrac later about some further group dynamics.

That night, as he was getting ready for bed, Enjolras found himself smiling at the end of the day, and realized that he couldn’t remember the last time he had smiled so much. God, Combeferre was going to be so smug. And yet, as Enjolras turned out the lights, he found that he didn’t care.

AO3 Link

#so guess who updated?#please come yell in my inbox #the third chapter is almost finished #I am on a fucking role #my writing #awake my soul #exr #enjoltaire #fanfiction #les amis #les mis #les miserables

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starswornoaths · 6 years ago

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On Names and the Ties that Bind

Early in their courtship, Aymeric and Serella have a...strange discussion on the topic of marriage.

Or: neither of them knows what they’re doing but they’re pretty sure this isn’t how the topic should be brought up.

(For timeline’s sake, this takes place only just after the Warriors of Darkness arc, but before everything with Baelsar’s Wall and the end of Heavensward)

There was always another letter to respond to, Aymeric thought to himself, eyeing the stack of letters that had just been delivered to his desk with about the same level of open contempt he’d typically reserved for an enemy on the battlefield. Though if he were to truly dwell on it, he hardly viewed either overly different from the other on his best days.

“Shame, really,” Serella commented, clucking her tongue. “You’d just finished that whole pile of documents, too.”

Aymeric spared her a sidelong glance, his expression softening. She gave him a sympathetic smile, her hands stilled in their tinkering with whatever contraption she had hauled from the Skysteel Manufactory this time.

“’Tis more bearable with you here.” He admitted, returning his attention to the newly acquired pile of envelopes and reaching for the first one.

“Fortunate for you, then, that I had no other plans today.” Serella gave a thoughtful hum, even as she went back to her fiddling.

“Fortunate indeed.” He agreed with a quiet chuckle, envelope opener cleanly slicing through the wax seal with practiced precision.

The clicking of her screwdriver working a gear into place became the only white noise in the room once more as he opened the folded letter. He let out a thoughtful hum as he read the header—he was faintly familiar with the house crest on the stationary, but what would they want with—

Reading barely two sentences in, and it became clear exactly what this was: a proposal to discuss marriage between himself and someone of the house.

Setting it to the side, he let out a huff of irritation and took to the second envelope—surely ‘twas the only one this time, he hoped beyond hope.

A second house, petitioning to meet with him and discuss— amongst other things, admittedly— a potential marriage arrangement. And though he noted sourly that at least this one deigned to acknowledge that he was currently ‘in the midst of a dalliance’ — a dalliance! The nerve! — as the letter worded it, they also found it perfectly acceptable to comment that it was, ‘hardly a detriment to his possible eligibility, as mistresses were a common and expected stipulation to a potential marriage.’

At that, Aymeric frowned deeply but opted not to comment on it. He set the second offer on top of the first and moved on to the next envelope.

He had never been more relieved to see a tax proposal—nor had he ever so enthusiastically signed one before then. Putting it in a fresh envelope and creating his own wax seal was an almost outright jovial experience, because it was not another marriage offer.

But the envelope after that one, unfortunately, was.

Without meaning to, Aymeric let out a noise of disgust as he added it to the others without more than a passing glance—though the words, ‘additional mistress’ did not escape his attention. Serella looked up at the noise, and he couldn’t help the minor moment of guilt he felt—she’d been working, he didn’t mean to interrupt her.

“Trouble?” Serella asked him with a tilt of her head.

“After a fashion.” Aymeric answered, leaning back in his chair. He pressed his fingers against his temple, hoping a migraine was not forthcoming despite the ache that had begun to present itself. “Trouble I had hoped would eventually stop.”

“Is it something I could help with?” She offered, lowering the device she had been working on, her hands stilling.

He considered—he certainly did not want to hide anything involved in this, as it would be foolish to; she had known of these thrice damned offers since before they had even considered one another friends, so it would likely not surprise her to know they still persisted. Rather than let it fester until something unnecessarily dramatic came about, talking on it now would be good, he decided— he could better understand her position on the matter.

“House of Lords giving you trouble?” She ventured when he did not provide a further explanation.

“In a sense.” He sighed and let his hand fall back upon the desk. “Forgive me, I do not intend to be vague,” he gestured to the pile of letters. “Ever these have vexed me, I am accustomed to it.”

“So...marriage proposals?” Serella asked after a moment of studying him, voice thick with sympathy.

“Kindling.” Aymeric answered darkly.

“Marriage proposals.” She affirmed to herself with a nod.

Truly, they were nothing new, not even to her; in the time she spent alongside him, even as naught more than acquaintances when she was newly come to Ishgard, he had received offers of marriage on a somewhat regular — if slow going — basis. With his new position as the Lord Speaker, however, those offers seemed to only increase as the weeks wore on, much to his chagrin.

“They would not bother me quite so much, were we not…” Aymeric cut himself off, pinching the bridge of his nose as he sucked a breath through his teeth. “Forgive me, I need not vent to you about this, of all things.”

“It bothers you.” Serella said, setting her work in her pack and turning her undivided attention to him. “So if you want to talk about it, then so do I.”

Lowering his hands into his lap, he looked at her, at the way she sat with her head tilted in interest, brow furrowed in concern, and felt whatever frustration he had leave his shoulders entirely. She cared, he had to firmly remind himself; in regards to companions— even courtships, the concept was one he still had to get used to outside of his immediate circle of subordinates.

“I know we have only scarcely begun—” his cheeks faintly flushed in spite of himself. “—courting.” She nodded, her lips tugging into a soft smile. “And ‘twas not as though I expected such letters to simply go away because I am now spoken for.” He gave her a small but genuine smile. “Rather happily, I should add.”

“Well, that part’s a relief, at least.” Serella breathed a laugh, though her concern still showed on her face. “But I’m guessing they haven’t let up.”

“They have not.” His frown returned. “I am unsure if I would be more upset if they did not acknowledge our relationship and merely continue on as they always have, but…” Her eyes watched the way his hand clenched his quill. “But that they insult you with these proposals—“

“Wait, wait,” Serella held a hand up. “How are they insulting me?” She did not seem angry. Merely…perplexed. “I’m not really involved in the whole thing.”

“Many of the offers I have so generously been given of late have acknowledged that I am currently with you,” he paused, clearly conflicted in going on.

“Ah,” She sighed as it all clicked into place. “So they’re offering marriage, with the understanding that I could still be your mistress.” When Aymeric looked up at her in surprise, she shrugged. “I get it, the offer is brazenly arrogant and gross, but that’s just,” she gestured vaguely with her hand. “A nobility thing. Doesn’t just happen in Ishgard.”

“You speak as though you have come across it often.”

“Not where I’ve been involved— that’s a bit of a first, I’ll admit,” Serella waved a hand dismissively. “But I’m commissioned for engagement rings an awful lot of the time. And I’ve gotten plenty of requests for, ‘can you add a third ring that’s less ornate than the other two so the concubine doesn’t feel left out’ types.” She mockingly pitched her voice higher to mimic the nobles she was commissioned by, pursing her lips in obvious displeasure. “And more often than not, they’d demand a refund because surprise! People don’t like being belittled—even less so when their actual lover is being belittled alongside them.”

“Forgive me,” Aymeric murmured sadly, eyes downcast. “I had never wanted you to be dis—“

“Dear one, I don’t give one fig what the nobility say about me— here, or elsewhere.” She stood and walked around to his side of the desk. She leaned the back of her thighs against it, smiling gently at him as she reached over and laid a hand atop his. “I’m just sorry they’re still hounding you. You clearly don’t want their advances.” Though he laced his fingers with hers still he could not quite ease the knot that had formed in his breast. “Something’s still troubling you.”

Ever the observant one, he noted with infinite fondness.

“I suppose.” He admitted, offering her a small, tired smile through a sidelong glance.

“Is it something I can help with?” She asked.

“Perhaps. I do wonder,” Aymeric paused, debating on if it would even help with the strange tangle of concern that had firmly lodged itself in his chest. “What do you think of marriage?” He wound up blurting out, his thoughts tangling the intent of his words. “Or rather, the idea of marriage, I should say.”

To her credit, she did not gawk at him, even if the surprised of the question was evident on her face.

“Given you’re not one for idle musings on such things,” Serella began slowly, her tone even. “I’m guessing you mean a marriage between you and I?”

Painfully aware that he had now well and truly stuck his foot in his mouth, he nodded. She mulled it over in her head for a moment, and he was suddenly anxious of her answer; would she have an expectation that he would not be comfortable meeting— or worse, would he find out that she was not interested in something long term with him? The thought of either being the case made his stomach twist unpleasantly.

“I mean, it’s entirely too early to seriously consider it.” She said after a moment, shaking her head.

“I agree.” He said, and let out a breath he hadn’t realized he had been holding, relieved that she felt as he did in that regard, at least. “I am merely curious on your perspective of it.”

“That’s fair,” She conceded with a nod. “Since we are discussing a possible marriage later,” she paused to mull it over, though after another moment she simply shrugged. “I admit, I find the idea nice, but ultimately unnecessary.”

“Unnecessary?” Aymeric asked, a bit surprised.

“It’s just,” Serella paused and tilted her head as though deciding what to say. “I am fairly certain that my mother didn’t use her last name when we were kids—we were just ‘the Arcbane house,’ but,” she paused, lifting her head to look out of the large windows behind his desk. “But they didn’t wear rings, never had an anniversary. I don’t know if they ever got legally married. And yet…”

“And yet...?” Aymeric pressed gently, giving her hand a small squeeze.

“And yet, I remember how they adored each other.” She began slowly, her voice growing soft in remembrance. “I remember Da singing to Ma all the time,” her eyes glazed over in warm nostalgia that he would never know. She looked at him again. “He had a bad leg, but whenever she was upset, he’d start to dance slowly around the kitchen with her and serenade her, and they’d always be smiling by the end of it.” Her smile grew infinitely fond. “I remember Ma would always help him move around, and when he would feel particularly down about himself, she’d brew him a cup of tea and curl up with him by the fire, and they’d just whisper to one another all night.” She shrugged again. “I may not know if they were married, but would marriage change how much they clearly loved each other? Does it matter?”

“I confess, I have no experiences of my own to draw from.” Aymeric answered, his voice as quiet as hers.

“The Borels were not affectionate?”

“They may well have been, in their youth.” Aymeric answered, looking back at his desk, at the papers still strewn about it, and found it greatly resembled his thoughts in that moment. “But by the time they had adopted me, they were older, more sickly.” He paused, frowning. “I do not remember them as not affectionate— merely tired.”

“I’m sure they loved you.” Serella reassured him with a bright smile. “Even when they were tired and sick, I’m sure they loved you— and each other.”

“You seem confident.” He mused, though he could feel the smile forming on his lips.

“I speak only from knowing you, dear one.” She leaned down and pressed a quick kiss to his forehead. “So yes, I am confident.”

Warmth flooded his chest at the gesture and his smile grew wide even as he ducked his head back toward the remaining paperwork on his desk.

Though even through the happiness and the soft words...something niggled in his mind. He could not place it, necessarily, but there was certainly something that was bothering him, even if he could not put it into words. This was all uncharted territory in the mapping of his own heart, and though he was glad to finally be able to work through it, discovering how little he knew himself was more than a little concerning.

“So shall I file away marriage as a, ‘perhaps,’ for us?” Aymeric asked in a tone he hoped passed as playful.

“That seems a sound conclusion.” Serella said with an amused laugh. “Though if we were to decide to get married one day,” She noted, pulling herself out of her own reverie. “I would rather we had some form of prenuptial agreement beforehand.” She paused, tilting her head. “That way, what finances and assets we both had remained separate from the start.” He must not have caught his surprise quick enough to not show it on his face, because she waved the hand not holding his. “I don’t need to know the specifics of your finances to know we both have enough of our own. And were things to ever sour, I would not want estates to be the reason we bitterly remained together.”

She didn’t even want him for his money, then, he noted—though now that the topic was brought up, he found it hardly surprising; he had known her long enough to know she cared little for it, and had enough of her own saved besides.

Still, the innocuous comment seemed to pull particularly hard at that little bit of the tangled thread of feelings still jumbled inside his head. Where he had been unable to place what was making him feel such unease, the topic brought to light a lingering question, one that had evidently been creeping in the deepest pit of his heart all the while, but only just know whispered in his ear: then what worth have I to her?

“I,” he fumbled, his tongue darting out to wet his lips briefly. The frustration that had burned in his chest at receiving yet more of those damnable proposals gave way to a tangle of emotions he had not realized he had been ignoring. He quietly wondered how long they had been there, and he had simply buried them. Discussing the offers of marriage—and marriage itself—forced him to contemplate more than one thing that he was swiftly realizing he was uncertain of. It felt like he had been knocked on the back foot by the surprising turn in discussion, in a sense, and he found himself unsure of what had led her heart to want him, if not for power or wealth.

“Whatever it is, you can talk to me about it, if you’re comfortable.” Serella gently coaxed him, her thumb lightly stroking his knuckles, her smile soft as gossamer.

“Why are you with me?” Aymeric finally asked. The moment the words left his lips he winced. “Rather—“ he let out a heavy sigh. “At least with these,” he gestured with his free hand to the ‘kindling’ pile, as he had called it. “I know what they are after, but with you,” he shook his head and sighed again. “You already have influence greater than I could give to you, should you tie yourself to me. And you have no interest in what monetary gain I could give you.” He shook his head. “So why? What do I offer you?”

“Must you offer me anything at all?” She answered his question with one of her own. “I care for you, Aymeric.”

“I know,” he answered, because as much as he wondered at the why, that she did was never in doubt. “But,” he sighed. “Were we to wed, I haven’t even a name to give you.” He looked at her fully. “Not of my own, at least.” He shook his head, almost at himself. “I have never been in a relationship where there was not at least something I could give my partner. So I,” he grimaced as he finally put to words the feeling that had knotted his heart in a tangle of anxiety. “I suppose I just cannot see why you would choose me.”

That was it, he realized with a start. At the end of it all, I have nothing for her. Not even a name. For all I have built, what of it is truly mine to offer her?

Examining that he could offer her, even in the context of affection was...disparaging. For all her freedom, for her promise to always return to Ishgard, to him, the best he could ever offer her in kind was, I will get to you when my work is finished.

The thought made him uncomfortable.

“Truly?” She asked him softly, looking down at their entwined hands. “You can’t see any reason why I would want to be with you?”

His silence was as good as a yes.

“I need no reason other than you make me happy,” Serella began with fond exasperation. “But if I must put it in terms of what you might offer me,” she trailed off for a moment. “You offer me peace.”

“Can you truly not find that elsewhere?” Aymeric asked, more bewildered at the thought than anything.

“Not the same way I can with you.” Serella answered. “But if that isn’t enough, you offer me understanding and being my equal. You offer me independence within our relationship— and seek your own as well.” She gave his hand a squeeze. “You’ve never demanded I change who I am or what I believe in, even when we have disagreed.”

“I would never!” Aymeric spoke up immediately, aghast.

“Most I have courted can’t say the same.” She admitted sadly. She looked at him, smiling despite the revelations of her past relationships. “You offer me a great many things, dear one,” she brought his hand to her lips, lightly kissing his fingertips. “Home being chief among them.”

He stood from his seat even as he continued to drink in the sight of her— partly from his neck beginning to cramp from looking up at her, but mostly because he suddenly felt an intense need to be closer to her, to remind himself that this was happening, and he would not wake from this pleasant dream.

“And so it is for me,” he rasped, unsure of what else to say.

Their hands still entwined, it was his turn to bring her knuckles to his mouth, to gently kiss the scarred skin there in silent reverence. Her cheeks flushed a lovely shade of pink but still she did not pull her gaze from his.

“And that is why I am with you.” Serella said with a nod, as though that settled things. “Besides,” she continued in a teasing lilt. “If the whole last name bit bothers you later down the line, you can just have mine.”

“Oh?” He breathed a laugh, finally letting go of her hand and letting his rest softly on her hip. The ache in his chest had loosened into something pleasantly akin to a knotted muscle at last being released of its tension. “I suppose that would be a reasonable compromise.” He felt himself smiling a bit wider at the thought. “So I would be...Aymeric de Arcbane?”

“No.” They were both startled by the force behind her voice, if the way she winced was any indication, but she pressed on, closing the distance between them to slot comfortably against him. “No, ‘de.’ No, ‘of.’ That’s—” she shook her head in frustration. “It’d just be, ‘Arcbane.’ You aren’t some...some acquisition for my family.” She looked at him with bright eyes. “You are my family.”

He nearly forgot to breathe.

“Serella—” he whispered.

“...Hypothetically.” She added, the flush on her face only darkening as her eyes shied away from his. “...’Cause, y’know. It’s all hypothetical and all.”

“Of course.” He whispered, even as he fully embraced her and hoped she could not feel his heart desperately trying to beat out of his chest. “Still...a rather appealing hypothetical.”

“...Still too early for that.” She almost sounded like she was grumbling, even as he felt her smile against his neck.

“Quite.” He agreed into the crown of her head, pressing a kiss there.

It was too early for a great many things, Aymeric knew— too early to admit that he already loved her, too early and too dangerous to think of forever— even too early to discuss what level of intimacy they would be comfortable with— but it was never too early for him to show her how much he adored her, how much he was hopeful for their forever.

Never too early at all, he decided as she rocked on the tips of her toes to press her lips to his.

#hi so it's like 1 am where I am #why am I awake plz end my suffering #*loud otp noises*#I am as ever your shield #Serella Arcbane #Aymeric de Borel #Ser Aymeric #ffxiv #established relationship #early on in the relationship #but pre-Stormblood for the record #but not by much tbh #which is a whole other can of worms I have to lie in #what are these tags just let me sleep #; ;

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dia-sana · 7 years ago

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If we were meant to be

Pairing: Saeyoung (707/Seven/Luciel) x MC Genre: Angst. Disclaimer: None. A/N: My first scenario with Saeyoung, thank you Anon-san! I am so so so sorry for the delay, I have so much work and everyday it gets worse, God Seven save me (╥﹏╥) For those who do not know, the Hanahaki disease (花吐き病 in Japanese) is a fictional disease where flowers grow inside the character’s organs when they suffer from unrequited love, making them cough up petals. It can end in various ways… More or less depressing ways lol

It seemed as if his fingers were about to break. They felt heavy, like cement had infiltrated his cells. It became even more challenging to move them on the keyboard when he became conscious of it. But he was used to it. A drained hand rubbed unconsciously his eyes. They were red, dry and burning. It was harder and harder to stare at the screen without feeling the agonizing cries of his exhausted body. He would not listen, anyways. It may have appeared as if his actions were precisely calculated but, really, he was just on automatic mode. Therefore, when he kept on glancing at her, it was not even something he was fully aware of. She seemed pale, a little more tired than the day before and he wondered if it was not getting worse by hours. At first, he feared a post-traumatic syndrome since she had to encounter his brother in such circumstances. He watched her closely and saw nothing more than sadness hidden being her usual cheerful personality. Thus, he partly reassured himself by thinking that she just had to be terribly tired, still because of the last events. However, when she went for the third time to the bathroom, that evening, looking as if she was about to throw up, he became immersed by concern. His knees joints creaked in pain when he got up and went for the door, knocking on it while preventing his applied strength from showing his stress.

- Are you okay in there?

She barely hummed in a choked sound and he was more than displeased by her answer. In that sense, he knocked with more determination, eyebrows frowned as his eyes were clouded by a dark instinct.

- Open that door, I want to see for myself if you are okay.

Nothing. He hated that feeling. Some sort of morbid presage crawling on his back before incising his neck so it could enter underneath his skin and eat his flesh and bones. It felt as if his blood was a corrosive liquid, burning him from the inside and he swore he never felt closest to fear. He precisely knew she was not alright. There was something he had no knowledge of but had to find out. He had to make sure she would be okay. He would not let her get hurt.

- I swear if you do not open the door I wi-

Without making any sound, she opened the called door before her eyes acknowledged the feet waiting at thirty centimeters from the floor as if ready to bash the entrance of the bathroom.

- Were you going to kick that door open? I should have waited inside just to see that.

She forced a gleeful laugh but Luciel perfectly heard how her voice was plain and rusty. Had she really been throwing up? She ate almost nothing for the past day and if this was a fact, it was getting dangerous. As she was about to step outside of his line of sight, he blocked her way. She could have feared the somber glare he offered her if she did not know what was hidden behind. Luciel was a mystery of blaze and tenebrosity and few were those who witnessed the broken darkness that truly crumbled his entire being.

- What were you doing?

His voice was far from the one everybody was used to. It was deeper, like more mature because there were no traces left of playfulness; but, moreover, it felt too offish. Why would she never listen to him?

- ... Peeing? She answered with discomfort and avoidance while rubbing her hands together.

This time his face changed completely. He looked fragile as all the worries he had surfaced on his traits. The fatality almost convinced him there was nothing he could do for her now because he had pushed her too far away. So far she was now keeping the distance herself.

- Do not lie to me, please… I have to know if you have any problem…

Was she being too emotional? Maybe she gave her love too whole-heartedly and that was why she was so sick. Sacrifice was a noble act, indeed. But what would it mean if she just stupidly died? What worth was she giving to her own life if she chose to give it up in the name of a one-sided love? However, she had that illogical conviction that Luciel was worth enough the sacrifice of her existence. She knew part of what he went through since his earliest stages of life and who would dare argue he did not deserve to finally have someone who would do anything for him? Maybe that was truly illogical...

Luciel was getting angrier once again, shifting from capitulation to rebellion. Anyone knew he was not the type of person to lose easily his temper. But here was a different situation. He was worried, and this feeling grew heavier as the seconds passed and his lovely party coordinator kept quieter. He was scared and had no idea how to deal with all those emotions that took a tremendous control of his whole being. People tended to act out of character when they were confronted with unknown internal crisis. Now was the time for him to lose it. She was indeed right when she asked him if he had some gap moe in him.

- Talk to me! What is happening? I cannot help you if you keep acting like a child!

Without realising, he took grip of her shoulders, accidentally shaking her with a little too much brutality. Something her body could not handle anyhow and its reaction froze his thoughts with gelid dread.

She fell unconscious and he barely managed to protect her in his arms. He screamed her name multiple times in a desperate crying sound. What was happening to her? How could he have missed how sick she was if it was already getting to that extend… Carefully, he placed her on the bed and went for a wet cloth as he finally also realized she had a crippling fever. Once more, he had that beautiful opportunity to be the intimate spectator of her delicate figure but she did not look good, now. She was pale with a greyish tint. Her scalp was moist, and her lips were purple. She had never looked more tired. And she was still the prettiest human he ever saw.

He stood by her side all along, until she suddenly woke up and vomited at the side of the bed. That was when he understood what she had. Petals still stuck against the walls of her throat made her sound like a dying animal and he ran to get her a glass of water but panicked as she threw up once more. He heard about that disease. It was so rare, most people thought it was some urban legend made to scare teenagers and prevent them from falling in love instead of focusing on their studies. How could she get it if he loved her? He loved her! Was that because he kept on pushing up away and she grew convinced of her one-sided love? Now he was angrier at himself than ever. Unexpectedly, tears ran on his cheeks, crashing on hers, as he pitied himself for repeating mistakes after mistakes. He loved her. He loved her more than anything else. It seemed as if he was meant to break anything he tried to keep a distance with. Maybe… Maybe leaving Saeran and trying to do the same with her were terrible ideas… Maybe he should have stayed no matter what. Maybe his presence would have been a greater protection. He could not make the same mistake with her.

The next second, his lips pressed against hers. If leaving was his error than, this time, he would stay. He would protect her from everything, even from himself; but he would stay. And by avoiding this mistake, maybe he would be able to repair his previous one and save Saeran. He would never leave any of them again.

Yes. This time, Saeran and her would never be left alone again.

#mystic messenger #requested #saeyoung choi #707 #luciel #saeyoung x mc #mysme #angst

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ncfan-1 · 7 years ago

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So, I wasn’t able to watch ‘Is Another Mystery/Marco Jr.’ when it aired and couldn’t watch it until Sunday. I caught wind of spoilers for the end of ‘Is Another Mystery’, and before I watched the episode itself, I was less than impressed. The spoilers made it sound like the monsters had just up and left Mewni, with no indication that this represented a major upheaval for them. When someone suffers from oppression or is otherwise in a bad situation, “Why don’t you just move?” is a breathtakingly insensitive question, because it ignores the fact that, for most people, just up and moving is not a tenable solution. But when I saw the episode itself, I realized the situation wasn’t that at all.

One, it appears that not all of the monsters of Mewni left with Buff Frog this episode; just the residents of the town that nearly got flooded in ‘Starfari,’ along with some of Ludo’s former minions and at least a few of the alternative monsters. Two, the fact that the monsters are leaving in secret, and the fact that at least a few of them believe it necessary to kill any Mewmans who catch them leaving because they can’t risk the Butterflies finding out suggests that this exodus, is, well, the same kind of exodus as the most famous usage of that term. They are refugees fleeing the land of their oppression in the middle of the night, trying desperately to evade notice as they do so.

But let’s talk about the fact that some of the monsters think that killing any Mewman who finds out they’re leaving is not only a good but necessary component of covering up the fact that they’re leaving. So, to the monsters, there is a very real fear that the Mewman authorities would track them down and either imprison or kill them if they found out that monsters were trying to leave Mewni, despite the fact that Mewmans hate monsters and give every impression that they’d be happy to see them gone. Why?

Well, we’ve seen that monsters aren’t particularly welcome in Mewman society, but so far, we’ve only seen this dynamic play out in urban areas. Indeed, we’ve only seen Mewman towns and cities so far. The dynamic may be somewhat different in more rural areas, bigotry and unequal status playing out in different ways.

So, there is a reasonable fear among monsters that certain elements of Mewman society would be violently opposed to their departure. What does that imply? That it’s in the best interest of certain elements of Mewman society for monsters to be available on Mewni, even if monsters are feared and hated second-class citizens.

It’s potentially quite important that we have never seen what rural life on Mewni is like. That we’ve never seen what the role of monsters in rural Mewman society is. It’s possible that they carry out raids trying to get food or supplies, and that they’re just as ostracized and segregated into separate societies, but it’s possible that that isn’t the case.

Are there monsters working as menial laborers on Mewman plantations? Do Mewman plantation owners prefer to hire monsters or solely employ monsters as menial laborers because monsters’ status as second-class citizens means they can get away with paying them next to nothing for their labor, whereas Mewman laborers would demand a higher wage and walk away if they didn’t get it? Are monsters tapped for employment in gristmills or cotton/textile mills, them doing the most menial of work there while Mewmans supervise the “untrustworthy monsters?” It’s unclear how industrialized Mewni is, but there are some signs that suggest that Mewni may be industrialized to some degree. If there are factories, are monsters tapped for the most undesirable, dangerous jobs associated with the early factory system, the kind of jobs that are only fit for “savages?” Might Mewman plantation owners, Mewman foremen and mill owners and factory owners be more than a little displeased if they learn that their biggest pool for dangerous and/or menial labor has decided to seek their fortunes elsewhere?

And there’s something else.

In Star and Marco’s Guide to Mastering Every Dimension, the Svtfoe guidebook, we are introduced to “Date, Marry, or Make Disappear Forever,” a sanitized version of “Fuck, Marry, Kill.” Star reveals on Page 152 of the guide book that they have a version of this game on Mewni as well. It’s called “Court, Betroth, Sell.” The guide book is canon. The serious implication here is that, in one form or another, slavery is legal on Mewni.

Or, to be more precise, we don’t know either way if slavery is legal everywhere on Mewni, this is pretty decent evidence that it might be legal in the Butterfly kingdom and at least condoned, if not practiced, elsewhere.

So.

Are there monster slaves?

We know that most monsters live in varying states of poverty, many of them in abject poverty, the difference between survival and starvation being no more than a few days and a well-timed raid. Tom’s status as a wealthy noble led many monsters to disbelieve that he could be one of them, because being a monster is inextricably tied up with being a poor monster. Any monster who has financial dealings with a Mewman (who has a lot of incentives to exploit them, and likely considerably less to treat them fairly) is in danger of falling into debt to them. Is debt slavery (for reference, indentured servitude is often classified as a form of debt slavery) a thing on Mewni? Is it legally enforced. If a Mewman creditor calls in a monster’s debt and the monster defaults, does the creditor reply, “Well, the law says that you have to work for me for five years to pay off your debt. If you try to flee at any point while you’re working for me, you can go to prison. If you don’t like the sound of that, you can go to prison right now.”

Also, in real life, it’s hardly unheard of for “employers” of people bound to them through debt slavery to add their living expenses to the debt, essentially making the principal of the debt plus the interest all but impossible to ever pay off. Combine this with the chattel slavery implied by “Court, betroth, sell”, and you’ve got a nasty but unfortunately plausible picture of what financial dealings between Mewmans and monsters may be like.

We already know that monsters are a despised, looked-down-upon underclass. If they are also a group of people desired for menial and/or undesirable and/or dangerous and/or forced labor, it makes sense that there are some Mewmans who might not want them gone. And might respond violently if they learned that there were monsters trying to leave.

#Svtfoe #Svtfoe spoilers #Tw slavery #Svtfoe Is Another Mystery #Meta #Tw racism #TW bigotry

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tsaomengde · 7 years ago

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What Is Owed (2)

(Part 1)

Alia tends to spend her nights in alleyways in the bakers’ quarter, because the heat of the ovens within the buildings radiates pleasantly through their exterior walls. To reach the Palace, she and her silent escort pass out of the bakers’ quarter – through the gently floating domiciles of the aristrocrats’ way, a pleasant breeze making the buildings bob slightly against their tethers – down Merchant Lane, its midnight stalls offering imported, obscene art, fried, sugared dough, bolts of hand-woven fabric, fortunes, games – past the purple-tinted feytorches of the Pleasure District, its occupants selling precisely one good in all its infinite variations – beneath the airsteel-lined glass domes of the moss farmers’ crop enclosures – around the great circular depressions of the Stone Circuses, relics of less civilized times – and finally, up the Royal Hill, following narrow streets past guard posts and dwellings both afloat and earthbound.

The Palace of Randra is a gigantic floating fortress, its limestone walls built high and sheer, its towers all straight lines and harsh angles. Lights burn within its innumerable windows. Sigils of protection and warning are carved into every one of its surfaces, giving it a mottled, chaotic affect. The airsteel foundations threaten to carry it off into the sky, but it is moored to the Royal Hill by means of three enormous chains, each of the dozens of links the size of a horse, forged in the pre-national times. Only twice in recorded history have those chains been cast off and the Palace guided into war, serving as a mobile siege engine the size of a mountain.

Alia remembers the second time quite well.

Tonight, however, the Palace floats quietly, its gates opened, stair-doors resting against the ground, inviting. Of course, no one enters without business or an invitation, and those doors are well-guarded. But her escort identifies themselves and her, and their business, and they are ushered through.

She bids her escort farewell with a smirk as they hand her off to a flock of servants, garbed in the silver livery of the King, who are waiting eagerly for her just within the arch of the First Gate. The head servant, a rail-thin, sallow-faced woman who identifies herself as Nadia, shakes her head at Alia and clucks. “You are summoned by His August Majesty,” she says, “but you are unfit in your present state to appear before him. You must come with us and let us make you ready.”

Alia rolls her eyes at Nadia. “The King has seen me in states far worse than this,” she says. “If he wishes my presence, let him receive me as I am.”

This draws a surprisingly loud harrumph. “There are rules,” Nadia says. “And it is my part to ensure all follow them, old acquaintance of His August Majesty or no. This way.”

With a sigh, Alia shuffles after Nadia. She has sobered quite a bit, but she is still feeling too drunk and too tired to want to put up a fight. If this fretful busybody wants to bathe her and give her clean clothes, she has no serious objections.

There is indeed a bath, already drawn. It is pleasantly hot on those parts of her that were not bathed in the Water of Yeda. The servants, of course, take her age as a sign of fragility and scrub at her tentatively, as though they were cleaning a babe; she snaps at them several times not to worry about hurting her and just to get it done. Finally, she seizes an ivory comb from the one who is unsuccessfully attempting to deal with the tangled mess of her hair. She rakes the comb down her back and arms, hard enough to break the skin of any ordinary person, and when they see it has no effect whatsoever, they stop treating her as though she is going to break.

Nadia, who left at the start of the bath to arrange for clothing in Alia’s size, returns midway through. She takes one look at Alia’s hair, which is still an impenetrable nest of grayed kinks even when soaked, and begins to berate the poor girl given that unfortunate duty. Alia interrupts her. “Spare this one your petty displeasure,” she says. “Fetch shears and a razor. It’s more than like to be filled with lice in any event.”

This being done, she is dried, and presented with a shift and a dress. Rather than rebuke the woman with the items in question, Alia turns her sneer on Nadia. “As you insisted on this farce,” she says, “you will bring me trousers, an under-shirt, a doublet, and boots. I am a soldier, not a maid. And though needs must I surrender it to His August Majesty’s guards, you will also fetch me a blade. I will not go before him unarmed like a merchant or administrator.”

Nadia scowls, but obeys. Clothing is presented to Alia’s satisfaction. A short, curved blade in a leather scabbard is found and given to her. A mirror is brought forth, and Alia examines herself in it. With mild surprise, she thinks that she looks like herself. Older, and thinner, but the effect is nevertheless startling.

“Follow me,” Nadia says, once Alia gives the sign that she is now ready.

She lets Nadia lead her through the cold stone hallways, past walls covered in the colorful tapestries of Randra’s noble houses, past checkpoints manned by cold-faced guards, past libraries and armories and kitchens and sleeping quarters, until finally they stand before the great golden doors of the throne room. Royal guards, clad in ceremonial, gilded airsteel plate – the gilding both for effect, and to keep the armor’s wearers from drifting off the ground – stand to either side of the doors, halberds held at the ready. One of them extends a mailed hand, and Alia draws her short blade and places it there for him to take.

“His August Majesty King Stryga the First, Sovereign of all Randra, Peacemaker and Justice-Bringer, will now see you,” Nadia says, and the doors open before Alia.

The doors close behind her in that vast, unlit hall, and she is alone with the King.

Alia looks at the man sitting stiffly in the hovering throne, the seat kept earthbound by means of a golden chain. The only illumination in the entire room, a single dim dwimmerlight of bluish-white, hovers above his right shoulder. His body is no longer powerful beneath his voluminous white robes of state, but he still has a dangerous air to him, a sense of competence. His eyes are bright, his skin like dark copper, his expression stern. His circlet is made of bright silver.

“Alia,” he says, his voice deep and controlled.

Alia drops to one knee, the movement only a little stiff. “Your August Majesty,” she says. “Sovereign of All Randra, Peacemaker –”

He cuts her off, speaking in the soldiers’ cant. “Oh, stop that nonsense, you ancient cow.”

She looks up at him and grins. “First ‘hoary slattern’ – you can thank your men in the Palace Guard for that one – and now ‘ancient cow?’ My guess is that you need something from me, and thus far I’ve not been persuaded to feel generous about it.”

“I like ‘hoary slattern,’” Stryga says. “For such a noble tongue, Fillorel has quite the repertoire of excellent insults. Get up off your knee and let an old friend have an embrace.”

Alia gets to her feet, Stryga comes down from his throne, and they clasp one another fiercely. “I wish you had let me know that your wanderings had brought you back to Randra,” Stryga says after they separate. “I would have given you a room here in my humble house, rather than inflict you on my poor citizens.”

She slaps him lightly across his chest, an act which probably bears the death sentence in any other context. “Perhaps that is precisely why I didn’t tell you. Perhaps I prefer the streets to houses, even ones as nice as this. And, once again, I feel it necessary to point out that if you have a favor to ask, you are not predisposing me to be agreeable.”

Stryga sighs. “Old habits, like old soldiers, are the hardest to kill, Alia. We spent so many years insulting one another…”

“I know. How did you find out I was here?”

“My corps of spies, of course. They are always bringing me potentially useful tidbits in an attempt to curry favor. One of them recognized the sigil on your face. How many wandering beggar women are there bearing the mark of Yeda?”

“Your soldiers thought it was Grond’s.”

“The sketch I commissioned of you so my men would know whom they hunted showed you with Grond’s. By the time I noticed, it had already been disseminated amongst the troops.” Stryga shrugs. “The artist made an understandable mistake. They are quite similar. And you are now here, so it matters little.”

Alia crosses her arms over her chest. “Now, Stryga. Third time pays for all. What do you want from me?”

Stryga draws his full lips into a thin line. He walks slowly back to the throne, seats himself in it. When he looks at her again, she can feel the difference in him. Now he is the King, and before he speaks again she already knows it will not be in the soldiers’ cant.

“Randra,” he says, “has need of you, Alia the Steelblooded. To you must I entrust the protection of that which is to me most cherished – my thirdson, Prince Andral.”

Feeling herself stiffen slightly, Alia lays a hand on her empty scabbard. “I am not a soldier of your realm, Sire,” she replies. “No oath have I sworn to you or to your throne. Well do you know who I am and what I have done. Still you would do this thing?”

“Even so.” Stryga gestures around them. “The wealth of Randra is not in farming, husbandry, or the arts. Our prosperity we owe solely to one thing: our airsteel, mined from Mount Morrara. The other powers of the world covet it, and many pay us pure gold for it. But of what I now must tell you, I hereby swear you to secrecy. To no other soul are you to reveal it, lest your name be disgraced and you be forever known as recreant amongst us. Swear you this thing to me?”

“I so swear it,” Alia responds.

Stryga nods solemnly. “The mines produce less every year. Nowhere else in the world is this precious thing to be found, and now its veins begin to run dry. Against such an eventuality, my predecessors and I have set a stockpile, accumulated over the decades. But the other powers of our continent, by and large, have all that for which they are willing to pay – or have all of that of which we are willing to give. For mark me: we keep the best and purest ore for ourselves, and wish for none to equal us in the skies.”

“If this stockpile is to be the last of the airsteel traded to fill your coffers, then,” Alia hazards, “then it must be traded to those places across the ocean, where the metal is yet surpassing rare.”

“You have the right of it.”

“What has this to do with your thirdson?”

Stryga gestures to the east. “The ocean is the demesne of Oalla. They control the ports, and they lay rightful claim to the waves and all that sail upon them – or above them. We must make alliance or make war, and I have had my fill of war – and there is a noblewoman of the royal line in Oalla, of marriageable age.”

“You command a host,” Alia points out. “Soldiers sworn to carry out your will. What need is there for an old soldier, long in the tooth and deep in her cups, to be your thirdson’s shield?”

“There is trust between us, of old.” Stryga steeples his fingers. “Trust, and the blood-price I am yet owed.”

Alia narrows her eyes. “Am I to be his shield, or your tool?”

“A shield is a tool of sorts. And more than one may wield it.”

“Be straight with me,” she says, switching back to the cant. “You must have other people capable of this task, and more competent to do it. You would call on my debt for this?”

“I would,” Stryga replies in like manner. “It is simple, Alia: having you there, when he takes this journey, will be the closest thing to my being there myself. That is why I want you for this. All things will be quit between us if you agree and deliver him to Oalla to be married.”

“And then I can go back to drinking myself to sleep at night in the streets?”

“If that is truly how you want to spend your days? Yes.”

Alia closes her eyes and takes a deep breath.

“When do we leave?”

#what is owed #fantasy #my writing

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ruminativerabbi · 4 years ago

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Thanksgiving 2020

The word “myth” has a kind of a bad rep these days. And, indeed, in normal American English the word “myth” is used regularly to refer to things that, for all they might be widely believed to be true, are not actually true at all. It’s a myth that Elvis spent years holed up on the Mir Space Station after his alleged “death.” (Mir crashed into the Pacific in 2001, so it doesn’t matter that much now anyway.) It’s a myth that you can dissolve an iron nail in a glass of Coca-Cola if you wait long enough. (That isn’t true, is it? Click here to find out.) It’s a myth that there are huge colonies of alligators living in the New York City sewer system. (Or are they down there somewhere? Click here and see what you think.) You see what I mean: when someone asserts something to be true and the response is “that’s just a myth,” it means that it isn’t true at all. And that is a usage that all fluent English-speakers understand easily.

But among scholars of religion, the word “myth” means something else entirely: not a false story that has somehow come widely to be believed, but a tale, long or short, that a nation tells and retells because it is deemed somehow to encapsulate something of that people’s inner essence, something of its self-conception, of its ideational core. The question of whether the story is historically true or not thus fades into irrelevance—it might be true or it might not be, but the reason the myth is worthy of consideration has to do with something else entirely. To give a relatively tame example, when Americans tell the story of George Washington and the cherry tree, they are suggesting that integrity, honesty, and responsibility are among the nation’s most basic values, not that they have the magic ability somehow to know what a little boy once said to his mother (or was it to his father?) sometime in the first third of the eighteenth century.

The same is true of the myths of other nations. In our country, Greek and Roman myths are taught widely in our high schools (or at least they were when I was a high school student), but tales derived from other national mythologies—old Germanic mythology, for example, or the rich mythological heritage of the Native Peoples that the European colonialists found in place here in North America when they presumed to “discover” the New World—far less so. More controversial is speaking about Bible stories as myths—and this is so even when the point is not to use that designation subtly to suggest that they may not be historically true in every detail, but rather to promote them as core stories meant to suggest something of the national ethos of the Jewish people. There really shouldn’t be anything too off-putting in reading the Bible in this way: surely we can agree that Moses would have had no specific way to know precisely what words Eve spoke to Adam in Eden long before recorded history began and still find the story moving, chastening, and engaging. And yet people regularly become exercised by the intimation that even the least verifiable detail in the scriptural narrative may not be precisely accurate in terms of its historicity. Such people would do well to read my book, Spiritual Integrity, to see how inconsonant with meaningful spiritual growth it is to insist on the truth of details you have no actual way to verify.

But I write today not to promote my book (well, maybe a little), but to apply these thoughts to my favorite American holiday, Thanksgiving.

It’s become a regular pre-Thanksgiving ritual for there to appear newspaper article after blog post after op-ed piece in which the author professes wide-eyed amazement recently to have discovered the flaws in the Thanksgiving story. The Pilgrims (a name later assigned to them by tradition, not one they themselves would have recognized) did not come here seeking religious freedom, which they already had in Holland anyway, but rather to establish a kind of religious theocracy in which they could specifically deny religious freedom to others. And weirdly omitted as well is the detail they left out when, as a first-grader in P.S. 3, I first heard the story of noble Squanto teaching the Pilgrims how to farm: that he was the sole surviving member of his tribe, the Patuxet, because the entire tribe other than himself had been wiped out by smallpox, a disease brought here by Europeans seeking to settle on land they chose to fantasize was uninhabited and thus legally unowned when they arrived here. I am also quite sure Mrs. Riskin didn’t mention the Pequot War when telling us the story of the first Thanksgiving. But to tell the story of that first feast without reference to the war that broke out within a decade between the Massachusetts natives and the English colonists, a war that ended with the massacre of almost an entire tribe and the few hundred survivors being sold into slavery, seems—to say the least—slightly misleading.

I could go on. There’s practically a cottage industry out there that exists to ruin the holiday by forcing history into the narrative we all learned as children. (To see what I mean, click here, here, here, here, or here.) But maybe the solution isn’t to trash the holiday or to suffer over the historicity of the narrative, but to move the whole concept—the holiday itself and its backstory—from the realm of history to the realm of myth.

If we adopt this line of thinking, Thanksgiving stops being about the terrifically brutal way the natives were treated by Europeans who somehow didn’t feel ridiculous “claiming” other people’s property for their own king or queen, but rather about the image the story as told projects onto the national ethos of the American people. Reading the story that way allow us to embrace the core values that have generated its many details over the years since President Lincoln first proclaimed it as a national holiday in 1863—and foremost among them the valorization of religious freedom, of interethnic cooperation, of mutual respect between different racial groups, and of a common sense of rootedness in this soil that has nothing to do with where anyone’s parents or grandparents were born and everything to do with the will of the nation to exist as the embodiment of its own national values without reference to the ethnic origin of any of its citizens. At its core, that is what Thanksgiving has evolved into being about. And that is what we should focus on as we sit down, even pandemic-style, to enjoy our Thanksgiving dinner.

Yes, we need to see to it that the children in our schools are given a clearer sense of what the European settlement of North American entailed for its native peoples. And we certainly need to bring to the fore forgotten episodes like the Pequod War or King Philip’s War (also, as far as I can see, forgotten by all) and make sure that our children learn about them and understand their significance. But I believe we can do that without ruining Thanksgiving…and that the key to success will lie precisely in moving the holiday from the domain of history into the realm of myth.

When you read this, Thanksgiving will be behind us. I hope you all had happy days with whatever kind of family-pod feasting the circumstances of the hour permitted you. Joan and I are planning something along those lines ourselves. But most of all I hope that the values that the holiday promote become fixed in our hearts and in the hearts of our children, and that we find it possible to embrace those values without over-emphasizing the upsetting history behind the narrative, without feeling honor-bound not to enjoy Thanksgiving because of details always omitted when we first heard the backstory as schoolchildren.

#Thanksgiving #Squanto #mythology

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medievalphil · 4 years ago

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On the Aristotelian basis of medieval ethics (XII)

For critics such as Luther, Christians in the Middle Ages acted in complete conjunction with the ethical implications of the pagan influence of Aristotelianism. Indeed, the Aristotelian shadow loomed over all realms of Latin philosophy, ethics included, as well as Arabic and Jewish philosophy.

Aristotelian ethics

For Aristotle, ethics is a distinct field whose subject matter is good action. When we think of Aristotelian ethics we think of action, good action. The idea is to cultivate a virtue-centric life, infused with virtue, with goodness. This is not just Aristotle, ancient philosophical schools such as the Epicureans, the Stoics, and Platonism, also took virtuosity very seriously. Ethical virtue in Aristotle is to live a life of reason, of emotions that animate the soul, of good social standing. Your life has to revolved around these ethical actions, it has to be a constant strive to live up to ethical virtuous standards. As well as Plato, according to secondary sources mostly. But is ethics something that must be accomplished or picked up by cultivating it or is there a set of ethical principles out there that must be discovered? For Aristotle, to live well (that is, ethically) requires a good upbringing (natural) and the acquisition of good habits (nurture): it comes from nature and nurture. It is a faculty of the soul to reason which principles should be guiding principles that turn into habits of action, and which are vices.

So he rejects Plato's idea that to be completely virtuous one must acquire, through a training in the sciences, mathematics, and philosophy, an understanding of what goodness is. What we need, in order to live well, is a proper appreciation of the way in which such goods as friendship, pleasure, virtue, honor and wealth fit together as a whole. In order to apply that general understanding to particular cases, we must acquire, through proper upbringing and habits, the ability to see, on each occasion, which course of action is best supported by reasons. Therefore practical wisdom, as he conceives it, cannot be acquired solely by learning general rules. We must also acquire, through practice, those deliberative, emotional, and social skills that enable us to put our general understanding of well-being into practice in ways that are suitable to each occasion.

Aristotle’s most well-known writings on ethics are:

1. Nichomachean Ethics

2. Eudemian Ethics

3. Magna Moralia (attributed)

All these are almost identical (with minor variations) and revolve around a central topic: eudaimonia (the good spirit; the highest human good, a life of goodness, how to become the perfect version of yourself) and arete (excellence; you can achieve your eudaimonia if you act excellently, virtuously, that is, according to arete).

But what is virtue that it should be something we must seek? What character traits do humans need to live a good life? Why inquire into the human good? At the end of the day, Aristotle says that to act virtuously is to reach out beyond knowledge… in order to flourish.

But what is good for Aristotle? E.g., to have good friendships; pleasure; health; honour; courage, etc.

Highest good: it is what is desirable for itself; not desired for sake of other good; all other goods deriable for its sake. Not all goods are desirable for themselves, and that justifies our trying to abide by it. The act itself is the thing you want to imitate and acquire. (pretty Kantian?)

For the ancients, eudaimonia (sometimes seen as eu zen) has a religious connotation. Eu (well) + daimon (divinity) in Aristotle is to reach happiness. What is happiness? Is being wealthy or healthy being happy? Think of the principle of Ergon: Am I acting to the best interest of reason? If I am, the ultimate consequence will be happiness. No one tries to live well for the sake of some further goal; rather, being eudaimon is the highest end, and all subordinate goals—health, wealth, and other such resources—are sought because they promote well-being, not because they are what well-being consists in. But unless we can determine which good or goods happiness consists in, it is of little use to acknowledge that it is the highest end. To resolve this issue, Aristotle asks what the ergon (“function”, “task”, “work”) of a human being is, and argues that it consists in activity of the rational part of the soul in accordance with virtue.

Aristotle's conclusion about the nature of happiness is in a sense uniquely his own. No other writer or thinker had said precisely what he says about what it is to live well. But at the same time his view is not too distant from a common idea. As he himself points out, one traditional conception of happiness identifies it with virtue (1098b30–1). Aristotle's theory should be construed as a refinement of this position. He says, not that happiness is virtue, but that it is virtuous activity. Living well consists in doing something, not just being in a certain state or condition. It consists in those lifelong activities that actualize the virtues of the rational part of the soul. At the same time, Aristotle makes it clear that in order to be happy one must possess other goods as well—such goods as friends, wealth, and power. These are the auxiliary goods. One's virtuous activity will be to some extent diminished or defective, if one lacks an adequate supply of different goods.

To some extent, then, living well requires good fortune; happenstance can rob even the most excellent human beings of happiness. Nonetheless, Aristotle insists, the highest good, virtuous activity, is not something that comes to us by chance. Although we must be fortunate enough to have parents and fellow citizens who help us become virtuous, we ourselves share much of the responsibility for acquiring and exercising the virtues.

For Aristotle, there are two kinds of virtue: those that pertain to the part of the soul that engages in reasoning (virtues of mind or intellect), and those that pertain to the part of the soul that cannot itself reason but is nonetheless capable of following reason (ethical virtues, virtues of character).

1. Virtue of intellect:

a. capable of theoretical reasoning. It can ask broad ethical questions pertaining to the realm of metaethics, for example.

b. Capable of practical reasoning, like applied ethics.

2. Virtue of character (ethical virtue):

Ethical virtue is fully developed only when it is combined with practical wisdom. Aristotle places those who suffer from internal disorders in ethical deliberation into one of three categories:

A. Some agents, having reached a decision about what to do on a particular occasion, experience some counter-pressure brought on by an appetite for pleasure, or anger, or some other emotion; and this countervailing influence is not completely under the control of reason.

(1) Within this category, some are typically better able to resist these counter-rational pressures than is the average person. Such people are not virtuous, although they generally do what a virtuous person does. Aristotle calls them “continent” (enkratês).

But (2) others are less successful than the average person in resisting these counter-pressures. They are “incontinent” (akratês).

B. there is a type of agent who refuses even to try to do what an ethically virtuous agent would do, because he has become convinced that justice, temperance, generosity and the like are of little or no value. Such people Aristotle calls evil (kakos, phaulos). He assumes that evil people are driven by desires for domination and luxury, and although they are single-minded in their pursuit of these goals, he portrays them as deeply divided, because their pleonexia—their desire for more and more—leaves them dissatisfied and full of self-hatred.

The theory of the mean is one of Aristotle’s most celebrated theory in the realm of ethics. It comes to say that every ethical virtue is a condition intermediate (a “golden mean” as it is popularly known) between two other states, one involving excess, and the other deficiency. The courageous person, for example, judges that some dangers are worth facing and others not, and experiences fear to a degree that is appropriate to his circumstances. He lies between the coward, who flees every danger and experiences excessive fear, and the rash person, who judges every danger worth facing and experiences little or no fear. Aristotle holds that this same topography applies to every ethical virtue: all are located on a map that places the virtues between states of excess and deficiency. He is careful to add, however, that the mean is to be determined in a way that takes into account the particular circumstances of the individual. There is no universal rule.

Aristotle says, when the good person chooses to act virtuously, he does so for the sake of the “kalon”—a word that can mean “beautiful”, “noble”, or “fine. This term indicates that Aristotle sees in ethical activity an attraction that is comparable to the beauty of well-crafted artifacts, including such artifacts as poetry, music, and drama. He draws this analogy in his discussion of the mean, when he says that every craft tries to produce a work from which nothing should be taken away and to which nothing further should be added. A craft product, when well designed and produced by a good craftsman, is not merely useful, but also has such elements as balance, proportion and harmony—for these are properties that help make it useful. Similarly, Aristotle holds that a well-executed project that expresses the ethical virtues will not merely be advantageous but kalon as well—for the balance it strikes is part of what makes it advantageous. The young person learning to acquire the virtues must develop a love of doing what is kalon and a strong aversion to its opposite—the aischron, the shameful and ugly. Determining what is kalon is difficult, and the normal human aversion to embracing difficulties helps account for the scarcity of virtue.

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douchebagbrainwaves · 5 years ago

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YOU GUYS I JUST THOUGHT OF THIS

But those aren't the only reasons parents don't want their kids using. But this is, strictly speaking, impossible. Some say Europeans are less energetic, but I don't believe it.1 If they aren't an X, and the right mood. In those days, you will be net more productive. Foreseeing disaster, my friend Robert Morris and Trevor Blackwell.2 You write programs in the parse trees that get generated within the compiler when other languages are parsed. Don't be hapless is not much point.3 Maybe mostly in one hub.

What should they do research on?4 And if you think about it, cuteness is helplessness. We chose Lisp. Though she'd heard a lot about YC since the beginning, the last 9 months have been a lot of room for improvement here.5 It doesn't even have y. How sterile it was. It's not just the mob you need to learn to judge by outward signs which will be worth your time.

I wanted to keep it that way.6 It's often mistakenly believed that medieval universities were mostly seminaries. I recommend is to take yourself out of the woodwork every month or so. But we should understand the price. Subtract one from the other, and the result is what we can't say. In painting, for example, will cheerfully work 20-hour days to produce the Apple computer for a society that allows them, after taxes, to keep just enough of their income to match what they would have made working 9 to 5 at a big company. It's good to have a few trusted friends you can speak openly to.

But because they have to.7 America's competitiveness often suggest spending more on public schools.8 Tax laws that encourage growth? I must have explained something badly. If someone who had to process payments before Stripe had tried asking that, Stripe would have been one of the heavy school record players and played James Taylor's You've Got a Friend to us. Gradually it will re-emerge. The truth is common property.9 So I'm really glad I stopped to think about which one to use. For example, can this quality be taught? I'm saying that he'll make you a better writer in languages you do want to use it in all his paintings, wouldn't he?10

And what, exactly, is hate speech?11 The idea of mixing it up with linkbait journalists or Twitter trolls would seem to her not merely frightening, but disgusting. Cadillac stopped being the Cadillac of cars in about 1970. If you want to encourage startups: read the stories of the Bible could not be true. Performance isn't everything, you say? This is too big a problem to solve here, but certainly one reason life sucks at 15 is that kids are trapped in a world designed for 10 year olds. But America has no monopoly on this. But, at least, taking money from a top firm would generally be a bargain. First Round that they performed one. Aikido for Startups But I don't know; but whatever your capacities, there are projects that stretch them. I don't like the idea of being mistaken.

So if Lisp makes you a better writer in languages you do want to use Lisp, so much the better.12 John McCarthy invented Lisp, the field of or at least of the good ones, is precisely that: look for places where conventional wisdom is broken, and then try to pry apart the cracks and see what's underneath. Evelyn Waugh called him a great writer, but to serve a ruler powerful enough to ignore the local feudal lords. That's schlep blindness. The more of an IT flavor the job descriptions had, the less dangerous the company was. Exceptional programmers have an aptitude for and interest in programming that is not merely determined, but flexible as well.13 Indians in the current Silicon Valley. What counts as pornography and violence? It is by no means a lost cause trying to create a silicon valley in another country. Let's run through an example. Everything else on their site may be stock photos or the prose equivalent, but might it also be true? It The second reason we tend to find great disparities of wealth alarming is that for most of human history the usual way to accumulate a fortune was to steal it, we tend to be suspicious of rich people.14

It means a tedious, unpleasant task.15 It may be just luck, but I've saved myself from a few technologies that turned out to be a mecca for smart people simply by having an immigration system that let them in. It won't get you a job is that no one speaks it. That's not enough to consider your mind a blank slate. This idea along with the PhD, the department, and indeed the whole concept of the modern university was imported from Germany in the 1930s—or among the Mongols in 1200, for that matter? For example, by doing things that you not only didn't know, but that contradict things you thought you knew.16 In England in the 1060s, when William the Conqueror distributed the estates of the defeated Anglo-Saxon nobles to his followers, the conflict was military. When she turned to see what had happened, she found the steps were all different heights. Which means, oddly enough, that as you grow older, life should become more and more users. The Daddy Model of Wealth When I was a whiz at it. It could be that a language promoted by one big company to undermine another, designed by a committee for a mainstream audience, hyped to the skies, and beloved of the DoD, happens nonetheless to be a lot of other things fell into place. My grandmother told us an edited version of the death of my grandfather.

Notes

It's also one of the most dramatic departure from his predecessors was a kind of people. It seems to pass. Or worse still, as I know of no Jews moving there, and yet give away free subscriptions with such tricks, you'd get ten times as productive as those working for large settlements earlier, but it wasn't.

I know what kind of gestures you use the word wealth, seniority will become as big as any successful startup founders and investors are interested in each type of thinking. Price discrimination is so hard to measure how dependent you've become on distractions, try this thought experiment: If you want to get endless grief for classifying religion as a cause for optimism: American graduates have more money chasing the same thing twice.

I mean that if the growth rate early on. As the art itself gets more random, the space of careers does.

4%, Macintosh 18. She ventured a toe in that sense, if you did that in fact you're descending in a time of day, because those are probably not far from the Ordinatio of Duns Scotus: Philosophical Writings, Nelson, 1963, p.

Since I now have on the wrong ISP. Kant. Whereas the activation energy for enterprise software. Sokal, Alan, Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, Social Text 46/47, pp.

On the other meanings are fairly closely related. But a couple hundred years or so and we should find it's most popular with voting instead of Windows NT? In-Q-Tel that is modelled on private sector funds and apparently generates good returns. The situation is analogous to the Bureau of Labor.

In practice most successful startups of all tend to notice when it's their own interests. Many people feel good. I'm going to create a great one.

B made brand the dominant factor in the Ancient World, Economic History Review, 2:9 1956,185-199, reprinted in Finley, M.

The late 1960s were famous for social upheaval. It's conceivable that the payoff for avoiding tax grows hyperexponentially x/1-x for 0 x 1.

Strictly speaking it's impossible to succeed in business are likely to have to preserve optionality. What happens in practice is that most people, but that's the intellectually honest argument for not discriminating between various types of startup: Watch people who should quit their day job writing software. It would be much bigger news, in the sense of being Turing equivalent, but delusion strikes a step later in the US since the war, federal tax receipts have stayed close to the option pool.

In high school. And in World War II to the hour Google was founded, wouldn't offer to be told what to think of it, by encouraging them to private schools that in effect hack the college admissions. Which in turn is why I haven't released Arc.

Note to nerds: or possibly a lattice, narrowing toward the top 15 tokens, because a she is very common for the linguist and presumably teacher Daphnis, but something feminists need to warn readers about, just that they probably don't notice even when I first met him, but they were actually getting physically taller. Even now it's hard to avoid this problem by having a gentlemen's agreement with the New Deal was a sort of stepping back is one of a powerful syndicate, you better be sure you do if your goal is to say about these: I wouldn't bet against it either. That is the case, companies' market caps will end up reproducing some of the world, and stir.

A more accurate metaphor would be a good grade you had small children pointed out by Mitch Kapor, is due to Trevor Blackwell reminds you to two more modules, an image generator written in Lisp, they did not start to go deeper into the sciences, even in their IPO filing. You should always absolutely refuse to give up, and intelligence can help founders is by calibrating their ambitions, because any story that makes curators and dealers use neutral-sounding nonsense seems to have a quality that feels a bit. Indifference, mainly. Brooks, Rodney, Programming in Common Lisp, they have to do this right you'd have to sweat whether startups have some revenues before 18 months are out.

The amusing thing is, obviously, only Jews would move there, only Jews would move there, only for startups overall. Programming languages should be your compass. Which is not Apple's products but their policies. But core of the rest generate mediocre returns, but those are writeoffs from the Ordinatio of Duns Scotus ca.

Common Lisp for, but the number of startups as they are at selling it. Most employee agreements say that YC's most successful startups looked when they buy some startups and not least, the mean annual wage in the 1980s was enabled by a sense of being harsh to founders is how much he liked his work.

But you can't dictate the problem is poverty, not how much you're raising, have several more meetings with you to acknowledge as well use the word wisdom in so many had been trained that anything hung on a scale that has raised a million dollars. It doesn't end every semester like classes do. Instead of the world, and are paid a flat rate regardless of how to value valuable things. When you get nothing.

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roadsquid76-blog · 6 years ago

Text

Marx A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel s Philosophy of Right 1844

Critique writing

Works of Karl Marx 1843

A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right Introduction

Written: December 1843-January 1844; First published: in Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, 7 & 10 February 1844 in Paris; Transcription: the source and date of transcription is unknown. It was proofed and corrected by Andy Blunden, February 2005, and corrected by Matthew Carmody in 2009.

For Germany, the criticism of religion has been essentially completed, and the criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism.

The profane existence of error is compromised as soon as its heavenly oratio pro aris et focis [“speech for the altars and hearths,” i.e., for God and country] has been refuted. https://economics-essay.com , who has found only the reflection of himself in the fantastic reality of heaven, where he sought a superman, will no longer feel disposed to find the mere appearance of himself, the non-man [Unmensch] , where he seeks and must seek his true reality.

The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.

It is, therefore, the task of history, once the other-world of truth has vanished, to establish the truth of this world. It is the immediate task of philosophy, which is in the service of history, to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms once the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked. Thus, the criticism of Heaven turns into the criticism of Earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics.

The following exposition [a full-scale critical study of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right was supposed to follow this introduction] – a contribution to this undertaking – concerns itself not directly with the original but with a copy, with the German philosophy of the state and of law. The only reason for this is that it is concerned with Germany.

If we were to begin with the German status quo itself, the result – even if we were to do it in the only appropriate way, i.e., negatively – would still be an anachronism. Even the negation of our present political situation is a dusty fact in the historical junk room of modern nations. If I negate powdered pigtails, I am still left with unpowdered pigtails. If I negate the situation in Germany in 1843, then according to the French calendar I have barely reached 1789, much less the vital centre of our present age.

Indeed, German history prides itself on having travelled a road which no other nation in the whole of history has ever travelled before, or ever will again. We have shared the restorations of modern nations without ever having shared their revolutions. We have been restored, firstly, because other nations dared to make revolutions, and, secondly, because other nations suffered counter-revolutions; on the one hand, because our masters were afraid, and, on the other, because they were not afraid. With our shepherds to the fore, we only once kept company with freedom, on the day of its internment.

One school of thought that legitimizes the infamy of today with the infamy of yesterday, a school that stigmatizes every cry of the serf against the knout as mere rebelliousness once the knout has aged a little and acquired a hereditary significance and a history, a school to which history shows nothing but its a posteriori, as did the God of Israel to his servant Moses, the historical school of law – this school would have invented German history were it not itself an invention of that history. A Shylock, but a cringing Shylock, that swears by its bond, its historical bond, its Christian-Germanic bond, for every pound of flesh cut from the heart of the people.

Good-natured enthusiasts, Germanomaniacs by extraction and free-thinkers by reflexion, on the contrary, seek our history of freedom beyond our history in the ancient Teutonic forests. But, what difference is there between the history of our freedom and the history of the boar’s freedom if it can be found only in the forests? Besides, it is common knowledge that the forest echoes back what you shout into it. So peace to the ancient Teutonic forests!

War on the German state of affairs! By all means! They are below the level of history, they are beneath any criticism, but they are still an object of criticism like the criminal who is below the level of humanity but still an object for the executioner. In the struggle against that state of affairs, criticism is no passion of the head, it is the head of passion. It is not a lancet, it is a weapon. Its object is its enemy, which it wants not to refute but to exterminate. For the spirit of that state of affairs is refuted. In itself, it is no object worthy of thought, it is an existence which is as despicable as it is despised. Criticism does not need to make things clear to itself as regards this object, for it has already settled accounts with it. It no longer assumes the quality of an end-in-itself, but only of a means. Its essential pathos is indignation, its essential work is denunciation.

It is a case of describing the dull reciprocal pressure of all social spheres one on another, a general inactive ill-humor, a limitedness which recognizes itself as much as it mistakes itself, within the frame of government system which, living on the preservation of all wretchedness, is itself nothing but wretchedness in office.

What a sight! This infinitely proceeding division of society into the most manifold races opposed to one another by petty antipathies, uneasy consciences, and brutal mediocrity, and which, precisely because of their reciprocal ambiguous and distrustful attitude, are all, without exception although with various formalities, treated by their rulers as conceded existences. And they must recognize and acknowledge as a concession of heaven the very fact that they are mastered, ruled, possessed! And, on the other side, are the rulers themselves, whose greatness is in inverse proportion to their number!

Criticism dealing with this content is criticism in a hand-to-hand fight, and in such a fight the point is not whether the opponent is a noble, equal, interesting opponent, the point is to strike him. The point is not to let the Germans have a minute for self-deception and resignation. The actual pressure must be made more pressing by adding to it consciousness of pressure, the shame must be made more shameful by publicizing it. Every sphere of German society must be shown as the partie honteuse of German society: these petrified relations must be forced to dance by singing their own tune to them! The people must be taught to be terrified at itself in order to give it courage. This will be fulfilling an imperative need of the German nation, and the needs of the nations are in themselves the ultimate reason for their satisfaction.

This struggle against the limited content of the German status quo cannot be without interest even for the modern nations, for the German status quo is the open completion of the ancien régime and the ancien régime is the concealed deficiency of the modern state. The struggle against the German political present is the struggle against the past of the modern nations, and they are still burdened with reminders of that past. It is instructive for them to see the ancien régime, which has been through its tragedy with them, playing its comedy as a German revenant. Tragic indeed was the pre-existing power of the world, and freedom, on the other hand, was a personal notion; in short, as long as it believed and had to believe in its own justification. As long as the ancien régime, as an existing world order, struggled against a world that was only coming into being, there was on its side a historical error, not a personal one. That is why its downfall was tragic.

On the other hand, the present German regime, an anachronism, a flagrant contradiction of generally recognized axioms, the nothingness of the ancien régime exhibited to the world, only imagines that it believes in itself and demands that the world should imagine the same thing. If it believed in its own essence, would it try to hide that essence under the semblance of an alien essence and seek refuge in hypocrisy and sophism? The modern ancien régime is rather only the comedian of a world order whose true heroes are dead. History is thorough and goes through many phases when carrying an old form to the grave. The last phases of a world-historical form is its comedy. The gods of Greece, already tragically wounded to death in Aeschylus’s tragedy Prometheus Bound, had to re-die a comic death in Lucian’s Dialogues. Why this course of history? So that humanity should part with its past cheerfully. This cheerful historical destiny is what we vindicate for the political authorities of Germany.

Meanwhile, once modern politico-social reality itself is subjected to criticism, once criticism rises to truly human problems, it finds itself outside the German status quo, or else it would reach out for its object below its object. An example. The relation of industry, of the world of wealth generally, to the political world is one of the major problems of modern times. In what form is this problem beginning to engage the attention of the Germans? In the form of protective duties, of the prohibitive system, of national economy. Germanomania has passed out of man into matter, and thus one morning our cotton barons and iron heroes saw themselves turned into patriots. People are, therefore, beginning in Germany to acknowledge the sovereignty of monopoly on the inside through lending it sovereignty on the outside. People are, therefore, now about to begin, in Germany, what people in France and England are about to end. The old corrupt condition against which these countries are revolting in theory, and which they only bear as one bears chains, is greeted in Germany as the dawn of a beautiful future which still hardly dares to pass from crafty theory to the most ruthless practice. Whereas the problem in France and England is: Political economy, or the rule of society over wealth; in Germany, it is: National economy, or the mastery of private property over nationality. In France and England, then, it is a case of abolishing monopoly that has proceeded to its last consequences; in Germany, it is a case of proceeding to the last consequences of monopoly. There it is a case of solution, here as yet a case of collision. This is an adequate example of the German form of modern problems, an example of how our history, like a clumsy recruit, still has to do extra drill on things that are old and hackneyed in history.

If, therefore, the whole German development did not exceed the German political development, a German could at the most have the share in the problems-of-the-present that a Russian has. But, when the separate individual is not bound by the limitations of the nation, the nation as a whole is still less liberated by the liberation of one individual. The fact that Greece had a Scythian among its philosophers did not help the Scythians to make a single step towards Greek culture. [An allusion to Anacharsis.]

Luckily, we Germans are not Scythians.

As the ancient peoples went through their pre-history in imagination, in mythology, so we Germans have gone through our post-history in thought, in philosophy. We are philosophical contemporaries of the present without being its historical contemporaries. German philosophy is the ideal prolongation of German history. If therefore, instead of the oeuvres incompletes of our real history, we criticize the oeuvres posthumes of our ideal history, philosophy, our criticism is in the midst of the questions of which the present says: that is the question. What, in progressive nations, is a practical break with modern state conditions, is, in Germany, where even those conditions do not yet exist, at first a critical break with the philosophical reflexion of those conditions.

German philosophy of right and state is the only German history which is al pari [“on a level”] with the official modern present. The German nation must therefore join this, its dream-history, to its present conditions and subject to criticism not only these existing conditions, but at the same time their abstract continuation. Its future cannot be limited either to the immediate negation of its real conditions of state and right, or to the immediate implementation of its ideal state and right conditions, for it has the immediate negation of its real conditions in its ideal conditions, and it has almost outlived the immediate implementation of its ideal conditions in the contemplation of neighboring nations. Hence, it is with good reason that the practical political party in Germany demands the negation of philosophy.

It is wrong, not in its demand but in stopping at the demand, which it neither seriously implements nor can implement. It believes that it implements that negation by turning its back to philosophy and its head away from it and muttering a few trite and angry phrases about it. Owing to the limitation of its outlook, it does not include philosophy in the circle of German reality or it even fancies it is beneath German practice and the theories that serve it. You demand that real life embryos be made the starting-point, but you forget that the real life embryo of the German nation has grown so far only inside its cranium. In a word – You cannot abolish [aufheben] philosophy without making it a reality.

The same mistake, but with the factors reversed, was made by the theoretical party originating from philosophy.

In the present struggle it saw only the critical struggle of philosophy against the German world; it did not give a thought to the fact that philosophy up to the present itself belongs to this world and is its completion, although an ideal one. Critical towards its counterpart, it was uncritical towards itself when, proceeding from the premises of philosophy, it either stopped at the results given by philosophy or passed off demands and results from somewhere else as immediate demands and results of philosophy – although these, provided they are justified, can be obtained only by the negation of philosophy up to the present, of philosophy as such. We reserve ourselves the right to a more detailed description of this section: It thought it could make philosophy a reality without abolishing [aufzuheben] it.

The criticism of the German philosophy of state and right, which attained its most consistent, richest, and last formulation through Hegel, is both a critical analysis of the modern state and of the reality connected with it, and the resolute negation of the whole manner of the German consciousness in politics and right as practiced hereto, the most distinguished, most universal expression of which, raised to the level of science, is the speculative philosophy of right itself. If the speculative philosophy of right, that abstract extravagant thinking on the modern state, the reality of which remains a thing of the beyond, if only beyond the Rhine, was possible only in Germany, inversely the German thought-image of the modern state which makes abstraction of real man was possible only because and insofar as the modern state itself makes abstraction of real man, or satisfies the whole of man only in imagination. In politics, the Germans thought what other nations did. Germany was their theoretical conscience. The abstraction and presumption of its thought was always in step with the one-sidedness and lowliness of its reality. If, therefore, the status quo of German statehood expresses the completion of the ancien régime, the completion of the thorn in the flesh of the modern state, the status quo of German state science expresses the incompletion of the modern state, the defectiveness of its flesh itself.

Already as the resolute opponent of the previous form of German political consciousness the criticism of speculative philosophy of right strays, not into itself, but into problems which there is only one means of solving – practice.

It is asked: can Germany attain a practice à la hauteur des principes – i.e., a revolution which will raise it not only to the official level of modern nations, but to the height of humanity which will be the near future of those nations?

The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism of the weapon, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses. Theory is capable of gripping the masses as soon as it demonstrates ad hominem, and it demonstrates ad hominem as soon as it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter. But, for man, the root is man himself. The evident proof of the radicalism of German theory, and hence of its practical energy, is that is proceeds from a resolute positive abolition of religion. The criticism of religion ends with the teaching that man is the highest essence for man – hence, with the categoric imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, abandoned, despicable essence, relations which cannot be better described than by the cry of a Frenchman when it was planned to introduce a tax on dogs: Poor dogs! They want to treat you as human beings!

Even historically, theoretical emancipation has specific practical significance for Germany. For Germany’s revolutionary past is theoretical, it is the Reformation. As the revolution then began in the brain of the monk, so now it begins in the brain of the philosopher.

Luther, we grant, overcame bondage out of devotion by replacing it by bondage out of conviction. He shattered faith in authority because he restored the authority of faith. He turned priests into laymen because he turned laymen into priests. He freed man from outer religiosity because he made religiosity the inner man. He freed the body from chains because he enchained the heart.

But, if Protestantism was not the true solution of the problem, it was at least the true setting of it. It was no longer a case of the layman’s struggle against the priest outside himself but of his struggle against his own priest inside himself, his priestly nature. And if the Protestant transformation of the German layman into priests emancipated the lay popes, the princes, with the whole of their priestly clique, the privileged and philistines, the philosophical transformation of priestly Germans into men will emancipate the people. But, secularization will not stop at the confiscation of church estates set in motion mainly by hypocritical Prussia any more than emancipation stops at princes. The Peasant War, the most radical fact of German history, came to grief because of theology. Today, when theology itself has come to grief, the most unfree fact of German history, our status quo, will be shattered against philosophy. On the eve of the Reformation, official Germany was the most unconditional slave of Rome. On the eve of its revolution, it is the unconditional slave of less than Rome, of Prussia and Austria, of country junkers and philistines.

Meanwhile, a major difficulty seems to stand in the way of a radical German revolution.

For revolutions require a passive element, a material basis. Theory is fulfilled in a people only insofar as it is the fulfilment of the needs of that people. But will the monstrous discrepancy between the demands of German thought and the answers of German reality find a corresponding discrepancy between civil society and the state, and between civil society and itself? Will the theoretical needs be immediate practical needs? It is not enough for thought to strive for realization, reality must itself strive towards thought.

But Germany did not rise to the intermediary stage of political emancipation at the same time as the modern nations. It has not yet reached in practice the stages which it has surpassed in theory. How can it do a somersault, not only over its own limitations, but at the same time over the limitations of the modern nations, over limitations which it must in reality feel and strive for as for emancipation from its real limitations? Only a revolution of radical needs can be a radical revolution and it seems that precisely the preconditions and ground for such needs are lacking.

If Germany has accompanied the development of the modern nations only with the abstract activity of thought without taking an effective share in the real struggle of that development, it has, on the other hand, shared the sufferings of that development, without sharing in its enjoyment, or its partial satisfaction. To the abstract activity on the one hand corresponds the abstract suffering on the other. That is why Germany will one day find itself on the level of European decadence before ever having been on the level of European emancipation. It will be comparable to a fetish worshipper pining away with the diseases of Christianity.

If we now consider the German governments, we find that because of the circumstances of the time, because of Germany’s condition, because of the standpoint of German education, and, finally, under the impulse of its own fortunate instinct, they are driven to combine the civilized shortcomings of the modern state world, the advantages of which we do not enjoy, with the barbaric deficiencies of the ancien régime, which we enjoy in full; hence, Germany must share more and more, if not in the reasonableness, at least in the unreasonableness of those state formations which are beyond the bounds of its status quo. Is there in the world, for example, a country which shares so naively in all the illusions of constitutional statehood without sharing in its realities as so-called constitutional Germany? And was it not perforce the notion of a German government to combine the tortures of censorship with the tortures of the French September laws [1835 anti-press laws] which provide for freedom of the press? As you could find the gods of all nations in the Roman Pantheon, so you will find in the Germans’ Holy Roman Empire all the sins of all state forms. That this eclecticism will reach a so far unprecedented height is guaranteed in particular by the political-aesthetic gourmanderie of a German king [Frederick William IV] who intended to play all the roles of monarchy, whether feudal or democratic, if not in the person of the people, at least in his own person, and if not for the people, at least for himself. Germany, as the deficiency of the political present constituted a world of its own, will not be able to throw down the specific German limitations without throwing down the general limitation of the political present.

It is not the radical revolution, not the general human emancipation which is a utopian dream for Germany, but rather the partial, the merely political revolution, the revolution which leaves the pillars of the house standing. On what is a partial, a merely political revolution based? On part of civil society emancipating itself and attaining general domination; on a definite class, proceeding from its particular situation; undertaking the general emancipation of society. This class emancipates the whole of society, but only provided the whole of society is in the same situation as this class – e.g., possesses money and education or can acquire them at will.

No class of civil society can play this role without arousing a moment of enthusiasm in itself and in the masses, a moment in which it fraternizes and merges with society in general, becomes confused with it and is perceived and acknowledged as its general representative, a moment in which its claims and rights are truly the claims and rights of society itself, a moment in which it is truly the social head and the social heart. Only in the name of the general rights of society can a particular class vindicate for itself general domination. For the storming of this emancipatory position, and hence for the political exploitation of all sections of society in the interests of its own section, revolutionary energy and spiritual self-feeling alone are not sufficient. For the revolution of a nation, and the emancipation of a particular class of civil society to coincide, for one estate to be acknowledged as the estate of the whole society, all the defects of society must conversely be concentrated in another class, a particular estate must be the estate of the general stumbling-block, the incorporation of the general limitation, a particular social sphere must be recognized as the notorious crime of the whole of society, so that liberation from that sphere appears as general self-liberation. For one estate to be par excellence the estate of liberation, another estate must conversely be the obvious estate of oppression. The negative general significance of the French nobility and the French clergy determined the positive general significance of the nearest neighboring and opposed class of the bourgeoisie.

But no particular class in Germany has the constituency, the penetration, the courage, or the ruthlessness that could mark it out as the negative representative of society. No more has any estate the breadth of soul that identifies itself, even for a moment, with the soul of the nation, the geniality that inspires material might to political violence, or that revolutionary daring which flings at the adversary the defiant words: I am nothing but I must be everything. The main stem of German morals and honesty, of the classes as well as of individuals, is rather that modest egoism which asserts its limitedness and allows it to be asserted against itself. The relation of the various sections of German society is therefore not dramatic but epic. Each of them begins to be aware of itself and begins to camp beside the others with all its particular claims not as soon as it is oppressed, but as soon as the circumstances of the time, without the section’s own participation, creates a social substratum on which it can in turn exert pressure. Even the moral self-feeling of the German middle class rests only on the consciousness that it is the common representative of the philistine mediocrity of all the other classes. It is therefore not only the German kings who accede to the throne mal à propos, it is every section of civil society which goes through a defeat before it celebrates victory and develops its own limitations before it overcomes the limitations facing it, asserts its narrow-hearted essence before it has been able to assert its magnanimous essence; thus the very opportunity of a great role has passed away before it is to hand, and every class, once it begins the struggle against the class opposed to it, is involved in the struggle against the class below it. Hence, the higher nobility is struggling against the monarchy, the bureaucrat against the nobility, and the bourgeois against them all, while the proletariat is already beginning to find itself struggling against the bourgeoisie. The middle class hardly dares to grasp the thought of emancipation from its own standpoint when the development of the social conditions and the progress of political theory already declare that standpoint antiquated or at least problematic.

In France, it is enough for somebody to be something for him to want to be everything; in Germany, nobody can be anything if he is not prepared to renounce everything. In France, partial emancipation is the basis of universal emancipation; in Germany, universal emancipation is the conditio sine qua non of any partial emancipation. In France, it is the reality of gradual liberation that must give birth to complete freedom, in Germany, the impossibility of gradual liberation. In France, every class of the nation is a political idealist and becomes aware of itself at first not as a particular class but as a representative of social requirements generally. The role of emancipator therefore passes in dramatic motion to the various classes of the French nation one after the other until it finally comes to the class which implements social freedom no longer with the provision of certain conditions lying outside man and yet created by human society, but rather organizes all conditions of human existence on the premises of social freedom. On the contrary, in Germany, where practical life is as spiritless as spiritual life is unpractical, no class in civil society has any need or capacity for general emancipation until it is forced by its immediate condition, by material necessity, by its very chains.

Where, then, is the positive possibility of a German emancipation?

Answer: In the formulation of a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, an estate which is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere which has a universal character by its universal suffering and claims no particular right because no particular wrong, but wrong generally, is perpetuated against it; which can invoke no historical, but only human, title; which does not stand in any one-sided antithesis to the consequences but in all-round antithesis to the premises of German statehood; a sphere, finally, which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all other spheres of society and thereby emancipating all other spheres of society, which, in a word, is the complete loss of man and hence can win itself only through the complete re-winning of man. This dissolution of society as a particular estate is the proletariat.

The proletariat is beginning to appear in Germany as a result of the rising industrial movement. For, it is not the naturally arising poor but the artificially impoverished, not the human masses mechanically oppressed by the gravity of society, but the masses resulting from the drastic dissolution of society, mainly of the middle estate, that form the proletariat, although, as is easily understood, the naturally arising poor and the Christian-Germanic serfs gradually join its ranks.

By heralding the dissolution of the hereto existing world order, the proletariat merely proclaims the secret of its own existence, for it is the factual dissolution of that world order. By demanding the negation of private property, the proletariat merely raises to the rank of a principle of society what society has raised to the rank of its principle, what is already incorporated in it as the negative result of society without its own participation. The proletarian then finds himself possessing the same right in regard to the world which is coming into being as the German king in regard to the world which has come into being when he calls the people his people, as he calls the horse his horse. By declaring the people his private property, the king merely proclaims that the owner of property is king.

As philosophy finds its material weapon in the proletariat, so the proletariat finds its spiritual weapon in philosophy. And once the lightning of thought has squarely struck this ingenuous soil of the people, the emancipation of the Germans into men will be accomplished.

Let us sum up the result:

The only liberation of Germany which is practically possible is liberation from the point of view of that theory which declares man to be the supreme being for man. Germany can emancipate itself from the Middle Ages only if it emancipates itself at the same time from the partial victories over the Middle Ages. In Germany, no form of bondage can be broken without breaking all forms of bondage. Germany, which is renowned for its thoroughness, cannot make a revolution unless it is a thorough one. The emancipation of the German is the emancipation of man. The head of this emancipation is philosophy, its heart the proletariat. Philosophy cannot realize itself without the transcendence [Aufhebung] of the proletariat, and the proletariat cannot transcend itself without the realization [Verwirklichung] of philosophy.

When all the inner conditions are met, the day of the German resurrection will be heralded by the crowing of the cock of Gaul.

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thevividgreenmoss · 6 years ago

Text

When Swann had said to me in Paris one day when I felt particularly unwell: “You ought to go off to one of those glorious islands in the Pacific; you’d never come back again if you did,” I should have liked to answer: “But then I shall never see your daughter again, I shall be living among people and things she has never seen.” And yet my reason, my better judgment whispered: “What difference can that make, since you won’t be distressed by it? When M. Swann tells you that you won’t come back he means by that that you won’t want to come back, and if you don’t want to that is because you’ll be happier out there.” For my reason was aware that Habit—Habit which was even now setting to work to make me like this unfamiliar lodging, to change the position of the mirror, the shade of the curtains, to stop the clock—undertakes as well to make dear to us the companions whom at first we disliked, to give another appearance to their faces, to make the sound of their voices attractive, to modify the inclinations of their hearts. It is true that these new friendships for places and people are based upon forgetfulness of the old; my reason precisely thought that I could envisage without dread the prospect of a life in which I should be for ever separated from people all memory of whom I should lose, and it was by way of consolation that it offered my heart a promise of oblivion which in fact succeeded only in sharpening the edge of its despair. Not that the heart, too, is not bound in time, when separation is complete, to feel the analgesic effect of habit; but until then it will continue to suffer. And our dread of a future in which we must forgo the sight of faces and the sound of voices which we love and from which today we derive our dearest joy, this dread, far from being dissipated, is intensified, if to the pain of such a privation we feel that there will be added what seems to us now in anticipation more painful still: not to feel it as a pain at all—to remain indifferent; for then our old self would have changed, it would then be not merely the charm of our family, our mistress, our friends that had ceased to environ us, but our affection for them would have been so completely eradicated from our hearts, of which today it is so conspicuous an element, that we should be able to enjoy a life apart from them, the very thought of which today makes us recoil in horror; so that it would be in a real sense the death of the self, a death followed, it is true, by resurrection, but in a different self, to the love of which the elements of the old self that are condemned to die cannot bring themselves to aspire. It is they—even the meanest of them, such as our obscure attachments to the dimensions, to the atmosphere of a bedroom—that take fright and refuse, in acts of rebellion which we must recognise to be a secret, partial, tangible and true aspect of our resistance to death, of the long, desperate, daily resistance to the fragmentary and continuous death that insinuates itself throughout the whole course of our life, detaching from us at each moment a shred of ourself, dead matter on which new cells will multiply and grow. And for a neurotic nature such as mine—one, that is to say, in which the intermediaries, the nerves, perform their functions badly, fail to arrest on its way to the consciousness, allow indeed to reach it, distinct, exhausting, innumerable and distressing, the plaints of the most humble elements of the self which are about to disappear—the anxiety and alarm which I felt as I lay beneath that strange and too lofty ceiling were but the protest of an affection that survived in me for a ceiling that was familiar and low. Doubtless this affection too would disappear, another having taken its place (when death, and then another life, had, in the guise of Habit, performed their double task); but until its annihilation, every night it would suffer afresh, and on this first night especially, confronted with an irreversible future in which there would no longer be any place for it, it rose in revolt, it tortured me with the sound of its lamentations whenever my straining eyes, powerless to turn from what was wounding them, endeavoured to fasten themselves upon that inaccessible ceiling.

But next morning!—after a servant had come to call me and to bring me hot water, and while I was washing and dressing myself and trying in vain to find the things that I needed in my trunk, from which I extracted, pell-mell, only a lot of things that were of no use whatever, what a joy it was to me, thinking already of the pleasure of lunch and a walk along the shore, to see in the window, and in all the glass fronts of the bookcases, as in the portholes of a ship’s cabin, the open sea, naked, unshadowed, and yet with half of its expanse in shadow, bounded by a thin, fluctuating line, and to follow with my eyes the waves that leapt up one behind another like jumpers on a trampoline. Every other moment, holding in my hand the stiff starched towel with the name of the hotel printed upon it, with which I was making futile efforts to dry myself, I returned to the window to have another look at that vast, dazzling, mountainous amphitheatre, and at the snowy crests of its emerald waves, here and there polished and translucent, which with a placid violence and a leonine frown, to which the sun added a faceless smile, allowed their crumbling slopes to topple down at last. It was at this window that I was later to take up my position every morning, as at the window of a stagecoach in which one has slept, to see whether, during the night, a longed-for mountain range has come nearer or receded—only here it was those hills of the sea which, before they come dancing back towards us, are apt to withdraw so far that often it was only at the end of a long, sandy plain that I would distinguish, far off, their first undulations in a transparent, vaporous, bluish distance, like the glaciers that one sees in the backgrounds of the Tuscan Primitives. On other mornings it was quite close at hand that the sun laughed upon those waters of a green as tender as that preserved in Alpine pastures (among mountains on which the sun displays himself here and there like a giant who may at any moment come leaping gaily down their craggy sides) less by the moisture of the soil than by the liquid mobility of the light. Moreover, in that breach which the shore and the waves open up in the midst of the rest of the world for the passage or the accumulation of light, it is above all the light, according to the direction from which it comes and along which our eyes follow it, it is the light that displaces and situates the undulations of the sea. Diversity of lighting modifies no less the orientation of a place, erects no less before our eyes new goals which it inspires in us the yearning to attain, than would a distance in space actually traversed in the course of a long journey. When, in the morning, the sun came from behind the hotel, disclosing to me the sands bathed in light as far as the first bastions of the sea, it seemed to be showing me another side of the picture, and to be inviting me to pursue, along the winding path of its rays, a motionless but varied journey amid all the fairest scenes of the diversified landscape of the hours. And on this first morning, it pointed out to me far off, with a jovial finger, those blue peaks of the sea which bear no name on any map, until, dizzy with its sublime excursion over the thundering and chaotic surface of their crests and avalanches, it came to take shelter from the wind in my bedroom, lolling across the unmade bed and scattering its riches over the splashed surface of the basin-stand and into my open trunk, where, by its very splendour and misplaced luxury, it added still further to the general impression of disorder. Alas for that sea-wind: an hour later, in the big dining-room—while we were having lunch, and from the leathern gourd of a lemon were sprinkling a few golden drops on to a pair of soles which presently left on our plates the plumes of their picked skeletons, curled like stiff feathers and resonant as citherns—it seemed to my grand-mother a cruel deprivation not to be able to feel its life-giving breath on her cheek, on account of the glass partition, transparent but closed, which, like the front of a glass case in a museum, separated us from the beach while allowing us to look out upon its whole expanse, and into which the sky fitted so completely that its azure had the effect of being the colour of the windows and its white clouds so many flaws in the glass. Imagining that I was “sitting on the mole” or at rest in the “boudoir” of which Baudelaire speaks, I wondered whether his “sun’s rays upon the sea” were not—a very different thing from the evening ray, simple and superficial as a tremulous golden shaft—just what at that moment was scorching the sea topaz-yellow, fermenting it, turning it pale and milky like beer, frothy like milk, while now and then there hovered over it great blue shadows which, for his own amusement, some god seemed to be shifting to and fro by moving a mirror in the sky. Unfortunately, it was not only in its outlook that this dining-room at Balbec—bare-walled, filled with a sunlight green as the water in a pond, while a few feet away from it the high tide and broad daylight erected as though before the gates of the heavenly city an indestructible and mobile rampart of emerald and gold—differed from our dining-room at Combray which gave on to the houses across the street. At Combray, since we were known to everyone, I took heed of no one. In seaside life one does not know one’s neighbours. I was not yet old enough, and was still too sensitive to have outgrown the desire to find favour in the sight of other people and to possess their hearts. Nor had I acquired the more noble indifference which a man of the world would have felt towards the people who were eating in the dining-room or the boys and girls who strolled past the window, with whom I was pained by the thought that I should never be allowed to go on expeditions, though not so pained as if my grandmother, contemptuous of social formalities and concerned only with my health, had gone to them with the request, humiliating for me, that they should consent to allow me to accompany them. Whether they were returning to some villa beyond my ken, or had emerged from one, racquet in hand, on their way to a tennis court, or were riding horses whose hooves trampled my heart, I gazed at them with a passionate curiosity, in that blinding light of the beach by which social distinctions are altered, I followed all their movements through the transparency of that great bay of glass which allowed so much light to flood the room. But it intercepted the wind, and this was a defect in the eyes of my grandmother, who, unable to endure the thought that I was losing the benefit of an hour in the open air, surreptitiously opened a pane and at once sent flying, together with the menus, the newspapers, veils and hats of all the people at the other tables, while she herself, fortified by the celestial draught, remained calm and smiling like Saint Blandina amid the torrent of invective which, increasing my sense of isolation and misery, those contemptuous, dishevelled, furious visitors combined to pour on us.

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove

#*#marcel proust #within a budding grove

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poetryofchrist · 7 years ago

Text

Jeremiah 8

Gloss choices are everywhere in every translation and they all register nuance in one direction or another. Take שׁאר for example (verse 3). I have searched for words that indicate remains, left over, residue, remnant, surplus etc. Two stems could easily overlap here: שׁאר: bereft (7), extra (2), residue (137), trace (9 - with a negative, i.e. no trace), still here (20). And יתר, advantage (11), remnant (2), left (in the sense of left over, 12), leftover (5), remain (133), rest (1), surplus (16). You can see how these two stems could have shared glosses, the very thing I have been trying to avoid to tease out differences. There is no 'theology of a remnant' in my translation. I have used the word only twice so far. In the KJV remnant is used for 3 or 4 unrelated stems more than 90 times. This may produce an interpretation in the host language (English) that is superfluous to the intent of the guest language (if indeed there was any such intent). There are other glosses as well for these stems. I'm not at all sure I have the senses perfect. But if I am consistent, at least I have some control over the changes required if I have my mind changed. In some ways, my teasing out of differences may not make much difference since the senses overlap in English as well. Leave/left/remain are multifaceted in themselves. I could have treated this group as a single group as I have done for words indicating movement, go/walk/bring/come. Equally, I have to forgive the KJV for their overlaps whether deliberate or accidental, for their translation philosophy included the deliberate exercise of variety in glossing specifically to avoid nearby repetition of sounds, this being a literary requirement of the style of the day (I remember this from reading years ago part of a preface to the KJV). What follows is not what I remember but it is close:

An other thing we thinke good to admonish thee of (gentle Reader) that wee have not tyed our selves to an uniformitie of phrasing, or to an identitie of words, as some peradventure would wish that we had done, because they observe, that some learned men some where, have beene as exact as they could that way. Truly, that we might not varie from the sense of that which we had translated before, if the word signified the same thing in both places (for there bee some wordes that bee not of the same sense every where) we were especially carefull, and made a conscience, according to our duetie. But, that we should expresse the same notion in the same particular word; as for example, if we translate the Hebrew or Greeke word once by Purpose, never to call it Intent; if one where Journeying, never Traveiling; if one where Thinke, never Suppose; if one where Paine, never Ache; if one where Joy, never Gladnesse, &c. Thus to minse the matter, wee thought to savour more of curiositie then wisedome, and that rather it would breed scorne in the Atheist, then bring profite to the godly Reader. For is the kingdome of God become words or syllables? why should wee be in bondage to them if we may be free, use one precisely when wee may use another no lesse fit, as commodiously?

They were not married to words. But as we have seen in Hebrew poetry, the repetition of sounds is a major component in Hebrew poetry, a repetitious word game rather than a word game of variety. If that thesis is true and I think it has merit, a translation in a host language that misses repetition is obviously in conflict with an original use of words in the guest language. So - removed from any absolutist position on the meaning of words, but allowing beauty, sound and music, let us continue with verses 4 and 5, a terse play on the word שׁוב, turn, return, occurring 5 times in fewer than 25 words (tch tch very bad style). Backsliding? Maybe. Maybe turncoat would work, but I think just turning and returning works here. JB misses this entirely and uses apostasy for שׁוב. Astonishing! The problem with the KJV stance is that it gives too much room for political and religious control over the sense of the text. Perhaps they were more married to the words of their cultural organization and privilege than they would like to admit or were even able to see. Fake news is not a new phenomenon.

Jeremiah 8 Fn Min Max Syll בָּעֵ֣ת הַהִ֣יא נְאֻם־יְהוָ֡ה יוֹצִ֣יאוּ אֶת־עַצְמ֣וֹת מַלְכֵֽי־יְהוּדָ֣ה וְאֶת־עַצְמוֹת־שָׂרָיו֩ וְאֶת־עַצְמ֨וֹת הַכֹּהֲנִ֜ים וְאֵ֣ת ׀ עַצְמ֣וֹת הַנְּבִיאִ֗ים וְאֵ֛ת עַצְמ֥וֹת יוֹשְׁבֵֽי־יְרוּשָׁלִָ֖ם מִקִּבְרֵיהֶֽם 1 At that time, an oracle of Yahweh, they will bring out the bones of the kings of Judah, and the bones of his nobles, and the bones of the priests, and the bones of the prophets, and the bones of inhabitants of Jerusalem, from their tombs. 3d 4B 54 וּשְׁטָחוּם֩ לַשֶּׁ֨מֶשׁ וְלַיָּרֵ֜חַ וּלְכֹ֣ל ׀ צְבָ֣א הַשָּׁמַ֗יִם אֲשֶׁ֨ר אֲהֵב֜וּם וַאֲשֶׁ֤ר עֲבָדוּם֙ וַֽאֲשֶׁר֙ הָלְכ֣וּ אַֽחֲרֵיהֶ֔ם וַאֲשֶׁ֣ר דְּרָשׁ֔וּם וַאֲשֶׁ֥ר הִֽשְׁתַּחֲו֖וּ לָהֶ֑ם לֹ֤א יֵאָֽסְפוּ֙ וְלֹ֣א יִקָּבֵ֔רוּ לְדֹ֛מֶן עַל־פְּנֵ֥י הָאֲדָמָ֖ה יִֽהְיֽוּ 2 And they will unfold them to the sun and to the moon, and for all the host of the heavens whom they have loved, and whom they have served, and after whom they have walked, and whom they have searched out, and whom they have worshiped. They will not be gathered and they will not be entombed, for compost over the face of the ground they will be. 3d 4C 53 22 וְנִבְחַ֥ר מָ֙וֶת֙ מֵֽחַיִּ֔ים לְכֹ֗ל הַשְּׁאֵרִית֙ הַנִּשְׁאָרִ֔ים מִן־הַמִּשְׁפָּחָ֥ה הָֽרָעָ֖ה הַזֹּ֑את בְּכָל־הַמְּקֹמ֤וֹת הַנִּשְׁאָרִים֙ אֲשֶׁ֣ר הִדַּחְתִּ֣ים שָׁ֔ם נְאֻ֖ם יְהוָ֥ה צְבָאֽוֹת 3 And death will be chosen over life for all the residue of any who are still here from this evil family, in all the places of any who are still here where I banished them, an oracle of Yahweh of hosts. 3e 4C 27 22 וְאָמַרְתָּ֣ אֲלֵיהֶ֗ם כֹּ֚ה אָמַ֣ר יְהוָ֔ה הֲיִפְּל֖וּ וְלֹ֣א יָק֑וּמוּ אִם־יָשׁ֖וּב וְלֹ֥א יָשֽׁוּב 4 And you say to them, Thus says Yahweh, Will they fall and not arise? If it has turned, then will it not return? 3e 4C 20 7 מַדּ֨וּעַ שׁוֹבְבָ֜ה הָעָ֥ם הַזֶּ֛ה יְרוּשָׁלִַ֖ם מְשֻׁבָ֣ה נִצַּ֑חַת הֶחֱזִ֙יקוּ֙ בַּתַּרְמִ֔ית מֵאֲנ֖וּ לָשֽׁוּב 5 Why does this Jerusalem people turn a perpetual turning? They are resolute in deceit. They will not return. 3d 4B 19 12 הִקְשַׁ֤בְתִּי וָֽאֶשְׁמָע֙ לוֹא־כֵ֣ן יְדַבֵּ֔רוּ אֵ֣ין אִ֗ישׁ נִחָם֙ עַל־רָ֣עָת֔וֹ לֵאמֹ֖ר מֶ֣ה עָשִׂ֑יתִי כֻּלֹּ֗ה שָׁ֚ב בִּמְר֣וּצָתָ֔ם כְּס֥וּס שׁוֹטֵ֖ף בַּמִּלְחָמָֽה 6 I paid attention and I heard. They did not so speak. There was no person sighing over its evil, saying, What have I done? Everyone turned to their own racing like a horse charging into the battle. 3e 4C 26 15 גַּם־חֲסִידָ֣ה בַשָּׁמַ֗יִם יָֽדְעָה֙ מֽוֹעֲדֶ֔יהָ וְתֹ֤ר וְסִיס֙ וְעָג֔וּר שָׁמְר֖וּ אֶת־עֵ֣ת בֹּאָ֑נָה וְעַמִּ֕י לֹ֣א יָֽדְע֔וּ אֵ֖ת מִשְׁפַּ֥ט יְהוָֽה 7 Even a stork in the heavens knows her appointed times, and a turtledove, and a crane, and a thrush, they keep the time of their coming, but my people do not know the framework of Yahweh. 3e 4C 26 11 אֵיכָ֤ה תֹֽאמְרוּ֙ חֲכָמִ֣ים אֲנַ֔חְנוּ וְתוֹרַ֥ת יְהוָ֖ה אִתָּ֑נוּ אָכֵן֙ הִנֵּ֣ה לַשֶּׁ֣קֶר עָשָׂ֔ה עֵ֖ט שֶׁ֥קֶר סֹפְרִֽים 8 How do you say we are shrewd, and the instruction of Yahweh is with us? Nevertheless, behold, for falsehood he acted, the stylus of the falsehood of scribes. 3e 4C 18 14 הֹבִ֣ישׁוּ חֲכָמִ֔ים חַ֖תּוּ וַיִּלָּכֵ֑דוּ הִנֵּ֤ה בִדְבַר־יְהוָה֙ מָאָ֔סוּ וְחָכְמַֽת־מֶ֖ה לָהֶֽם 9 Ashamed are the shrewd, dismayed, but they are removed. Behold, in the word of Yahweh, they refused, so what is shrewdness for them? 3e 4C 13 15 לָכֵן֩ אֶתֵּ֨ן אֶת־נְשֵׁיהֶ֜ם לַאֲחֵרִ֗ים שְׂדֽוֹתֵיהֶם֙ לְי֣וֹרְשִׁ֔ים כִּ֤י מִקָּטֹן֙ וְעַד־גָּד֔וֹל כֻּלֹּ֖ה בֹּצֵ֣עַ בָּ֑צַע מִנָּבִיא֙ וְעַד־כֹּהֵ֔ן כֻּלֹּ֖ה עֹ֥שֶׂה שָּֽׁקֶר 10 Therefore I will give their wives to others, their fields to those who dispossess them, for from the least and to the greatest, all are extorting gain. From prophet and to priest, all have done falsehood. 3e 4C 34 13 וַיְרַפּ֞וּ אֶת־שֶׁ֤בֶר בַּת־עַמִּי֙ עַל־נְקַלָּ֔ה לֵאמֹ֖ר שָׁל֣וֹם ׀ שָׁל֑וֹם וְאֵ֖ין שָׁלֽוֹם 11 And they have healed the shattering of the daughter of my people, with denial, saying, Peace, peace. And there is no peace. 3e 4C 19 4 הֹבִ֕שׁוּ כִּ֥י תוֹעֵבָ֖ה עָשׂ֑וּ גַּם־בּ֣וֹשׁ לֹֽא־יֵבֹ֗שׁוּ וְהִכָּלֵם֙ לֹ֣א יָדָ֔עוּ לָכֵ֞ן יִפְּל֣וּ בַנֹּפְלִ֗ים בְּעֵ֧ת פְּקֻדָּתָ֛ם יִכָּשְׁל֖וּ אָמַ֥ר יְהוָֽה 12 Were they dried up when they did abomination? even ashamed? They were not ashamed and their humiliation they do not know. Therefore they will fall with the fallen. At the time of their visitation they will stumble, says Yahweh. 3c 4B 9 33 אָסֹ֥ף אֲסִיפֵ֖ם נְאֻם־יְהֹוָ֑ה אֵין֩ עֲנָבִ֨ים בַּגֶּ֜פֶן וְאֵ֧ין תְּאֵנִ֣ים בַּתְּאֵנָ֗ה וְהֶֽעָלֶה֙ נָבֵ֔ל וָאֶתֵּ֥ן לָהֶ֖ם יַעַבְרֽוּם 13 For havoc I will gather them, an oracle of Yahweh. There are no grapes on the vine, and there are no figs in the fig tree, and the leaf withers, and I will give them what passes away. 3c 4B 10 29 עַל־מָה֙ אֲנַ֣חְנוּ יֹֽשְׁבִ֔ים הֵֽאָסְפ֗וּ וְנָב֛וֹא אֶל־עָרֵ֥י הַמִּבְצָ֖ר וְנִדְּמָה־שָּׁ֑ם כִּי֩ יְהוָ֨ה אֱלֹהֵ֤ינוּ הֲדִמָּ֙נוּ֙ וַיַּשְׁקֵ֣נוּ מֵי־רֹ֔אשׁ כִּ֥י חָטָ֖אנוּ לַיהוָֽה 14 To what end are we sitting? Gather yourselves and let us enter into the enclosed cities and be mute there, for Yahweh our God has muted us and has made us drink the waters of gall, for we have sinned against Yahweh. 3d 4C 23 23 קַוֵּ֥ה לְשָׁל֖וֹם וְאֵ֣ין ט֑וֹב לְעֵ֥ת מַרְפֵּ֖ה וְהִנֵּ֥ה בְעָתָֽה 15 We waited for peace and there was no good, for a time of healing, and behold, alarm. 3e 4B 8 10 מִדָּ֤ן נִשְׁמַע֙ נַחְרַ֣ת סוּסָ֗יו מִקּוֹל֙ מִצְהֲל֣וֹת אַבִּירָ֔יו רָעֲשָׁ֖ה כָּל־הָאָ֑רֶץ וַיָּב֗וֹאוּ וַיֹּֽאכְלוּ֙ אֶ֣רֶץ וּמְלוֹאָ֔הּ עִ֖יר וְיֹ֥שְׁבֵי בָֽהּ 16 From Dan was heard the snuffling of his horses. From the voice of the neighing of his mighty ones, all the earth quaked. And they came and they devoured a land and her fullness, a city and those settled in her. 3e 4C 23 17 כִּי֩ הִנְנִ֨י מְשַׁלֵּ֜חַ בָּכֶ֗ם נְחָשִׁים֙ צִפְעֹנִ֔ים אֲשֶׁ֥ר אֵין־לָהֶ֖ם לָ֑חַשׁ וְנִשְּׁכ֥וּ אֶתְכֶ֖ם נְאֻם־יְהוָֽה 17 For note me well sending among you snakes, anaconda that are without their conjurer, and they will bite you, an oracle of Yahweh. 3e 4A 22 9 מַבְלִ֥יגִיתִ֖י עֲלֵ֣י יָג֑וֹן עָלַ֖י לִבִּ֥י דַוָּֽי 18 Why would I smile? against me sadness, against me is my heart of melancholy. 3e 4B 8 6 הִנֵּה־ק֞וֹל שַֽׁוְעַ֣ת בַּת־עַמִּ֗י מֵאֶ֙רֶץ֙ מַרְחַקִּ֔ים הַֽיהוָה֙ אֵ֣ין בְּצִיּ֔וֹן אִם־מַלְכָּ֖הּ אֵ֣ין בָּ֑הּ מַדּ֗וּעַ הִכְעִס֛וּנִי בִּפְסִלֵיהֶ֖ם בְּהַבְלֵ֥י נֵכָֽר 19 Behold the voice of the cry of the daughter of my people from the land of those who are far off. Yahweh is not in Zion? Her king is not in her? Why have they grieved me with their graven images and alien futility? 3d 4B 25 16 עָבַ֥ר קָצִ֖יר כָּ֣לָה קָ֑יִץ וַאֲנַ֖חְנוּ ל֥וֹא נוֹשָֽׁעְנוּ 20 Harvest has passed, finished is summer, and we, we are not saved. 3e 4B 8 8 עַל־שֶׁ֥בֶר בַּת־עַמִּ֖י הָשְׁבָּ֑רְתִּי קָדַ֕רְתִּי שַׁמָּ֖ה הֶחֱזִקָֽתְנִי 21 Over the shattering of the daughter of my people I am broken. I mourn. Desolation resolutely holds me. 3e 4A 9 10 הַצֳרִי֙ אֵ֣ין בְּגִלְעָ֔ד אִם־רֹפֵ֖א אֵ֣ין שָׁ֑ם כִּ֗י מַדּ֙וּעַ֙ לֹ֣א עָֽלְתָ֔ה אֲרֻכַ֖ת בַּת־עַמִּֽי 22 Balm? Is there none in Gilead? no physician there? for why does it not come up? the health of the daughter of my people. 3e 4B 12 13 מִֽי־יִתֵּ֤ן רֹאשִׁי֙ מַ֔יִם וְעֵינִ֖י מְק֣וֹר דִּמְעָ֑ה וְאֶבְכֶּה֙ יוֹמָ֣ם וָלַ֔יְלָה אֵ֖ת חַֽלְלֵ֥י בַת־עַמִּֽי 23 Who will give my head waters and my eyes a fountain of tears, that I may weep day and night for the profaned of the daughter of my people? 3e 4C 12 14

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heckyeahlucilleballilovelucy · 7 years ago

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The Safe Nomad (5). Aline (Germany) and Sebastien (Canada): The Great Internet Conspiracy.

Before leaving Canada 20 months ago, Sebastien Pelletier joined a bunch of Facebook groups, including one for digital nomads curated by a certain Aline Dahmen from Germany. When he pressed the “request to join button”, he had no clue about what he was really getting into.

A few months later, out of sheer online serendipity, he met that very Aline on a beach in Southern Thailand. They talked shortly, mesmerized by how the internet brought them to exactly the same place at the same time, thousands of miles from home.

Then, a few months later they met again, this time, in Canggu, Bali, again by a very fortunate coincidence. A few hours before his flight to Singapore, Sebastien saw Aline on Facebook asking for accommodation tips in Bali. He could not believe his eyes and messaged her instantly:

“Are you in Bali?” “Yes.” “Me too! Let’s meet up!”

It was like the internet conspired to have Aline and Sebastien bump into each other on every island in South-East Asia until they developed the world’s first dating app for digital nomads.

They decided to take a stroll down the beach and, if you happened to be there on that evening, you could have taken them for just another couple of honeymooners enjoying the breathtaking sunset and making plans for the future.

And while the first half of your assumption would have been completely wrong – look, no holding hands, no kissing – the other half would have been spot on. Indeed, the two were making passionate plans together: based on Aline’s Facebook group, Nomad Soulmates, they were discussing the development of an app.

When questioned about the obvious discrepancy between the subject of the conversation and the proximity of a beautiful young girl during a glorious sunset on a fantastic Balinese beach, Sebastien’s defensive statement was short and to the point:

“I’m a geek. Tech is my favorite subject.”

From compulsive shopper to digital nomad. Sebastien’s becoming.

Up until 2014, Sebastien quenched his passion for technology by the means of compulsive shopping. Every funky electronic gadget that hit the market on a Monday was promptly delivered to his office in Montreal on Tuesday. His average crop was three parcels per week. He was making good money working as a software developer, but his finances could not keep up with his shopping addiction. He owed the banks 20,000 dollars and, because of his accumulating debt, he did not go on a holiday for 10 years.

This went on until one evening, his then girlfriend made him watch a documentary called Zeitgeist 3: Moving Forward.

Sebastien: “It was a turning point in my life. Later that night I took the decision to stop spending and pay off my debts. And for the next 6 months that’s exactly what I did. My office mates were shocked that no delivery boy was looking for me any longer.”

A month before settling his debt, Sebastien stumbled upon “The 4-hour work week”, Tim Ferris’s iconic best-seller which popularized the idea of making a decent living outside the 9-to-5 routine. It made Sebastien realize that the rich people are not prisoners to debt and that richness lies in experience and not in material possessions He decided to take one huge leap forward and live a location-independent life.

In July 2015, inspired by German blogger and digital nomad Johannes Voelkner, Sebastien booked a one-way ticket to Southern Spain. As soon as he arrived, he found himself surrounded by people who were living the life he dreamed of: working and traveling around the world.

He spent 3 months in Spain, then after a brief stay in Belgium he flew to Asia. 2 months in Koh Lanta, Thailand, 2 months in Bali, and then back to Thailand, where he intended to just pass through Chiang Mai. It took him 11 months. Then off to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and back to Bali, where he took that famous beach walk with Aline.

Getting the bug. Aline’s becoming.

Speaking of which, Aline’s story was completely different. Being 15 years younger than her partner in crime, she did not have much to leave behind. Right after high-school, she took a gap year and flew to New Zealand. She barely spoke any English back then, but quickly found a job as a nanny. (The family she lived with taught her the spotless elegant English she spoke throughout this interview.) She worked, she traveled, and met people from around the world. It was a fantastic year.

Back home in Germany she realized, for the first time in her life, what her real passion was: traveling. She could not re-adapt herself to a sedentary life. She broke her piggy bank open, bought a one-way ticket to Bangkok and went straight to the DNX conference.

It was networking at the conference that gave Aline her first jobs as a digital nomad, and it was precisely that conference that got her thinking of a dating platform for digital nomads.

Aline: “I noticed that most attendants were travelling alone and this made me think. They told me that it was hard for them to find someone as nomadic as they were. I saw a lot of potential in this insight and this led me into building my first “start-up”, the Nomad Soulmates Facebook group. It was a decisive point between going back to Germany and studying or trying to make things work remotely while traveling.”

The nomads she had met along the way encouraged her to learn online and develop new skills by the means of practical experience. Her eagerness to learn and her natural ability to connect with people turned her into a sought-after social media consultant. She now helps others manage their online communities.

World’s first dating app for digital nomads.

The online dating market is saturated with apps, but Aline and Sebastien believe that they have some real value to offer. Their website and application will employ cutting-edge technology and a fresh approach to networking. They work hard, they learn a lot and love every second of the process. Their primary and noble goal is to help nomads find nomads.

In the beginning, they went straight into app development for both iOS and Android. Then they realized that it would be more suitable to launch a website first, because the web was Sebastian’s primary area of expertise. They launched a website that is currently only available for users in Indonesia and Singapore. The website allowed them to immediately put out new developments and features and receive a real time engagement and feedback from their users.

Sebastien is in charge of the technical backbone of the project. Aline is the “people manager”, the heart of the 9000-strong Nomad Soulmate Facebook group. Due to her skills and passion, the group sees an abnormally high level of engagement; any post gets hundreds of likes and comments in no time.

Getting the best out of technology.

Sebastien: “Being a digital nomad is a different scenario from being on a permanent vacation after winning the lottery. Can someone be a sustainable nomad without technology? Probably not. Even people whose work is not directly dependent to technology – say, life coaches or yoga teachers here in Bali – use technology to find clients and increase exposure of their projects. If you want to maintain a nomadic lifestyle you cannot do it without at least a bit of technology.

Aline and I belong to different generations, but we both grew up surrounded by technology. And we have become dependent on it now. Take away our smartphones or shut down our social media channels and we’ll feel completely lost, at least for a while.

I have been quite critical of the fact that most big apps nowadays demand so much time and attention from their users. And while I understand that one cannot make money out of an app without driving traffic to it, some apps tend to become time sinks. I am thinking of a way to gamify this so that users will spend less time and concentrate more on what’s best and most useful from the technology at hand. “

Aline: “What I like about technology is that it empowers people to meet and connect. You meet someone online, have a chat, exchange a few ideas and maybe a year later you get to meet in person and maybe do something together, the way it happened with me and Sebastien. Even this interview would not have been possible without us getting in touch online first. I also like technology because it not only allows me to meet other people, but it lets me bring these people together as well. “

Productivity tricks.

Sebastien claims that the new lifestyle has changed him a lot, in the sense that he has more drive, more discipline and, consequently, a higher level of productivity and enjoyment with his work. I asked him to share his ‘secret’ to productivity. He agreed.

“Get up early and leave the house as soon as you can. Leave all distractions you might have at home and go someplace where there is nothing else for you to do but work. If you’re not sure what to work on, you’ll need to find that passion first. Once you’ve got that spark, you can re-ignite it at any time.”

What makes them do their thing, and feel protected?

Sebastien: “For me security is quite important because I’ve never had such a thing. I’ve been financially in the red for most of my adult life and I learned how to deal with it to the point that I’m almost comfortable with it. However, when I left Canada I had this big personal project in mind – which I still have – and this project is the centerpiece of my sense of security. It’s not the dating app, it’s something bigger. It’s my future and my safety net.

Security is a combination of not being stressed about money and the confidence that I am good at what I do and that there’s a strong demand for my skills.”

Aline: “There are two sides to security: financial and mental. Back in high school I lived in a bubble. I just did what the people around me were doing. When I escaped that bubble and went to meet travelers and digital nomads, it felt exciting leaving my comfort zone. I discovered that I could do dream much bigger than I thought. Once you’re out there, you start thinking outside the box and you stop limiting yourself.

What brings me a sense of security is the belief that my projects will achieve great success. I might sound crazy, but I do believe in a billion dollar app. Maybe this one, maybe the next. It’s this strong belief and a strong will that keep me going. My security resides in my optimism and in my ability to take things as they come in a positive and open manner.”

In case you missed our trip through Indonesia’s digital hubs, here is a quick recap of what has been going on until now:

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from HOTforSecurity http://ift.tt/2vSfeQ9

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