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lesewut · 1 year ago

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It is the time of the Reformation. For years, the philologist, theologian and humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam has been working on a Greek-Latin edition of the New Testament. In 1516, before Luther posted his theses, Erasmus published the edition, which Luther used for his German translation.

Erasmus of Rotterdam enjoys a high reputation in the scholarly world, Luther also admired him and wanted to have such a learned man as Erasmus on his side and they also shared certain criticisms, such as the papacy, their skepticism of scholastic theology, the doctrine of the sacraments, the cult of ceremonies and relics. Both are against the sale of indulgences, because "you just can not buy heaven." It is said that Erasmus laid the eggs that Luther hatched.

But Erasmus tries to remain relatively neutral, he is of the opinion that Luther's "storming and pushing" is counterproductive and that one can only improve the world with patience and restraint, he takes Jesus as an example. Erasmus does not see himself as a people's tribune, but as a representative and defender of science and repeatedly emphasizes that he would have placed himself in the service of science. Through his attitude, he wants to help the bonae litterae to bloom again. He criticizes the general contempt for schools and education and calls for more meaningful studies. But Erasmus of Rotterdam is not alien to life and also knows that most things cannot be changed so quickly because they are so stuck. Real change takes time and consistency, it needs good arguments that are well thought out and not brusquely fed by a feeling. A healthier approach to science is needed, because this tragedy arose from the fear of science and the stupidity of the monks. Because what you don't understand, you want to suppress and destroy, so that the Church "can undisturbed rule with their barbarism".

This Erasmus-Attitude can also be found in his famous work "In Praise of Folly". This satirical writing began when Rotterdam wrote a letter of dedication in 1498 to More, who was twenty years old at that time. The Latin title "Stultitiae Laus" or "Moriae Encomium" is a play on words, because the Greek word moría means "folly".

The writing style is compared to Lucian, a supreme irony alien to any didactics, averse to any moralization. It is said that Erasmus wanted to distract himself from the power struggles in the church with this writing and to motivate himself by dealing with a humorous topic. Half seriously, half jokingly, a philosophy of life is praised and Horace's saying "dulce est decipere in loco" is used as the principle of the world view.

It is not surprising, that this work is one of the most important of the Renaissance era and supported the Protestant Reformation to a large extent.

This edition is a facsimile of the Leipzig edition from 1781 and was published in 1918. Numerous engravings by Holbein adorn the book and depict the eulogy of the goddess of foolishness.

"If no one wants to introduce me," says the goddess of folly, almost snippy, "then I have to eulogize myself!"

And the goddess tells about her origin. About her father Pluto “who mixed all things holy and unholy together.” And her mother Methe, the fairest and liveliest of the nymphs. Her milk nurse is said to be the daughter of Bacchus and the carefree Apedia, who herself is descended from Pan. She even explains why the goddess of foolishness had to be a woman by saying that women would find all their pleasure in foolishness. The pair of opposites wisdom and foolishness runs through the entire text, sometimes to represent the "real wisdom" in foolishness and sometimes to represent the "most foolish foolishness" in wisdom.

“For if by chance some woman wishes to be thought of as wise, she does nothing but show herself twice a fool.”

Without her is no life and no love, because basically everything is based on the fact that man is foolish and that foolishness is something all too human. Folly favors love, which is itself more or less the result of projections and desires. And from whom else could one get the beginning of one's life and love than from the Goddess of Folly herself? This also explains the phenomenon why more intelligent people or people who consider themselves wiser than others, have fewer children: Because nature arranges it in such a way that these dry souls, who break their eyes with the night lamp, are also less fertile.

"Jupiter has mingled in a pound of passion scarcely an ounce of reason."

For whoever renounces passion, who is constantly at war with physical things, not only enjoys life more, he almost disappears from it. The goddess of foolishness explains this to us with the Latin word “de vita”, which means “away from life” as well as “avoid”. So every renunciation is not only hostile to life, one departs alive from life, since one fights stiffly against what could bring one refreshment. That is why the philosophers, especially the Stoics, are described as arch-fools, they are "more foolish than fools", in truth their wisdom is only folly and they disfigure themselves with the "paint of virtue". The deity of folly demands:

"Away with wisdom if you want to enjoy life!"

And points out that the heart of the wise is with sadness, and with their wisdom they only make themselves hated and suspect.

“But who are they that for no other reason but that they were weary of life have hastened their own fate? Were they not the next neighbors to wisdom? among whom, to say nothing of Diogenes, Xenocrates, Cato, Cassius, Brutus, that wise man Chiron, being offered immortality, chose rather to die than be troubled with the same thing always.”

But she was also the begetter of wisdom and faith, for out of her tottering and ridiculous play the philosophers emerged "in whose place are now those who were used to be called monks."

The clergy are scathingly criticized by the goddess, and the vaunted "Christian bliss" is portrayed as a kind of delusion. There are even "no fools more stupid than those in whom the flames of Christian piety burn brightly." The symbol of the lamb was not chosen in vain, the animal was not famous even in Aristotle's time. The tree of knowledge should be interpreted as proof that knowledge works like poison in our spirit and that the consumption of the forbidden fruit was not forbidden for nothing. The goddess of foolishness emphasizes that God's foolishness is better than human wisdom, and numerous passages from the Bible are interwoven to make it even clearer that man really does not and will not possess wisdom.

It is amazing how directly and critically Erasmus expresses his criticism here, his attitude is also clear in the Pope's criticism:

"As if there were more pernicious enemies of the church than ungodly popes, who by their silence let Christ be destroyed, bind him by selfish laws, profane him by forced interpretation, kill by a poisoned life. The Christian Church is begotten, strengthened and expanded by blood. Now, as if there were no Christ to protect his own in his own way, his cause is being pursued through the Shear. There is something so inhuman about war that it should be left to the wild beasts.”

With the most diverse human appearances in this world, the goddess shows how we often think we are wise and actually are fools. How we actually unlearn life, laughter and dally, both sources of youth and freshness, and become shy and unable to act. Foolishness favors friendships, it inspires writers and poets, money and fortune fly to fools and the owl of Minerva would prefer the fool one more. Without folly there is no art, no heroes and love can never mature.

"The wise man stays like the sun, the fool changes like the moon."

Through the moon we understand human nature, through the sun we understand God. So we shouldn't deceive ourselves and think we're clever, but enjoy life through silliness and not lose ourselves in high spheres that ultimately make us unhappy and sad because we, as human beings, are too limited to fully understand them .

Fools have a special privilege "to speak things that do not annoy one out of their mouths." Why is the fool the king's closest adviser? Why does his clothing resemble that of the king, down to the scepter and jester cap?

“A remarkable thing happens in the experience of my fools: from them not only true things, but even sharp reproaches, will be listened to; so that a statement which, if it came from a wise man's mouth, might be a capital offense, coming from a fool gives rise to incredible delight. Veracity, you know, has a certain authentic power of giving pleasure, if nothing offensive goes with it; but this the gods have granted only to fools.”

Likewise, people should not complain of their lot, the Scythian, who wishes to be a citizen of the blessed Land of Cockaigne, would have to come to terms with their meager existence. Children shouldn't grow up too fast "that's suspicious and unpopular". It is far more important to laugh "from which everything draws life" than learn "that Pythagorean Quaternio." The old folks are transformed by the Goddess of Folly, who leads the old to the spring of Lethe so that they can drink the drink of oblivion. The high age is compared to childhood, except that "second childhood is preferable to first childhood". The older a person is, the closer he is to childhood. Unwise dalliance brings amusement and foolish babble, relieves the mind of grief, makes us human, as Dostojevky wonderfully summarizes:

„Talking nonsense is the sole privilege mankind possesses over the other organisms. It’s by talking nonsense that one gets the truth! I talk nonsense, therefore I’m human.”

The archetype of the folly (and trickster) is also playing a big part in Jungian therapy for healing. As long as we lock ourselves from this juvenile spirit of joy, we can not touch our "Fisherking's wound" and get more depressive and unhappy. In Medieval and Rennaissance times, particularly in European courts, the concept of a fool was to serve the King as a truth-teller. The fact that the fool stood outside society, was certainly of great importance, as it allowed him to express concerns or offer advices without restrictive convention and politeness. During my researches, (inquiries into folly since may, has become a work for life), I've found a very interesting statement of Foucault in his work "Madness and Society", where he describes, that in the epoch of rationalism, craziness or madness (which can be considered as a characteristic of the fool) is not a illness, but a social construct, which was invented by psychiatry, to exclude or control deviant or undesirable people. Foucault claims that in the Age of Reason madness lost its original meaning as an expression of existence or resistance and was instead treated as an object of science and power. In the near future I will present further literary examples on the subject of foolishness. Among them I'm planning "The Idiot" by Dostoyevsky (Focus: why is the idiot "more human" than the others?) , "Don Quixote" (Focus: Living in a dream or dying of reality? Why I think that this book is one of the saddest + the danger of literature by feeding inadequate ideas, which lead to hunger for life and longing for phantastic adventures) and the legend of "Parsifal" (Main Topic: The fool represents the restoration of spiritual and physical harmony and the renewal of the kingdom, the symbol behind the wound of the Fisherking). Also, an extensive Jung contribution will explain the psychological meaning behind the archetype and I try to extract more examples from religion that illustrate the connection between madness and holiness. I want to end with a joke by Nasreddin Hoca (~ 13th century), who is the oldest and most famous satirist of Turkey. His stories often has a subtle humour and a pedagogic nature, turning unbelievable explanations ad absurdum.

„At dinner time, Nasreddin finds no meat on the table. He asks his wife, "What happened to the meat?" His wife replies, "The cat ate it." Nasreddin breezes into the kitchen, puts the cat on the scales, and discovers the cat to be weighing three pounds. Nasreddin quizzically questions the result, "If the meat I brought home weighed three pounds, then, where is the cat? And, if this happens to be the cat, then what happened to the meat?"

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froshele · 1 year ago

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Squirrel religion - both their absence of a public death concept and their social habit - can be easily understood if one knows one thing about squirrels, which is that the squirrel culture hero is a young male and/or large dominant boar who evades all the Big Deaths and defeats the Small Deaths, in various ways related to their tree-based cosmology.

This is in notable contrast to the fact that most of squirrel society, such as it is, is held together by the effort and mutual cooperation of sows. But be that as it may, squirrel-priests (always boars) don't talk about death, speak the names of the dead or acknowledge dying at all -- because to do so would be to lose points in Squirrelkind's game of chicken with the concept of "mortality" (particularly the most recent Big Death, "Vehicle"), which was begun at the beginning, and will only be done at the end.

Squirrel sows, of course, have a parallel chthonic tradition and a mystery death cult you come into at your first heat. They are widely thought of as intellectually inapprehendable and dangerous for that reason. This is why boars are dominant over sows in nearly every case except twice a year, when the sow in season, by a process not widely comprehended among squirrels, becomes only slightly larger and yet manifold more aggressive and respectable, and then somehow brings forth young.

Rat religion is both immensely life-affirming and immensely nihilistic simultaneously, with an attitude to death that can be summed up as "death works for a power we can directly speak to, and that power takes HR complaints".

Living saints among rats (impressively syncretic) are always either those who manage to evade shuffling off this mortal coil for a ludicrously long time, or those who amass much food to share and many social ties. Dead saints are usually martyrs (such as the benighted and politically hounded Whataburger Rebbe), whose impact is somewhat buoyed by death but is again proportionate to how cool they were in life.

The Whataburger Rebbe is remembered and there is a dumpster pilgrimage in hopes of his intercession with the Big Cheese (scriptural term) on one's behalf. The Martyr Prophetess of Columbus Circle has a much more niche cult, but not because rat religion has all that much sexism - actually, largely due to not having had many living descendants to eulogize her.

All rats hold of the cosmic Wheel, only of course to them it's not a thing that rolls along by itself, it's a thing they run in, seeing and knowing and sniffing and licking everything that the Power that Made the Wheel put into the Wheel, until they stop. When a rat dies that rat is born again, perhaps as a rat, perhaps not; if not as a rat, then maybe as prey or as a predator, and this too is a turn of the Wheel, a law of nature, a new role for one to inhabit and explore. There is no shame in it. There is no evil. All creatures great and small live in the Wheel, or perhaps in their own nested Wheellikenesses, and all creatures great and small must run.

This concept (shared among many species) is why in Manhattan (among other places) you can meet rats, cats, crows, raccoons and lawyers who all look at you in exactly the same way, and are all equally blasé about the rules of the road.

Mice, naturally, go to church (whichever one is the most important or the most like whatever Redwall had going on in their area, in that order of precedence). What else would they be doing? Oh, but only churchmice, and some churchmice are on an unending crusade against unchurchmice. It's a whole thing. You'll get it when you talk to more of them.

Due to centuries of cultural exchange there are a lot of similarities between the hamster religion and that of the chipmunks, both now being functionally death cults. The root of where they differ is how the two religions view this holy death.

To hamsters, death is an art form, an ever-ascending pillar of the strange and the grotesque. Hamsters seek beauty and uniqueness in death, venerating the most outlandish of the dead as saints: Our Lady of the Plumbing, Saint Tim the Blended, and Saint Ms. Cupcake Who Got Into That Barrel of Degreaser, to name a few. Through death, they connect with their god, whose immense corpse formed the world after choking to death on a stray asteroid. Hamsters will spend weeks planning their deaths and awaiting an opportunity to swan dive off this mortal coil.

Chipmunks follow a warrior’s religion. While hamsters embraced humanity as creators of new and exciting shapes and poisons, chipmunks never forsook their wild ways. Chipmunk culture idealizes the divine struggle: to face insurmountable odds and to die with honor. Only by throwing themselves under the wheels of a moving vehicle can they earn their reincarnation and escape the cruel jaws of the fox-god who awaits them in the underworld. Every chipmunk goes to their death secure in the knowledge that they have faced their fate a million times before and that they will face it a million times again.

Squirrel religion does not speak of death.

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largethingslargerthings · 1 year ago

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MEDITATIVE WEEK OF POETRY: JAMES ALLEN HALL

Some species mate, then decapitate. Some frogs never reproduce the same place twice. Some species film with fancy cameras their fucking. My father said my mother requested one night to be whipped by strangers. No species lack pleasure receptors in their ears. Some bees use sex as revenge, some as memory. Fell ponies never uncouple. Some sharks orgasm with their eyes so can never trust their seeing. My father said I can’t do it, sent my brother inside the porn store to buy what my mother wanted. Some call out to a god, others to excrement. I am not making equivalencies. Finches sing to seduce. Ornithologists theorize the same song also eulogizes if produced in a tree hollow. That this is not the saddest fact in all of zoology is zoology’s saddest fact. Unprompted, my mother told me she loved my father like a brother. Some mate for safety, to avoid sadness, to self-flagellate. Some say there, there as if pushing on a bruise. After her affairs, my father forgave his wife. For all species, desire is the most boring verb, yet they connive for it most hours. Some species of snake copulate in hopes they are another species altogether. Grunion bury their spawn in sand. My mother said she would have aborted me, but the clinic was closed. When whales abandon a grieving mother, she does not find kindness again. Some lives are taken down to salt, some to water. Some species invent facts about the living to explain the dead. I cannot fathom the bones I find in the woods posed themselves like this, though some species of grief find meaning in minutia, a mechanism for survival. It is hard to imagine a face for each skull.

#the adroit journal #meditative week of poetry #james allen hall #mwp #INHERITANCE AT CORRESPONDING PERIODS OF LIFE AT CORRESPONDING SEASONS OF THE YEAR AS LIMITED BY SEX

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rainreignrayn · 3 years ago

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Obliviate (Chapter 1: White-Gold, Ice-Cold)

She had lost sight of Harry and Ron.

There were too many people here, their black robes starkly contrasting with the golden chairs set up by the lake. Too many students, too many parents and aunts and uncles and cousins and ministry workers—it was a miracle Hogwarts had managed to conjure up that many seats. Even more were coming in through their loud, snapping portkeys, and a few came down by broomstick—all to pay their respects to Albus Dumbledore.

She had told Harry and Ron to wait for her by the courtyard so she could speak to Professor McGonagall, but she really should've thought twice about that. The professor was currently swarmed by ministry workers regarding the late headmaster's vigil, and there would be neither room nor time for Hermione to step in.

Turning around in exasperation, Hermione scanned the crowd for a cluster of red hair, hoping the Weasleys would help guide her. The courtyard was devoid of any mischievous presence, so she knew the two hadn't listened to her. Of course.

Hermione was not quite in the mood to listen to her professors eulogize the late headmaster right in front of their new one, unbeknownst to them that he be Dumbledore’s killer. Deciding to meet Harry and Ron later, Hermione began walking across the overflowing courtyard towards the hidden protection of the pillars, thinking it would be best to watch from afar. She climbed the short stone steps to the open walkway lining the yard from above and crouched down until she was shielded from view behind the parapet she leaned on. Gazing down on the wizarding families below, she finally found the Weasleys. All of them had come to bid farewell to Dumbledore—Arthur was speaking to Harry, Ron, and Ginny with an excited, out-of-place look in his eyes; Molly had her arms around Fred and George as she spoke animatedly with Bill and Charlie; Percy, daft arse as he was (though Hermione would never, ever say it out loud) was standing, back turned, in the shadow of Cornelius Fudge 50 metres away—as though he was never a Weasley.

Hermione closed her eyes for a brief moment, absorbing the sun and calming her racing mind. She would be leaving soon with Harry and Ron, and they couldn’t tell anyone—especially not their families. Neither one of them had the slightest idea of how long the hunt would take or where they would end up, and Hermione knew she needed to make a contingency plan should their… ‘trip’ extend into the summer (which was quite likely) but it was a low priority at the moment. The main issues at the forefront of her mind were getting through the day with the most respectable figures of the wizarding world right in her midst and finding a way out of Hogwarts that wouldn’t get them killed. Or worse.

Listening to the rumble of conversation, Hermione couldn’t help but feel this was the worst day for a funeral—especially for a wizard of stature such as Dumbledore. It felt as though no one was truly mourning, the sun was gleaming and the awful golden chairs amplified it, and any bright color only reflected—

Draco.

She would know that white head of hair anywhere, even if it was drenched in blood and dirt. Against the sunlight, she was able to make out the Malfoy trio just in between the rising and falling walls of the parapet opposite her. Even when they were dressed in the same robes as the hundreds of other wizards and witches there, they still stood out like a sore, beautiful thumb. One in particular.

Of course, Hermione couldn’t hear what they were saying, but it wasn’t likely to be anything related to the Dark Lord. Not when they were surrounded by the ministry’s entire workforce.

She did desperately wish she could hear his voice, though. With exams coming up, any class she’d had with him was silent and lecture-filled, for the most part. Her chest tightened at the thought of everything she’d miss—exams, end-of-year celebrations, him. Even though they don’t talk… she’d miss him.

There was such—such—a low chance of survival that she and the boys have made it an unspoken rule to never even address it. There was no knowing if or how or when Voldemort would find them after their acquisition of a horcrux—if they ever even found any. Even with Snape’s occluding lessons, Harry’s mind was in danger, and, in turn, everyone else. The idea of never seeing this school again, these people, her parents, was unimaginable but nearly inevitable.

Hermione’s train of thought was broken by a sharp, whispered “ Draco! ” nearby, and she whipped her head up, only to find a sea of glimmering black and gold. When that exclamation was returned with a growling “Get your hands off me,” Hermione realized her wish had been answered, and that the Malfoys had moved to the shade that her walkway provided below.

Listening intently (for informational purposes, of course, and not for the cadence of one specific boy’s voice), Hermione tilted her head a little further.

“Please, Draco, lower your voice,” she heard Narcissa Malfoy murmur.

“I just don’t understand why we’re here. Why’ve we willingly walked into a flock of bumbling ministry bores and—and blood-traitor Weasleys, for Salazar’s sake? Not that there’s a difference.”

Hermione was at awful odds with her mind, feeling like a traitor herself. Why was she defending this cruel boy in her head when he so outright condemns her family? Unsurprised but disappointed, Hermione told herself he must be speaking this way because of Lucius Malfoy’s presence. The snide, barbaric bastard.

She heard a rustle, followed by an, “I said, get—”

“Draco Malfoy,” Lucius muttered through audibly clenched teeth, “we are here for one reason and one reason only—because he told us to. If you’ve an issue with that, by all means, put your wand to your arm. Hell, use mine—”

“Lucius!” Narcissa gasped.

“—do what you want. Why am I not surprised you’re unable to follow the simplest of all orders after failing to execute the most important one? But what you absolutely cannot do is embarrass this family again. Weaken our name, again. Am I understood?”

Other than Hermione’s thudding heart, only silence gave a response.

“Am I understood, Draco?” This time, he spoke the words with a false, cheerful demeanor.

“Understood, Father.”

Hermione heard a soft click, the sound likely being Lucius’s cane finding the ground once more. “Good,” he replied calmly. “Come, now. We don’t want to look out of place, hiding down here.”

Their footsteps receded, and Hermione was met with the cacophony of her own mind.

How little he knew, thought Hermione, nails failing to pierce the stone beneath her.

And how little she herself knew, of the piercing grey eyes lingering on the bushy locks of hair flying against the wind, behind the shield of the parapet.

“Oi, ‘Mione, you seen the wanker anywhere?”

Hermione looked up from the novel before her on the polished wood table of the Great Hall and gaped at Ginny. “Pardon me?” To her knowledge, there were quite a few wankers everywhere. “Which house?”

Ginny looked as though she was trying to hold back a laugh, and it seemed to work as a deathly stare entered her gaze. “Ron,” she bit back. “Have you seen Ron?”

“What did he do?”

“Lots of things. Breathing, for one. Have you seen him?”

Hermione had not. She had last seen him in the Gryffindor common room a couple of hours ago, but Ginny was fine then. Whatever ‘breathing’ Ronald had done had happened between those hours, and he was doing right by hiding. Knowing her dearest, hot-tempered friend, it would be best for her to cool off before killing her brother who was about to go off on a suicidal mission with his best friends. “Yes, I have,” she answered brightly. He’s gone down by the lake for a w—”

But Ginny had already stormed off, and Hermione returned to her book.

She was unfortunately interrupted by Harry as he slid into the seat across from her. Hermione greeted him with a smile as her eyes drifted back to the story, not caring much to watch her best friend pile on more food than he could eat onto his plate.

Not that she was actually reading. No, Hermione (unbeknownst to others) had a habit of pulling out a book in front of people when she had other matters to attend to in her mind. She knew when to turn the page and where to let her eyes rest as her mind raced—not that her friends would notice. Brave and loyal they were, observant they were not.

The topic of interest that had Hermione preoccupied at the moment was a certain boy and his parents. There was little for her to analyze in this morning’s conversation, but all it did was further her belief that Draco was working against his will. He had to be. The Draco she knew, the one whose exhausted sigh broke the silent moments of the library’s midnight hours, couldn’t reconcile with the Draco that tried to kill Professor Dumbledore. The Draco that lived in the minds of everyone else. Like Harry.

Hermione glanced at Harry from the corner of her eye and watched him push the chicken around on his plate, a sullen expression blanketing his face. She frowned and closed her book shut, setting it gently on the bench beside her. Leaning forward on her arms, she asked Harry, “What’s wrong?”

He glanced up at her surprisedly, and after a moment too late he furrowed his brows. “What do you me—”

“—What is wrong, Harry?”

Harry visibly bit back a sigh and slumped his shoulders. He pushed his uneaten food to the side and set his weight on his arms, mirroring Hermione’s position. “Loads. There’s loads of things wrong, ‘Mione. You know, for starters—was it just me, or was everyone… not sad today? Or—or am I the one off? Shouldn’t the grieving period or whatever be longer? Especially for Dumbledore?” Hermione stared at her friend sympathetically, pushing her lips to the side as Harry kept ranting. “Everyone was smiling and talking and touching each other and touching me and I couldn’t, like, cry because no one else was and it was too sunny and the bloody Malfoys were there walking about and then—”

Hermione abruptly stood up, grabbing her bag and tossing her book inside. Harry stopped talking and watched as she picked up a napkin, placing on top of it a dinner roll and a bundle of grapes. Looking at him expectantly, she said, “Well? Aren’t you coming?”

“But the food—”

Hermione clicked her tongue. “You weren’t eating it anyways. Besides, this is most certainly not the place to rant about Malfoys. Let’s drop by the Owlery and visit Hedwig for a minute. No one goes up there, anyhow.” She held her hand out to Harry. “Come on.”

Harry gave her a small smile as he took her hand and brought himself up. They walked parallel to each other until they met at the end of the long Gryffindor table, and Hermione immediately gripped his shoulders and steered him away to the far left.

Harry jerked forward, trying to look back at her. “What are you—”

“Don’t turn,” she muttered with a lighthearted voice. “There’s awfully bright white hair that way. Keep moving.”

Harry began laughing as Hermione smiled and pushed him out of the Great Hall, far away from the stormy grey eyes that followed.

Back in the Gryffindor common room, Harry sat on the floor beside Hermione’s legs and practiced minor charms with his wand as Hermione finished her paper for Potions. Most of their friends had retired to their rooms, and the scattered few were milling about in low conversations. Harry slumped and made figures out of the crackling fire before him, thinking of the last time he had seen a friendly face in that flame.

Right as he grew bored and solemn with his thoughts, the charms doing nothing to soothe the rush in his head, Ron slipped in from behind the portrait and shut it swiftly.

Catching Harry’s eye, Ron raised his brow and flicked his gaze up towards the girls’ dormitories and back down to Harry. Harry understood immediately and sighed, shaking his head. No, Ginny was not in her room. Yes, she was still either prowling about the castle searching for her dimwit of a brother or concocting a plan to give him more brain damage to what he already had.

Ron groaned quietly and Harry could see he had given up on the little chase—he’d take whatever was coming. He had no other choice. Ron trudged towards his friends and flopped down on the floor beside Harry, right in front of Hermione’s elbow.

Which then proceeded to stab itself into the back of his neck.

“Bloody hell , Hermione! What was that for?” he cried.

“What did you do to your sister, Ronald Weasley? I—”

“What does that matter?” Ron whined. “Who ca—”

“ I care because I was supposed to spend tonight with her and now she’s been gone all evening looking for your stupid arse and you’re sitting here looking all sunshine-and-rainbows—”

“I am not sunshine nor rainbows! I am bloody winded— ”

“Sun, air, wind, what ever you are, you took another night with Ginny from me when you know our days are numbered so for the love of Godric, what did you do?” Hermione demanded, glaring hard.

Harry silently glanced between the two of them, brows crinkled. What did she—

His thought barely formed in his mind when Ron sighed just as Harry did a minute ago, mumbling, “I read her diary.”

Hermione choked on her breath as Harry just stared at Ron. “What?” he asked defensively. “I was bored. Be—”

“You were bored ?” Hermione cried, visibly distressed at Ron’s actions.

“Besides,” Ron continued with an emphasis, “It was a bloody awful experience. You should feel sorry for me, not her! Harry this, Harry that, oh, Harry’s so dreamy !”

Harry roughly elbowed Ron in the side, cheeks bright red and burning. “You’re foul, Ron—”

“—Foul isn’t nearly close enough,” Hermione raged, standing up abruptly.

“What’s got your fuse all lit, ‘Mione? We laugh at these things and now you’re acting all… mad,” Ron asked bewildered.

Harry watched Hermione shut her eyes and spin around, but she stood where she was, breathing deeply. “Hermione,” he asked hesitantly, “what did you mean when you said our days were numbered?”

Hermione let out a bitter-sounding chuckle and cast a quick Muffliato before either boys could blink. The common room was empty now, the fire behind them dying out. “What do you really think our odds of survival are, Harry?” She turned around and looked down at her friends, her anger dissipating into melancholy. “We’re leaving with no aid and no resources to hunt down bits of Voldemort’s crooked soul and no guarantee of survival. What do you think I meant by ‘our days are numbered’—”

Harry stood up to meet her at eye level, confounded. “I never asked you to come with me, Hermione!”

“Well, what did you think I’d do?” she replied furiously, gripping her wand. “Sit around here with Snape walking about while you two idiots run around the country? And I’m not saying I don’t want to go with you,” she stated firmly. “All I’m saying is we’re in the middle of a war. And I just wanted to spend time with Ginny.” Hermione directed the last part at Ron, who sat still, stunned by the exchange before him.

Wiping away a stray tear with the sleeve of her robe, Hermione mumbled, “I’ll be going for a walk. I’ll see you both tomorrow,” and silently left the common room.

The fire was dead now, and all Harry could do was stare at it.

Hermione was accompanied by only the muted thump of her shoes padding against the stone floors, echoing along the dim corridors as she headed to the seventh floor. She was hoping to have caught a flash of long red hair on the way to her destination, but she knew it wasn’t likely. There was a good chance Ginny was with Luna in the Ravenclaw dormitories, and the thought made Hermione feel all the more sullen.

Perhaps she shouldn’t have bursted at Ron (and Harry) the way she did, but she needed it. She had been treading shallow waters every day, backing up just enough each time to prevent herself from falling in the deep end—but she wouldn’t be able to hold back forever. Not that she’d ever admit it because she was somewhat polite and those two boys were her best friends, but she couldn’t help but feel used at times. She had spent the past two weeks reading and researching up on anything and everything that could help them the minute they left Hogwarts—all while Harry sat and stared into space and Ron ran around getting on everybody’s nerves. She doubted they were even aware of how much they needed to know and prepare for the hunt.

Hermione winced at her internal monologue as she climbed the steps up to the Astronomy Tower, feeling insensitive and ungrateful. After all, they all had different coping mechanisms. Harry had been so close to Dumbledore and all he likely felt now was a void that was only occupied by his friends. Ron, for the love of Godric, couldn’t take anything seriously for a single minute—or refuses to as a diversion. Hermione even threw herself into the nearest stack of books for her own distraction—so who was she to judge?

She leaned against the heavy wooden door in front of her, turning the brass knuckle as she pushed it open. Right as the door gave way, Hermione heard a scuffle as hushed whispers came to a stop. She saw the silhouettes of three figures in the muted moonlight but couldn’t make out any of them, but as one of them shifted towards the door—

—she saw his bright contrasting hair.

Pretending to not recognize him by hair and shadow only, Hermione pulled out her wand and asked strongly, “Who’s there?”

She heard a muttered Lumos and stood face-to-face with Draco Malfoy, Theo Nott, and Blaise Zabini.

rainreignrayn on ao3

#sorry if some sentences seem weird #there are supposed to be italics #dramione #draco #hermione #blaise #harry potter #draco malfoy #morally grey hermione #theo nott #ao3 #dramione fandom have you read this #dramione fanfic #dramione fanfiction #dhr #rainreignrayn #obliviate #raynwrites

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piratekenway · 1 year ago

Note

Ezio makes Arno show off the Phantom Blades to him so he can sketch it in a notebook. yanno, just in case he runs into Leonardo, so he can present it to him and watch Leonardo be like OH!!! this is so cool!

meanwhile

Evie: that was a special case! Edward: just hand over the bloody rope spools— Jacob: oh come on, Kenway, it gets us up places faster! Edward: you can climb like the rest of us. hand over the ropes.

Aveline and Edward occasionally leaning over and rooting for their little fleet to expand across the Atlantic. whenever they lose a ship in a ship battle Aveline holds a little funeral for it and Edward eulogizes the poor ship, even tho technically the thing never actually existed. Edward does ask her once or twice if she wants to head out and take a few ships for the fleet minigame since hey, look, the Jackdaw/Aquila fusion sitting in the harbor over there would make mincemeat out of any other ship, with its combined capabilities.

“I bet she might even be able to take on El bloody Impoluto like this,” he says.

Aveline is just like, hmmm. you know what. I’ll take that challenge. which is probably what they get up to once the twins, Jayadeep and Arno are off to check on their simulations and Edward’s sure that everyone on Great Inagua will behave themselves. Ezio swears that they all will! Altair bets they won’t. Desmond is just glad for the opportunity to learn shit and also incidentally bottle up all his incredibly complicated feelings and the existential crisis he’s having at the moment. give him tasks to do! like learn how to hunt!

oh DEF. I like to think the degree of corruption varies based on like, how willing somebody would be anyway to listen to Juno. someone like, say, Adé or Lydia or Elise would have it the worst bc Juno has to really work on them, but somebody like Roth doesn’t get corrupted as much. he’d probably be the Krauser of this whole mess now that I think about it—fully aware of what’s going on, reveling in the power and the chaos. Jacob is gonna have such a bad time!

the idea of Juno building her own little group of corrupted Assassins and Templars and co. to go against the gang is very fun and angsty to me! even better is I think the idea that a few of the Assassins have two of their loved ones to deal with, bc Juno is covering as many angles as possible, and in at least one case (ie Ezio) she has a deep grudge. hell, she’d have a grudge against Edward since he killed her husband one time, which means Ade and Mary! much to Ed’s deep consternation. Connor gets Achilles and Kanen'tó:kon.

but they don’t find this out immediately. this is how they find out that something’s terribly off here: the lil chaotic quartet are just heading back to the Café Theatre when Arno catches sight of Elise, which is completely insane, bc Elise by this time is dead. so he chases after her, and the London Assassins run after him, only for Elise to lead them into an ambush by Blighters, which is the biggest sign there is that something is Very Wrong here, bc this is the wrong century and the wrong country for the Blighters.

Arno calls out at Elise, like, Elise, it’s me! it’s just me! these are friends of mine, what’s wrong, please tell me—

and when she turns around he sees that there’s a glow to her eyes that is NOT good. when she moves there’s something strange, like the animation is lagging a little. and she says something like, why couldn’t you let me die? why couldn’t you let me go?

and they have to quickly run for it for some reason, maybe there’s a Blighter carriage riding up to try and kill them, and in the process Jayadeep finds a server bridge that leads back to Great Inagua but it’s not stable enough to take all four of them. so they push Evie through with a warning: someone’s in the Assassin servers, pouring poison into their friends’ ears. they’ve got Elise. there’s Blighters in Paris, which doesn’t bode well. find us in Russia, whoever it is likely doesn’t have a foothold there.

Evie delivers this message, and Desmond immediately clocks who it is: Juno. but it doesn’t make sense! she was dead last he checked. and Connor, frowning, mentions that he and Ezio and Altair had compared experiences in rescuing him and Ezio had mentioned that he and Shay were possessed, briefly, by a Precursor’s spirit. so then Desmond is like OH FUCK, we have to rescue the guys! FUCK. shit. Aveline and Edward are still out there, fuck—SHAY. HEY, CORMAC.

“what?” says Shay, briefly torn away from sketching out a diagram of how a shrapnel grenade works for Ezio to take to Leonardo if he finds him.

“where would you dock the Morrigan usually when you weren’t using her to do shit for the Templars?” Desmond asks.

“uh,” says Shay, racking his brain a bit for his most visited harbor. “the New York harbor. why?”

“you mean to find Edward and Aveline and warn them of the danger,” Ratonhnhaké:ton realizes. (Shay: what danger???) they can’t fast travel to the Jackdaw—there’s no way to fast travel to the open goddamn sea and they don’t actually know where they’ve gone, so stealing the Morrigan it must be. should be a piece of cake!

and then the 1700s America era gang + Desmond get a portal open to New York and drop right in, and, uh.

It Is Not A Piece Of Cake.

the post is getting Too Long on my blog and it’s breaking my poor phone so. WHEE. new one!

gang sails off into the distance! and by “distance” I mean they’re high-tailing it into the Assassin servers in order to regroup and recuperate and figure out what the fuck to do now since. well. hey, they retrieved Desmond and they’ve kept him safe! uh. now what. if there were other Assassins’ memories in Abstergo, how long until they gain sentience as well? and how the fuck did Desmond and Jacob find a movie projector on the ship?

Desmond is still kind of reeling from everything that’s just happened, and to his surprise, despite the whole awkwardness surrounding Uh Fuckin Everything, the Kenways are willing to take him in, altho Edward somewhat morbidly jokes that their dysfunctional family being an improvement over his is really kind of sad when he thinks about it. then he offers to let him take a turn at the wheel—he needs to go see what they’ve done to the captain’s cabin anyway, he wasn’t able to since the collision and it’s probably messed with a few things.

they do need a base to operate out of for the time being. Davenport Manor is suggested, then somewhat reluctantly shot down bc of the two Templars around who are immediately like yeah uh No. Café Theatre is too cramped, although in a pinch it could do. the Frye twins’ train has little to offer in the way of bedrooms. Monteriggioni is considered and makes it into a top five list, only losing bc an entire town is a little too big and prone to glitches. (Desmond is a little peeved about it.) eventually everyone settles on finding a version of Great Inagua in the Assassin servers and regrouping there so they can figure out their next move. and maybe Edward is a little bit smug over it.

I do like the idea of Desmond teaching the gang how to really break shit in Abstergo, like—Juno is still in there, and there’s a possibility there might be more sentient data representations of dead Assassins (and dead Templars) rolling around now in the servers. Ezio shudders to think of Juno at the same time that Shay does, and they’re both concerned about the idea of Juno being able to simply possess somebody, and if she’s able to do that in the digital realm, there’s the lingering possibility of her being able to do that to an actual flesh and blood person. which nobody wants! so that’s on their priority list. and also all the other possibly-sentient people who might be running around the servers.

Arno and the twins and Henry listen to all of this, then sit in contemplation. then all three of them are like. oh shit we have to check on our simulations bc Lydia and Elise might also be gaining sentience and god KNOWS what they’re doing right now without us. who wants to come with, we’ve got spare clothes for you. (aka: how to justify the legacy outfits lol.)

The “Too Long Post” which was about the playable characters in Abstergo’s games gaining sentience for easy reference. (And considering we ended it after they got away, we can count that as Arc 1 XD)

Honestly, I think the only valid locations for their homebase would be the Great Inagua or Davenport Homestead because they also need to park their ship (depending on who you ask, it’s either called ‘Aquila’ or ‘Jackdaw’) and the Seine river would be hard to navigate while the Thames is chock-full of other ships and boats and the moving train means they can’t always get to the ship quickly. Also, they all try to fit in the mansion that Edward had ‘commandeered’ but it becomes clear that there is a division. Altaïr, Ezio and Ratonhnhaké:ton took the rooms nearest to Desmond. Haytham took the room furthest away from everyone and Shay took the room to his left. Shao Jun took the empty room nearest to Ezio while Aveline took the empty room nearest to Ratonhnhaké:ton. Jacob’s the only one who went ‘whichever room is free’ and Arno took the room furthest away from Shay which sorta put him between Jacob and an empty room that Evie took for herself. Jacob joked of Jayadeep just sharing a room with Evie so he took the room on the other side of Jacob instead, making Jacob roll his eyes. Edward just took his old room (which was the largest room). So… they might be in this together but they’re definitely not exactly the bestest of allies at the moment.

Desmond taught them what he knew, things he didn’t know when he was alive but he just… knew once he ‘woke up’. He doesn’t even know if these skills came from his memory of Clay or from his memory of Dionysus (holy shit, his Isu ancestor was the god of wine and debauchery? What the fuck???) but he wasn’t going to reject such a boon. He’s quiet about his life though, only sharing a bit if anyone asked about what they saw.

And the only one who asked was a worried Shao Jun because Shay was keeping his distance and the others either didn’t have such a bad memory to watch (Aveline, Evie and Jayadeep) or didn’t even see any memory (Jacob and Arno).

The ones connected to Desmond though… Desmond told them everything. Even Edward who was just in the room with the three people who had the biggest urge to find Desmond and Haytham who Edward believes had been affected just as much by the time they started to piece Desmond back together. Edward provided the alcohol back then (although Altaïr did not partake) and they finished more than five bottles of Edward’s hardest liquor. He was especially worried for Haytham who grabbed an entire unopened bottle and just started topping his glass with it and ended up finishing it and still requesting his glass to be filled afterward.

Are we talking about the Juno in Desmond’s dataspace or the real Juno in digital space? Because if it’s the real Juno and this is set after Syndicate BUT before the comics where she died, then Juno is out in the real world (which would give us an excuse to have our sentient Assassins travel into other corners of the internet XD).

However, I do like the idea that they’ve unintentionally created Juno 2.0 from Desmond’s memory of her (and also a bit of Ezio and Ratonhnhaké:ton’s memories). This also gives Ratonhnhaké:ton a reason to want to take her down since she… technically didn’t lie but she absolutely used Ratonhnhaké:ton and gave him the short stick in that deal. (With her past misgivings to Ratonhnhaké:ton, Edward would be on board and maybe even Haytham once he learned how everything had been set into stones because of the path the Isus have chosen the world to walk to, including how the Kenway family ended).

You know what would be fun? If they made the grievous assumption that the data are gaining sentient while they were gone BUT the real reason why they’re slowly gaining sentient is because all sentient data (them) are still connected to the virus that started this all. Now, the virus was fast-acting in Abstergo because it was meant to fuck shit up there but the virus also have a failsafe that makes it dormant when it knows it’s no longer in Abstergo’s servers. But… the virus itself might be dormant but constant exposure to it will still affect data.

… wanna make Arno have a bad time once more? Élise is slowly waking up and she starts remembering…

The many times Arno repeated her death, together with the pain and rage that consumed her during those days, not knowing Arno repeated that memory over and over again to try and save her.

You gotta wonder… if Élise would even be happy to see Arno once more when her most lived memory was her death.

(Also… Lydia would be fine being sentient since she loves her grandaunt and granddad who raised her but… remember… Jack the Ripper is also in the servers).

#meanwhile edward and aveline are having a grand old time baiting a legendary ship #while jacob and henry and arno are frantically using the paris glitches to dive into different time periods #jacob is particularly in denial bc the presence of blighters means roth is around. but he cannot think about roth #is desperately trying not to think about roth #focus on arno panicking about elise. focus on henry worrying about london. focus on that and not about #this man who called him brave once. this man he had to kill.#he will deal with that later but they need to survive.#assassin's creed

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kinetic-elaboration · 3 years ago

Text

September 29: 3x09 The Tholian Web

Today’s episode, The Tholian Web, was completely new to me and I came in with no expectations at all. I wasn’t sure about it at first but ultimately I really liked it!

In uncharted territory looking for lost ship the Defiant. Space appears to be breaking up. Idk but for some reason this sounds very familiar.

Like truly I don’t know what this is reminding me of but hasn’t space broken up before?

And now there’s a mysterious object! Nothing is going Kirk’s way today at all.

“Fascinating.” / “Explain.” Truly the root of this relationship.

It’s the Defiant! Looking ghostly.

Uhura’s on the case already. You don’t need to tell her how to do her job.

Scotty and Sulu looking badass together.

Conveniently, it’s another constitution class, allowing all the sets to be reused. (Though also I do think it makes sense only a large ship like that would be in uncharted space.)

Look at them in those suits. They look like they’re going to the grocery store in May 2020.

How do they know this isn’t an illusion? Because “we can see it, but the sensors don’t pick up anything” screams “illusion” to me. I wouldn’t want to beam into open space!

The triumvirate + Chekov, fourth wheeling again. (My mom suggested he’d be incapacitated soon, which is fair--he IS the red shirt in this scenario.)

All of this is feeling very familiar--missing ship, unusual space phenomenon, people going mad--but I'm not sure if it's repetitive or classic.

NO mutiny ever? That seem unlikely. Also didn’t Spock literally commit mutiny? Chekov would appreciate knowing this.

Kirk manages to look intense even through the space suit.

I find it really weird he doesn’t know the captain of this ship. Like, first off, he knows everyone, and second, there only about 12-14 constitution class vessel Captains so I really do think they know each other.

“Spock, stay with me.” Don’t have to tell him twice.

Lol the ship looks so silly just...drifting away. Adorable, but silly.

Seeing an Asian man in sick bay reminds me how few Asian people there are in Starfleet. Like... 1.

“What the devil?” That’s a Southern man there.

Is the ship actually dissolving or is it an ILLUSION? (It’s actually dissolving.)

Uh, the transporter’s not working? That’s not good.

I love how Scotty hears that and immediately abandons the bridge, like there is NO other man for the job.

O’Neil’s face when Kirk asks to be beamed aboard is hilarious. Human embodiment of the :O emoticon.

“You too, Spock.” He delays ordering Spock back to the ship because he KNOWS Spock’s going to argue.

“Completing the data set” yeah okay. He just doesn’t want to leave Jim alone. Especially in the extremely suspicious circumstances of there being 4 people and 3 transporter spots.

He’s vanished!

Spock is NOT having this.

The fabric of space is very weak here. Sounds legit. And there are many alternate dimensions that are very close at hand. So in other words... Kirk is literally stuck in an AU right now.

This is sorta like The Alternative Factor but way better.

You know it’s serious when they break out the fish eye lens.

When Bones rushed in, I was expecting him to sedate Chekov but Spock has it covered.

I feel like Spock is extremely concerned for Chekov here. Like it’s subtle, but just the attention he’s paying to him. And Sulu is obviously very concerned too.

His “environmental unit” only has so much oxygen. What a great name for a fancy spacesuit.

Spock will not believe Jim is dead!! Never. (This is the plot of the whole episode in 8 words essentially.)

That’s an alien!

“According to the Federation, this area is free space.” ...Okay, that sounds a little colonialist. In his defense, he doesn’t press the point. He basically says, kay, we’ll go as soon as we’re finished rescuing.

And I appreciate the Tholian’s respect for that even though surely he must feel gaslit by Spock--rescuing WHO there are NO other ships??

Also I like the look of the alien.

Nifty lab equipment there.

MCCOY FIGHT SCENE.

Wow that orderly was easily disabled lol. I guess Chapel hypoed him but it really looked like she just tapped his shoulder and he fell.

Hmm, there are still 30 minutes left so something tells me this Kirk rescue mission won’t work.

Captain Kirk is not in his designated area. I repeat Captain Kirk has wandered away from his designated area.

The space was disturbed by the Tholians. I guess they weren’t factored into the delicate calculations.

Something about this exchange really screams Southerner meets Alien. Like more than most McCoy and Spock exchanges.

You can tell Spock is thinking about this whole "nothing’s being transmitted, it’s just the nature of space; everyone's already sick" thing but also not caring because CAPTAIN KIRK.

Now they’re being fired upon! A lot is happening here.

“Renowned Tholian punctuality” lol. Always a sense of humor on this one.

Spock’s face when Sulu questioned his order was 100% “Did I stutter?”

“I know you don’t like to use the phasers.” Because he’s a pacifist.

Well he changed his mind on those phasers fast enough.

“You’ve lost Jim.” UM no I think NOT.

Everything happens so much.

“That is the mark of a starship Captain like Jim.” I mean Spock is no Jim but there’s no need to be rude about it

“Doctor, go to your room and do your homework.”

Aw, the ships are kissing.

Now they look like little weaving shuttles. Adorable.

Hmm, it IS a web. Appropriately named episode.

“We shall not see home again.” Lol Spock way to be the Most Dramatique as always.

Tholian web screensaver Windows 98.

No, not a funeral!!

“This service requires my attention, Mr. Spock.” Crying emoji.

(I’m with Spock in almost everything in this ep but come on, you can’t ban McCoy from Kirk’s funeral, that’s just rude.)

This seems more like an assembly than a funeral tbh.

[agonizing scream] is also how I feel about Kirk “dying” and that’s why Generations isn’t real.

AOS Kirk would 100% approve of a brawl at his funeral.

Sulu and Uhura <3

“Each of you must evaluate the loss in the privacy of your own thoughts.” Spock definitely will.

Wait, that was it? The whole eulogy? Both Kirk and Spock really suck at eulogizing the other.

McCoy probably could have skipped this honestly.

Wait, Kirk left his space husband and his BFF a final in-case-of-death message? Noooooooooooooooo I can’t.

McCoy is so insistent they watch it and Spock is like “nah, that makes it too real, not gonna do it.”

“The Captain’s last order is the top priority.”

Why does everyone always assume Spock wants power? He obviously doesn’t. He could be a Captain if he wanted, probably. He’s early enough in his career where he still has time to become a Captain, too--eventually he does! Most of his career and literally every statement he’s ever made would kinda imply he’s not interested.

Also, if he didn’t care about Jim and he just wanted to take over the Enterprise, he would have left 3 hours ago? Like multiple people were saying he should? Including Bones??

“He was a hero in every sense of the word.” True.

McCoy is being VERY mean today.

And now he’s mad at him again for fighting the Tholians instead of leaving without Jim! Like which is it! What did he do wrong? At least pick a specific thing to criticize lol.

"I need not explain my rationale to you or to any other member of this crew." That’s true but also all I can hear is “I love him. I’m in love with him. I must have him back.”

What is that art work on the wall? That’s new.

I don’t get how Bones isn’t getting this. He KNOWS about the “warm, genuine feeling.”

Vulcans clearly aren’t immune to the...space weirdness. But yes, another pot shot at his alienness is always welcome lol.

“I AM in command of the Enterprise.” You tell him.

Finally, the secret message!

Omg Jim is literally dead and he’s still reassuring Spock. What a good boyfriend. I know this is the hardest thing you’ve ever done, but you got this bb.

Now he’s lecturing them both from beyond the grave and getting everything right and they’re just standing there like chastised schoolboys.

That “take care” was so soft.

“It does hurt, doesn’t it?”

“What would you have me say Doctor?”

Like??? I can’t stand this.

Uhura! At home.

I like that twirly thing they have in their quarters; very efficient use of space and also I want one.

I also love that her chair has crocodile arms.

Kirk shows up in the mirror just to be dramatic and disappear again.

“Of course you saw him. We’d all like to see him.” Lol. Yes, yes, he’s still with us... in our hearts.

If the Tholians complete the web, what will they do with what’s inside? Eat it?"

“Are we any closer to the cure for space weirdness?” / “No. Except also yes.”

Love all the vague science that goes into solving their problem at the last minute but also extremely quickly by any objective standard.

Is Chekov restrained with seat belts?

Whereas Uhura’s just chilling. She knows what she’s about.

Ghost Kirk! Ghost Kirk!

"Do you suppose they're seeing Jim because they've lost confidence i you?" Damn bones, harsh. I thought we were done with this.

Pretty distressing that everything relies SO much on Scotty lol--arguably the MOST critical single member of the crew.

“I’m sorry.” Glad to hear him say it, finally!

“He would just say ‘Forget it Bones.’“ Adorable.

I feel like everyone’s simultaneously thinking, ‘Okay, we ALL see that, right?”

I am overwhelmed by the longing in that shot of Spock trying to reach Kirk through the dimensions. Like, we’ve established everyone loves him, everyone misses him, everyone wants to see him, but Spock actually approaches him and tries to meet him...

“We were separated. He couldn’t touch me.”

I want to know Scotty’s opinion on Spock’s crazy statue.

So Spock shouldn’t have fired those phasers? Because they... did something... bad to the dimensions? But what other choice did he have, other than to leave without Kirk?

Wasn’t Scotty literally just saying this wasn’t fixable? And now he’s like ‘eh, I can fix it in 20 minutes and get you 80% power’?

The antidote is derived from a nerve gas used by the Klingons...that’s honestly rather hilarious. They’re good for something I guess.

“It simply deadens certain nerve inputs in the brain.” / “Any decent brand of Scotch’ll do that.” Starfleet’s finest lmao.

Lmao Mccoy's no longer drugging the crew he's straight up killing parts of their brains with booze and deadly nerve gas. The man must be stopped.

Noooo don’t give Scotty the whole bottle. We’ve already established the ship doesn’t run without him.

They still gotta get out of the web.

If I shipped McCoy/Spock I would DEFINITELY ship it in that little moment where they look at each other over the glasses.

I have no idea what happened but they seem to be free. Bye Tholians!

Kirk back in the chair where he belongs <3

“No problems worth reporting”--I mean that is technically true, I GUESS.

Kirk is trying to get the gossip.

“Only what one would expect when humans are involved.” / “What humans?” The oxygen hasn’t fully returned to his brain, I see.

Also he is completely lying about understanding McCoy’s explanation.

Sulu and Chekov are having a great time listening in. Collecting future gossip for the cafeteria.

“M-my last orders. That I left for both of you.” He’s adorable.

"The crisis was upon us and then passed so quickly that w-we...." Lol yes the crisis came and then 4 hours later, it was passed! Just like that.

I totally get that Kirk wants them to admit they watched the tape. It was his orders that they watch it first, plus he knows he said helpful stuff and he wanted to be helpful! But I also get why they don’t want to admit they saw it, because it is rather awkward to admit they watched his last words when he’s... not dead.

That was a great ep overall! I really enjoyed it.

My only two complaints are that there wasn’t enough Kirk, and I wasn’t fond of Bones’s characterization. I mean, I get that he was affected by the... space weirdness and maybe his usual prejudices were purposefully exaggerated to show that but it still felt like he was constantly piling up on Spock and in the most unhelpful way. Like, they often disagree, in part because they have different general philosophies, and Bones often misunderstands Spock. But Bones wasn’t really offering anything helpful in terms of command advice, and his criticisms were both repetitive and incoherent. Did he want Spock to leave Jim behind or not? Was firing the phasers bad or necessary? Is Spock doing too much to save Jim or is he just out to get rid of him and take command? And again, he had like 6 moments where he said something cutting and cruel and...one or two of those go a lot farther to show the point. I also just... Bones really, really doesn’t get Spock, and I can see how he’d get meaner given the space aggression. But he’s not cruel. And he and Spock are friends, and he does know that Spock loves Kirk more than anything. So I did not find him IC overall.

But I did really like Spock and his characterization. I could feel all the emotion in him, so pent up and controlled but so present--especially in the moment when he held the tape Kirk made, but in so many other places as well--the “funeral,” the first moment after Kirk failed to materialize, reaching for him on the Bridge...

I also liked this portrayal of Spock in command. He is a good commander and he has obviously grown a lot since the Galileo Seven. But he’s not Jim, and the show is clear about that. Kirk is not replaceable and his job is not easy. I’m not even sure that Kirk would have done much different than Spock--he wouldn’t have left without one of his crew, and that probably would have involved firing on the Tholian ship. But when Spock did it, it really felt like he was overwhelmed, frustrated, and not thinking--he didn’t want to, but then Scotty said he should, and he did. Kirk would have made the decision, not been pressured into it. Would it have mattered? It comes out to the same, but I think it would have been a different scenario. Kirk only ever makes his own decisions--then he can own them, no matter what. That didn’t feel like Spock’s decision, and it affected others’ confidence in him (cough cough McCoy).

I would have to watch again to see if I thought there was any other choice.

This ep made me think of the cave scene in ST09 where Ambassador Spock meets Kirk and thinks he is HIS Kirk, come on purpose to find him. Because obviously Kirk is like that: he comes back from the dead, he finds Spock no matter what, he comforts and reassures and supports him no matter what. He would cross dimensions, he’d travel through time, he’d become No Longer Dead, if that’s what Spock needed.

I was a little disappointed that we didn’t see Kirk’s adventures in the AU lol. I think he was lying about being alone in the other universe. I want to see the fic where he was actually in the AOS verse lol.

Even though there wasn’t enough Kirk in this ep, I appreciated how strong his presence was anyway, seeing everyone love him so much, and seeing just how effective he is as a Captain by comparison with Spock, who is good and who did get them out of the situation, but who lacks that certain... Captain’s quality.

And it outright was a great Spock episode, and a good Spock and McCoy ep except for all of the OOC-ness in McCoy. I’m starting to feel like actually there’s a pretty significant amount of Spock and McCoy stories (this one, The Paradise Syndrome All Our Yesterdays, even Bread and Circuses) and I wish there were more Kirk and Bones stories, too. They are best friends after all!

Next is Plato’s Stepchildren, which is a pretty meh episode, but not awful.

#the year 2021 #2021: star trek #2021: fandom thoughts #start trek tos

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ghostsofmemories · 4 years ago

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CHARACTER PROFILE: RAMONA BENNET (Insect Poison)

woahhh here she is!! if you want to catch up/don’t know who Ramona is, check out the insect poison WIP intro right here. anyway, on with the content!

origin of character: Ramona has existed as long as Robert has, since I wrote There Was a Falling Out in 2017. She wasn’t even close to a fleshed out character, her only personality traits were that she collected rocks and got murdered. I believe her name in the original book was Ruby, which I changed because I don’t like it anymore and her hair is a ruby-ish color and feels too obvious of a name.

birthday: May 13th, 1974 (taurus) (the younger twin)

mbti: intj

sexuality: honestly, it never came up and she never had a crush so literally just whatever vibes you get from her

physical description: average pretty much all the way around in terms of weight/height/etc. Deep red hair that when she’s young, she wears in braids and when she’s older, she wears straight down. She has bangs as well.

personality (as a child/teenager): she’s extremely quiet, and knows how to use her silence to make people uncomfortable or do what she wants. She desperately wants to be an individual and do her own thing, but needs instruction and direction from other people, which is why she’s constantly gravitating toward Robert even though she doesn’t want to be around him. She wants friends, but mostly so she can ignore the other things in her life. She cares about people but will deny it, and to make it seem like she doesn’t, she’ll go directly against them. Of the twins, she was the most likely to be able to have a redemption, but oops she died.

personality (as a hallucination/ghost): still sort of Ramona in pattern and sentence structure, but more talkative. Her answers to questions are vague and she seems to have pity for people, but bad intentions regardless. Somehow omniscient, or pretends to be.

a little excerpt: Ramona wasn’t sure whether the words clawed their way out of her mouth due to politeness or pollution—and the idea of seeing Martha again pulled vomit from the back of her throat. This could very well be the beginning of a bad habit, of sneaking vodka out of the cupboard and watering it down for good measure, of eulogizing innocence in a way that didn’t begin with almost. Then again, anything was better than setting a house on fire.

richard siken quote that was made specifically for her: Everyone needs a place. It shouldn’t be inside of someone else.

a lot of song lyrics: skeletons, skeletons, what do we have here/hiding from the mirror/say it once, say it twice, try to be nice/well, let's not lose ourselves (snow, ricky montgomery)

when I am dead, I won't join their ranks/’cause they are both holy and free/and I'm in Ohio, satanic and chained up/and until the end, that's how it'll be (saint bernard, lincoln)

I am a rock on top of the sand/I am a fist amidst the hands/and I break it/just because I can (wrecking ball, mother mother)

if wellness is this what in hells name is sickness?/but business is business, and business runs in the family/we tend to bruise easily/mad in the blood (runs in the family, amanda palmer

taglist + rambles under the cut

ahhh! I did a whole two character profiles and making the moodboard took longer than anything else, who would’ve thought. I’m going to post an update either today or tomorrow, but I’m currently trying to figure out if I want to put all 11 chapters in one update or split it into two (I’m leaning towards two, the book is over 16k at this point and only one update to cover 16k worth of content is insane).

Ramona is one of my favorite characters just because she contradicts herself so much and is so interesting. I hope you folks like her too!

Insect Poison Taglist (message/comment/ask to join/be removed):

@coffeeandcalligraphy @alicewestwater @fliiik-art @wolf-oak @shaelinwrites @hellnar @nsanelyawkward @oceancold @aetherwrites @keira-is-writing @bookpacking @chloeswords @feverdreamwritings @samirahs @isherwoodj

#insect poison #character profile #my writing #my wip

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egoiistas · 3 years ago

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jewel of the sun (1) - foster

a/n: hello. hehe

ao3

Ffxiv (Post ARR/HW) - Warrior of Light contemplates the aftermath of the Ul'dahn banquet from the cold, unfeeling lands of Ishgard.

In her experience, the cold had never been so vicious. It numbs and chills her to the bones as she watches the blizzard rage from within the confines of her foster home. It is a force that whips and lashes against the grey stones of the city - the street below barely visible. It is a vengeful power born in the wake of the Seventh Umbral Calamity, blinding and bright, as if the land itself deemed those who walk among it are no longer worthy of her fruits.

Coerthas is cold, yes - but she never had to regard it with any sort of permanence. A jaunt to Camp Dragonhead for the odd job had her break out her rose pink glacial coat, but, at the end of the day, she could always count on hanging it up until the next visit. Home and warmth was always an aetheryte transport away.

When her fingers touch the window, she feels the Ishgardian cold spread along her skin, sapping the heat from her flesh. This land is the opposite of her - her antithesis. It offers no space for fire to exist naturally. For it to persist, it must be protected and coddled. Extra measure required to shelter and foster any sort of flame. The wind will not pity it, the snow will not sympathize.

Her hand retracts from the window pane and squeezes her fingers into her palm before the cold can sting.

She is grateful to have found asylum in this frigid land for there wasn’t another.

B’jou Belhi, known as the Warrior of Light, and the Scions of the Seventh Dawn are wanted and accused of regicide. The notion is ludicrous even now and would be to anyone who had two brain cells to spark together. Yet, someone took advantage that the Warrior of Light was in the right place at the right time; ripe for framing. All that she did, every danger she faced since arriving in Gridania - Ifrit, Garuda, Titan, Leviathan, Ramuh, Garleans, Ascians, Ultima - and her word meant nothing. The events transpired with such quickness she barely had time to organize her thoughts. She had felt out of place, out of touch - out of her mind and worst of all, helpless. A guilt, heavy in her gut, rematerializes every time she’s reminded of the faces of her fellow Scions in her mind’s eye. How they had urged her to leave them behind.

Papalymo and Yda. Y’shtola and Thancred. Minfilia.

She had been utterly helpless.

Tears come to her easily and she sheds them just as freely.

All she was able to carry with her was the clothes on her back, Alphinaud, Tataru, and the moments burned into her mind of her found family staying behind so that she could escape. The forces that be - the Scions, Ser Aymeric, House Fortemps, the Echo, Hydaelyn - worked to ensure she continued on.

To those concerned, B’jou Belhi perishes in the rubble in her attempt to elude capture. She and her history are entombed in sewers beneath Ul’dah and the howling winds of Ishgard eulogize in her stead. The Eorzean Alliance would have to think twice about using their resources to chase an adolescent Elezen and a Lalafell that have taken refuge in Ishgard.

The glass shudders from a gust of wind carrying snowflakes turned into knives and despite it all, something burns in her breast. In Ishgard, a name like B’jou Belhi stands out. The naming convention singles her out in race and as the Warrior of Light or as the slayer of gods. To some, it was once the name to be prayed in reverence as the reincarnation of Azeyma. The given name bestowed to a stolen daughter belonging to no one.

Housed within her are the sneers and malicious looks of those who took her goodness for granted, twisted it for their schemes - serving as fuel. Facets of what made her B’jou Belhi are thrown into the funeral pyre, kindle for the flame to rise and dance within her so that she may rise anew.

In the backdrop of a blizzard, Bijou Bordeaux emerges from the ashes, smoke flowing off her skin, carrying with her that which she burnt so that she’ll never forget.

#ffxivwrite2021 #ffxivwrite #ffxiv #ffxiv fanfiction #hello i am here to post these silly little drabbles #bijou is my baby and don't you dare make fun of her #i will most assuredly cry

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lurkinglurkerwholurks · 6 years ago

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Carried

Created to fulfill @hollyhock13‘s BatFam Christmas Stocking prompt: "Janet Drake’s funeral was canonically held on Christmas Eve :)" because it was evil and I couldn't resist. See end of fic for AO3 link.

He should be crying. That’s what you’re supposed to do at a funeral. Especially your mom’s. But he wasn’t. He hadn’t. Not once.

Tim stared, dry-eyed, at the minister’s shoes. They were shiny but mud-flecked, a consequence of the walk through the cemetery to the grave. The earth beneath their feet was cold and hard, but it had slurried the night before and made a mess of the grounds. His mother would have hated it. She would have worn impractical stiletto heels, despite the cold and the terrain, and would have grumbled the entire way from the car. But she didn’t. As the guest of honor, she was carried instead.

The minister was still speaking. Tim tried to listen, he really did, but he couldn’t make his mind focus. The man had been hired by Jack Drake. He was an accessory, a traditional service fixture, a performer meant to fill out the facade. The Drakes weren’t church people, and the paunchy, grey-haired man at the front knew nothing of the woman he had been paid to eulogize.

That was okay. He had been kind to Tim, his hand warm and dry as they shook before the service. He had asked how Tim was doing and seemed to hear all the things he didn’t say. The minister might not have known Janet Drake, but when he spoke, his voice was full of warmth and gentle compassion. Besides, Tim hadn’t really known her either. In fact, of the mourners present, he probably knew her the least.

The lawn behind him was filled with the elite of Gotham. Janet’s socialite friends and Jack’s business connections stood clumped in little groups, all dressed attractively in black. The men had pumped Jack’s hand and roughly clapped Tim’s shoulder. The women had cooed over Tim or ignored him. Most had subtly flirted with Jack, resting delicate hands on his arm or staring up doe-eyed through thick eyelash extensions. Jack’s separation from his wife was common knowledge, and none seemed put off by the platinum-handled coffin sitting only yards away.

Tim wanted to pay attention. He wanted this day to mean something. Janet Drake had been a stranger, but she was still his mom. She was still a person. Someone should mourn her. Someone here should care.

Next to him, Jack Drake stood straight and still. He didn’t sniff or wipe his eyes. He didn’t put his arm around his son or tell him that everything would be alright. He just stood there, eyes fixed on nothing in particular. Jack had loved his wife at one point, Tim knew. They’d loved each other even when they hadn’t loved him. But it had been a very long time ago, and they had both moved on.

In his head, Tim heard the Tatooine stormtroopers squawking “Move along, move along” and choked down an irreverent laugh. Everyone was moving along. Janet Drake had passed four days ago, and already things were changing.

Jack had returned to Gotham, stepping foot in his home for the first time in weeks. Always a force of nature, he had swept through the house like a mudslide, putting together the service and funerary arrangements over the phone even as he boxed and bagged his wife’s belongings to donate. Tim had pulled himself off patrol, unsure how to explain his absence to his father, but the precaution had been unnecessary. They had spoken twice, once when Jack had arrived the day after his wife’s death, and again the morning of the funeral, when Jack had told his son that he would be catching a flight after the service.

Jack had a life back in Tokyo, with a company to run and a girlfriend who was waiting for him to return. A life that didn’t accommodate him returning to Gotham any more frequently than he had before. A life that didn’t include Tim. That was okay. It had to be okay. Though Tim’s parents traded off to be home for him in name, neither had truly been there for him in years, physically or emotionally. This new life, he tried to tell himself, would feel no different.

It had begun to snow. Tiny specks of white drifted to earth, landing on the shiny lid of the coffin as it was slowly lowered into the ground. Tim blinked away the cold flecks that landed on his eyelashes. He was cold. His outsides were cold, and his insides were cold, all the way down to the empty, gnawing pit in his stomach. He thought of the walk back to the car next to his father, together but not touching, not speaking. He thought of entering his house, quiet, empty, and lonely. He shivered.

The service ended. He and Jack tossed a couple of handfuls of ceremonial dirt atop the coffin, then wiped their hands on their slacks. The workers would come by later and fill in the hole. For now, it would collect snow. The minister stepped down from the front, shook Jack’s hand, shook Tim’s, and wished them well. Tim missed his warmth the moment he stepped away.

Tim kept his eyes on his shoes as they walked to the car. The other mourners waited on either side, sometimes speaking a farewell or condolence, but not getting in their way. No one wanted to linger in the cold. Perversely, Tim wished they would. He wished he had a few more seconds to adjust to the idea of leaving Janet behind. Shouldn’t it have been an indelible moment for him, seeing his mother disappear beneath the earth? She had cradled him, once upon a time. Shouldn’t it mean more to watch her go? He cringed away from the idea of feeling pain, but surely pain was preferable to this icy numbness.

“Jack.”

Jack stopped walking at the sound of his name, so Tim stopped as well. He lifted his head and blinked up through the softly falling flakes.

“Bruce Wayne.” Jack sounded surprised as he shook Bruce’s hand. “Thanks for coming.”

He was right to be surprised. The Waynes and the Drakes were neighbors, but not friends, barely even acquaintances, and Bruce was too busy, too powerful, to waste time at a service like this. Yet here he was, looking down at them both in his tasteful Armani suit.

“Of course. Our condolences on your loss.” Bruce’s gaze flicked over to Tim, searching for... What? Something Tim couldn’t give, most likely. Trauma akin to Bruce’s own? But this wasn’t a brutal alley murder. It was... It just was.

“Thank you.” Jack dredged up a thin smile, then seemed to remember his manners. “This is my son, Tim.” He settled a hand on Tim’s shoulder, the fingers long and thin like Tim’s own.

Inwardly, Tim cringed, but if Bruce was nonplussed, he didn’t show it. “Yes. Tim’s spent some time at my house while you’ve been abroad. He’s been a big help with some little projects I’ve been working on with my boy.”

Bruce gestured behind him. “You remember my ward, Dick.”

Dick, dressed in a slightly less expensive suit than Bruce’s, stepped forward and shook Jack’s hand. He and Bruce stood the same way when at rest. Tim wondered if they knew.

“Hey, Tim,” Dick murmured. His gaze was too warm, too sympathetic. Tim returned a mumbled hello and looked away.

“I feel horribly gauche to ask this, Jack, here and now, but I was wondering if we could borrow Tim for the afternoon.”

Bruce had taken Jack by the elbow and guided the man away, but Tim could still hear them. Perhaps he had been meant to. Bruce was doing a subdued version of his Brucie—charming, a little dense, benignly selfish. It must mean Bat business. Urgent, if Bruce and Dick had both come. Tim tried to straighten his shoulders and ready himself. He could be ready, if Bruce needed him. But the wind whipped through the crowd, and he hunched over again, shivering.

“Geez, Timbo.” Dick took off his coat and wrapped it around Tim.

“M’fine,” Tim mumbled.

Bruce was still talking, voice lower now, saying that a wake was no place for a boy. That was smart. Jack cared about appearances and would want his son at the house, but if Bruce could give him a reason, he’d be more than happy to be rid of Tim for a bit.

Dick was saying something about the cold, about Tim’s loss. Bruce was talking about his own parents. Tim was trying to jolt his sluggish brain into piecing together what the emergency could be.

Bruce got his way, of course. Once the issue of propriety was settled, helped along by a dash of that old Gotham guilt over poor orphan Bruce, it was simple enough to steal Tim away. They took him back to their car, a stately standard limousine that Tim hadn’t seen before, Bruce on his right and Dick on his left. Alfred met them at the car and opened the door. His eyes were kind, like the minster’s.

Tim waited until the limo had pulled down the cemetery’s long drive before asking, “What’s the mission?”

He found he was looking forward to the case, as much as the detached feeling behind his ribs could let him look forward to anything. Having something to focus on might help. Being able to move might shake some of the frost from his limbs.

Bruce and Dick exchanged a look that Tim couldn’t decipher. They looked so alike, despite not being related. What must it feel like to be able to look at another person and understand what they were thinking without a word spoken? What did it feel like to have your soul be that close to another’s?

“Mission?” Bruce repeated. His voice sounded strange.

Tim nodded. Was it that dangerous, then? That awful?

“There’s no mission, Tim.” Dick was speaking slowly, picking his way through his words. “We thought... Did you not want to leave?”

“There’s no mission?” Tim lifted one hand, brushed the limp hair from his eyes. “Then why are you here?”

“Because your mother died.”

It wasn’t that Tim had never heard Bruce speak with such tender softness. As terrifying as he could be, Batman had been known to crouch down in front of the smallest, most frightened child and lure them out by his voice alone. But Tim wasn’t sure why Bruce was speaking that way to him, or why it made something inside him begin to tremble.

“We wanted to be there for you, and you looked like you needed rescuing.” Dick’s eyes were bright and trained unblinkingly on Tim. “Were we wrong?”

Oh. Something deep in Tim’s chest sparked, an ember flaring weakly in the dark. They had come for him. Not for Robin, not for a mission, but for him. Then he winced, dreading their judgement of the truth he had to tell.

“I’m fine,” Tim murmured, his voice muffled in the car’s interior. “Thank you both for... for coming. But it’s different for me than it was for you. Janet... she wasn’t...”

Tim’s slender fingers picked at the stitching on the cuff of Dick’s overcoat, still slung around his shoulders. They needed to know. They needed to know what an awful person he was. And if it lost him Robin, so be it. At least they would know.

“I haven’t cried. Not once. And I don’t know that I will. I don’t even know that I’ll miss her. She was supposed to stay with me, but she was never home. I think she forgot I lived there sometimes.” Tim’s lips twisted. “It’s stupid, but I keep thinking... This is the first Christmas Eve I can remember that I know where they both are.”

He looked up and searched their faces, not sure how to interpret what he saw. Dick looked horrified, a fact that churned his gut, but Bruce’s face was as still and smooth as ever. Tim looked down.

“Come here.” When Tim didn’t move, Bruce spoke again. “Tim. Come here.”

The car was still moving, but Tim unbuckled and rose in a crouch, shifting from his bench seat to the spot between Bruce and Dick. After settling and rebuckling, he looked up at Bruce, jaw tight as he awaited his lecture.

No lecture came. Instead, an arm clad in soft Italian silk and smelling of aftershave and musky cologne reached around Tim and settled onto his shoulders. On his other side, Dick rested his hand on Tim’s, covering Tim’s numbed fingers with his own, calloused ones.

“You’ll stay with us tonight,” Bruce said. “Dick isn’t on shift in Bludhaven for another two days. Your room is already prepared. I’ll clear it with your father, and we’ll have you back in time to celebrate Christmas with him.”

“He won’t care,” Tim assured them. “Jack’s headed back to Tokyo tonight.”

Another silence spread through the car, one timed to the twitching pulse in Bruce’s jaw. Tim didn’t understand it, but he was pretty sure that it wasn’t his fault this time.

“We’ll talk about that tomorrow.” There was a pause, another unspoken communication over Tim’s head. “Or maybe the day after.”

Bruce’s fingers threaded through Tim’s hair, rubbing against the back of his skull, sending tendrils of warmth unfurling through the numbness.

“There is no right way to grieve,” Bruce murmured. “Or any timeline for it to start.”

“You were here for us when we needed you,” Dick agreed. “We’ll be here for you. Whatever that looks like. We’re a team, no matter what.”

Bruce didn’t verbally agree, but he gave Tim’s shoulders a gentle squeeze, and Tim found himself tipping over until his head rested against the delicately woven fabric of Bruce’s suit.

“Rest while you can,” Bruce advised, his chest rumbling beneath Tim’s cheek. “Alfred has been baking all day. You’ll need your strength.”

“We’ll wake you when we get to the Manor,” Dick promised.

Tim nodded and curled his fingers around Dick’s as he closed his eyes. It was wrong, he was pretty sure, to feel this happy while riding away from his mother’s funeral. The tears might never come, or they might appear later and drown him in their strength. But no matter what happened, it was nice to know he had people to carry him through. It was almost like having a real family.

AO3 link (seeing if this format will evade Tumblr’s draconian battle against external links): https://archiveofourown. org/works/17027148

#batfamchristmasstocking2018 #bcs2018 #batfam #batfic #my fic #tim drake #bruce wayne #dick grayson #christmas eve #hurt/comfort #emotional hurt/comfort #good dad!bruce #tim drake is robin #batman #dcu #nightwing

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radbrowndads · 6 years ago

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My mamoo passed away last week. When my friends and co-workers asked who I lost, I called him “my uncle”, but in English, he’d be more accurately described as my “first cousin once-removed” or my mother’s cousin. I have been devastated to lose him. Some folks not familiar with the culture I was raised with probably read this and think: "I’m not even that close to my first cousins, so why is he grieving about his Mom’s cousin?" As with all of my work, I am incredibly loathe to explain things that are inherent to my perspective or attempt to validate my world view as the child of Muslim immigrants.

But I think the reason I grieve my mamoo is important. And I want people to know the reason. I also want my family, who for better or worse all share Facebook as a common platform, to understand what he meant to me.

The crux of the importance is in that word, mamoo. "Mother’s brother."

In Urdu and in practice, we never distinguished between my mother’s actual brother and my mother’s cousin, nor my father’s sister and my father’s cousin. All were the same. And family comes with things like loyalty, respect, and unconditional love. It also comes with drama and arguments. But family is there for you.

Now like any family, you are closer to some branches and less to others. For whatever reason, this mamoo and his three other siblings has always been very close to our branch. Every single one of my mother’s four cousins has been deeply present throughout my life. They were (and are!) older than my parents and all but one were born in British India, in Panipat, before Partition.

Somehow, losing him, especially so suddenly, made me (and my sister Zainab, who independently came to the same conclusion) realize something — the culture of my mother’s family (and probably my father’s too) is seeped through with a refugee’s loss of home. My mother and everyone younger than her only knew Pakistan, but they inherited this trauma of their parents losing self, of losing home, of giving up what we knew to go to a new homeland and not by choice. And they passed that down to us. I’ve written about why this Partition means a lot previously here (https://www.buzzfeed.com/ahmedaliak…/not-quite-eat-pray-love). But even still I did not realize that how deeply these lessons penetrated my consciousness until I lost my mamoo.

My mamoo was a child when that happened. I can't even bear to think of all the young children whose lives ICE has ruined, but while mamoo and family would never be able to return home to India, the family stayed together at least. And he and his siblings have been a living link to that past we were inculcated with. My grandfather died when I was two, so my mamoo was the oldest man on my mother’s side that I regularly spent any time with. I hesitate to say he was like my grandfather, because that wasn’t the relationship at all and it feels pandering to American sensibilities of what familial love is. But still, whether he knew it or not, he was one of the most important elder men in my family and I see his influence on many in our generation. The loss was not just of a beloved family member — but of another pillar that was holding the family together, despite us dispersing throughout the world and away from Panipat.

Now, I want to point out that I have not personally experienced any suffering from this sort of “refugee” mindset, as it might imply to some. I have immense social and economic privilege as the children of two doctors and I have everything I could have ever asked for. But I do have this feeling that our culture, our family, our love for another may be eroded over time away from home. My grandparents worried that time in Pakistan would erode the culture from Panipat. And I worry that time here will erode some of the good that I learned from Pakistani culture. There is no strict value to this change, but when I talk with outsiders about my family, they remark that they admire how close we are. How much we are there for each other. And I never want to lose that.

On a personal level, there were many things I admired about my mamoo. He was present at every function he could be, no matter how far. Despite living in Pakistan and the UK, he visited my dying mother an incredible amount of times with his wife, my mami-jaan, who we also lost a few years back. I would often wake up from the deep sadness of knowing you’re going to lose a parent to see that yes, once again, Lutfi mamoo and Anwar Mami had came. I would ask him…. “Did you come from Pakistan?” not believing he had made the trip again, just to sit with his younger sister. And inevitably, he had. He made it seem like it was nothing at all, that to be there for us in our time of need was as easy as breathing. Mashallah. I wish to be like that in my family’s lives one day.

He was funny and loving and giving. You could be stuffed full of food and he would still literally stick his hand down your throat with food. My father was never much of a feeder in that way, so I never stopped being tickled watching this grown man lovingly present his entire khandan with nawallas to choke down at every meal. Until I was his next target of affection and I had to find a way to fend him off.

Once, he fed me the most delicious nihari of my life…. And immediately I fell unbearably sick with food poisoning, as did my sisters. But I recovered. And he served nihari again. I told him I wouldn’t eat it a second time, but he insisted… he said the sheermal we had eaten the nihari with was stamped on by the shopkeepers feet. "Just don’t eat the sheermal." So I happily ate it again, sans sheermal, only to be poisoned again. My sisters smartly avoided the second serving. I survived, but when I returned five years later, he served us nihari again and this time, despite his legendary insistence, I had learned to say no (he blamed the sheermal again). But my father did not, and he was the victim for the third iteration of this dangerous nihari. I had never him sweat like that. But I laughed at Lutfi mamu’s belief in our stomachs ability to persevere and his belief in showing love through food. It was, after all, the best damn nihari ever. I don’t regret eating it twice.

Before Facebook was ubiquitous, I’d get completely random Skype calls from him. I always found it a bit strange, since the older generation rarely called me at that age. And even more interesting, he’d often be calling in bed, against a generic white painted wall. And I’d ask him if he was calling from Lahore, his home. And no, he’d be calling me from Zanzibar or somewhere else in East Africa his business took him. I didn’t even know his job took him there! But he called me to ask how I was doing, to update me on his life, to connect us. As a lot of Pakistanis know, oldest children are valued and when you’re a younger sibling, you can sometimes feel ignored. But I never felt that way with my mamu. Those calls were such intensely memorable experiences of an elder treating me as if I was worthy. That I was valuable to him. I don’t even remember what we talked about, but it stayed with me, that he decided I was worth calling.

I am better at reflecting on the dead than the living. But I would remiss also to not mention his four daughters who have always treated us with a lot of love and affection as well, a legacy they got from both their parents. And of course, I can’t forget to eulogize his wife, Anwar Mami, who I have such fond memories watching cricket and cooking pullao with. I remember she was very impressed I had taken the effort to learn the family dish and I don’t believe my cooking deserved the level of praise she gave me. But that’s just the way she was with me.

Back to the original thrust of this: Lutfi Mamu was not the first person to die recently. We have lost so many elders in the past few years, including Mamu’s older sister, Khalida Khala, who I don’t believe I wrote anything about because it felt so freakish as well, that one day my beloved Khala could be there, and then be gone to a medical complication. And the same with Mami jaan who died to a long battle with cancer, as did my mother and Nuzhat Usmani’s husband Salahuddin Khalu. And then, of course, things repeat themselves. And Lutfi mamu died to a complication, to a battle with recovery.

And I realize that these things are not freakish, they are not strange. They are the norm. It happened to my parents and they felt the loss of Panipat and it will happen to us and we will feel the loss of Pakistan. One day my generation and I will look around and we will be carrying the torch of the legacy of the family. For better or for worse, we all took something from our family. I don’t know that I valorize any family value besides loving the fuck out of your family, besides being there for people who need you, besides loving to share food. A lot of other stuff is negotiable and I don’t want to say that I think inherently being an Usmani is good.

But being a family who loves each other. Where a cousin’s child can grieve his mamoo, to feel truly and bitterly lost at losing another model of Usmanihood, of family, of loving…. That is what I believe we should hold on to. Because it’s easy to transition to new ways of living, of nuclear families and of individual needs over those of the many. But for me, that way lies a deep, painful loss. I don’t want to let that happen. Because ammi, my mamoo, my mami jaan, my khala, and all the others we lost would be intensely pissed to know that the family is not together. And a week in London with the family has me confident that we can make it work, but it requires humility and sacrifice. It requires calls from Zanzibar and force feeding nihari that makes you shit out your face and your ass because it comes with a moment of bliss.

After my mamoo’s funeral, I saw my niece Laila play with her cousins, who are my mom’s cousins grandchildren. And I hope in thirty years, when they all grow up, they’re still connected. Because we did the fucking work and made the calls.

EDIT: i keep editing this to add clarification, but i think at this point i need a new comment.

one, i am sure there are buzurgon i have forgotten to name. one major one i forgot is rehmat amma, who was truly and absolutely the legacy of my nani on this earth during my lifetime. and i am sorry if i have forgotten others, but i pray that all of their souls are at ease

two, one of the bitter contradictions about having a huge, closely knit family is that deep layers of sweet familiarity and love are also marked by constant, repetitive cycles of loss and death. it’s a hard, but i think ultimately useful perspective to have on life. death is ever-present, for each of us, and whether you turn to god for explanation or you use the loss to find balance, i believe it is useful to know that life is short and it ends and it ends and it ends. I wouldn’t trade that knowledge for anything.

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alchemisland · 6 years ago

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Valhalla's Exiles

Valhalla's doors open to the brave and virtuous, made whole again in their unlife to revel in mead and mirth, fighting and fornicating until the wolf age dawns, when horns summon ranks forth to line the opposite side of the final battlefield. But where do the reluctant heroes go? The warriors brave by duty or by temperament, who never thirst'd for the blood of another. Those that die on the field, far from where or who they love. I hope there is a place for them.

https://www.wattpad.com/632017293-valhalla%27s-exiles-a-hall-for-the-reluctant-dead

I. A hall for the reluctant dead

Over the parapet is the world of death. Gas fills abandoned trenches to the lip, appearing as they must to passing birds as rivers of molten gold filling a smith's mold, veering sharply down mazelike channels, down stairs to an empty dugout. A flimsy line of sandbags heaped at ground level is the only barrier between us and oblivion, and over it, a Miltonian hellscape stretching ruined to the furthest horizon, seen only by those who offered their head for a sniper's target.

Bullets whizz through the air like leaden butterflies, moving directionless, raining death where they go. Great plumes of green smoke rise from disused artillery cannons and machine guns, the last remnants of our furthest advance; a winding network of hastily-constructed communication trenches abandoned when the initial fugue of German shells hit its mark with grim ease, as if guided by the reaper's hand. Gas canisters leak venom in pooling craters, the surface shimmering like slicked oil. Bloated Tommies bob on the surface. When at last the stretchers arrive, if ever, their putrefied forms are slung on wagons, robbed of their boots and baccy.

The campaign was a disaster. HQ knew from the start something was up. Even their grimmest speculations never imagined thousands dead at a push, tens of thousands in a week. One morning the order came through; suit up, report to ladders and await further instructions from your immediate sub-altern. Many regiments left ragged and thinly-numbered subsumed or were subsumed into existing ranks; a rag-tag squadron of veterans made nihilists through carnage. Whichever ranking officer was closest would do. I have never been over and god-willing we will not be sufficiently spent to send the next would-be Galen to his death. When the doctors charge, the war will be truly lost. Many men I know and have grown close to, men who live by my tinctures and poultices will go over, some for a second or even third time. With survival odds so low, who dares imagine cheating Mort a third time?

We knew months in advance of its coming, but still it felt surreal; seasons of cautious treading, stooping low to the duckboards where the trench walls sagged, measured in every duty, never chancing even a peek in the name of survival, and now to abandon all subterfuge to clumsily tumble across the top, whistles announcing the charge, boldly strolling into the waiting death of German gunner nests.

The army dispensed pamphlets with a hundred reasons to keep your toes clean at the front, or three new ways to smoke without having your brains shot out, but their officially-sanctioned literature, affectionately referred to as Jingo Lingo, spoke little of what to do when your entire squadron died within five seconds and the firestorm sends you reeling one way or another, unable to discern direction. The lucky ones returned unscathed, their wounds to manifest internally only later; the unlucky ones died either by enemy fire or the confused bullets of their terrified comrades, blindly firing at any humanoid shape.

Britannia promised much and more to her colonial subjects daring enough to join his majesty's forces, and I being one such mongrel greedily signed the dotted line. My trade is flesh, and the mending of it, though lately little remains of the men brought back. Far from the frontline, the opening months of the war with all her terrible slaughters left prepared the unprepared and made steely the anxious. Casualties on a scale hitherto unseen, marching lines of soldiers lame and blinded by hissing ochre venom, like a column of wretched sinners made myopic for their worldly transgressions, stumbling across the arid plains about the base of Mount Erebus, forced to trust only the shoulder of the man ahead, equally treacherous as himself.

Others came like jigsaws in pieces, howling on stetchers, grizzly stumps for legs where shrapnel sliced clean through the bone. Little could be done by that stage; a morphine dose, a mumbled novena if time permits, and then the long sleep comes for the warrior. In the Norse traditions, warriors slain in battle retire to Valhalla, where in gilded halls of mirth and mead aplenty to fight and fornicate until Ragnarok. Doubtless each and every wide-eyed schoolboy howling under my care is a brave and pure warrior to match any of antiquity, though I wonder where does the reluctant warrior go? He who tires quickly of battle, or who never desires it, whose bayonet thirsts not for blood and whose rifle always tilts above the heads of approaching foes. Those who do what they do for duty, obligation, national pride, for their father's lies, and the lies of their father's before. The warrior feathered by a thousand bolts and a hundred sabre cuts besides, only perishing to exhaustion, his vitality leaking in crimson rivulets down his medal-laden coats. The warrior poet who sees the brutality of what he does yet persists. Understanding the futility, seeing the intricate deceptions of the higher-castes and the destruction their rhetoric wrought, but still feigning steeliness for his men. What of this archetype? Ironically he is the greatest warrior, the most selfless and thusly most fearless. I can think of none more deserving yet less-inclined to enter Valhalla.

I wondered how the vikings reconciled that in their twilight years, when the bear's strength faded and only his dusty hide remained to soothe old bones from winter's kiss; grey, hump-backed, unable to squeeze into their raiding armour, dented and vermilion with rust, watching the youngers of the village by the dockside, painted for conquest. And he knowing his time for glorious death in battle is come and gone, and that no such glory exists wrought of steel. All that he's permitted to keep is memory. Memories of plunder, of sacked churches and monks corpses strewn across the beachhead like stringless marionettes, of hoarded gold and weregild paid, of babes torn from mothers breasts and dashed against the stones to raise the bloodtide that bore our ships homeward. Strange, in a moment those fading reveries turn from scenes of youthful valor to nightmares. When his dreams are sufficiently vivid to recollect, he scarcely recognizes the man on the sand, drenched in the blood of many foes, swinging a spiraled axe with a loglike handle in wide arks, separating limb from torso; was it really him? Truly the warriors of our sacred texts and cultural memory die young to live forever, as befits the romantic ideal of the soldier, and those who should survive will live to regret their foolhardy bloodthirst. Is there a place then for him, and those like him? The warrior appalled, tossing and stomping his surcoat into the mud, stripped but for his glory in the eyes of God and man, wizened and weakened of constitution. I hope there is a place for him and his. By the sea, a quiet home for restless souls made unlikely heroes.

And where will I go? There's bravery in stitching and sawing, the almighty knows that well as I do. Perhaps in wars of old, before whatever purposefully-prolonged hell this is, our Hippocratic oathsayers plied trades far behind the line, but now the line was just a word. Zeppelins and whistling shells drop closer everyday, and flares scatter midnight like shattering stars, and mortars drop as bolts cast from heaven churning the soil to chalk.

I wonder though; in healing these men to fight another day, am I preventing their passage to Valhalla? Not mine to ponder, I suppose. I hope I will go to this proposed lakeside idyll if such a space exists, and there by the lapping shore watch the waves fold upon themselves against the shale, and every sound that now knells the deaths of twice-ten youths will pass and leave only birdsong, or the wind swaying Elysian stalks, golden and numerous. Though each denizen will recognize the next man's warrior status, little will they speak of old glory, instead sharing the tender moments of their corporeal existences, their recollection of which grows fainter by the day, like a painting left beneath the sun. And I hope there to reacquaint with many fine boys I knew and know, those fallen now outside my knowing, far from my care, and there discuss that forgotten time before all of this. Eulogizing the world we lost.

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formerlymarco · 3 years ago

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Best review of the movie, which is probably my favorite Bond film after OHMSS.

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ruminativerabbi · 6 years ago

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An American Hero

John McCain’s death was hardly a surprise. (The announcement at the end of last week that the decision had been made to discontinue medical treatment was certainly a clear enough indicator that he was coming to the end of his days.) I admit that the national wellspring of emotion the senator’s death brought forth from political fellow travelers and opponents alike, even leaving the President’s belated and begrudging response out of the mix, caught more than a bit off-guard. But it was Senator McCain’s posthumously-revealed wish that he be eulogized in a bipartisan manner both by Presidents George Bush and Obama that made the strongest impression on me. That these were the two men who the most consequentially thwarted his own White House aspirations—the former by defeating him for the Republican nomination in 2000 and the later by defeating him in the presidential election of 2008—also impressed me as a sign both of humility and magnanimity. The funeral is this Saturday, so I’m writing this before knowing what either man will say. But my guess is that both will rise to the occasion and pay homage to the man, not for holding this or that political view, but for having the moral stamina to move past his own defeats at both their hands to return to the Senate to continue his life of service to the American people.

Senator McCain was a complicated figure and hardly a paragon of invariable virtue. He himself characterized the decisions that led to his involvement in the “Keating Five” scandal the “worst mistake of my life.” (The fact that he made that comment after the Senate Ethics Committee determined that he had violated neither any U.S. law nor any specific rule of the Senate itself speaks volumes: here was a man who could have gone on to crow about his innocence—or at least about his non-guilt—yet who chose instead publicly to rue the appearance of impropriety that he feared would permanently attach itself to his name.) He owned up publicly to the fact that, at least in the context of his first marriage, he was not a model of marital fidelity. He was in many instances a party-line guy, going along with the plan to invade Iraq without stopping to notice that there was no actual evidence that Saddam Hussein possessed the weapons of mass destruction President Bush was so certain had to exist and in fact going so far as to refer on the floor of the Senate to Iraq as a “clear and present danger” to our country without pausing to ask himself how he could possibly know that in the absence of evidence that Iraq possessed actual weapons capable of reaching these shores.

On the other hand, his more than five years as a prisoner of the North Vietnamese—the beatings and the torture he endured, his refusal to accept the early release offered to him because the military Code of Conduct instructs prisoners to accept “neither parole nor special favors” from the enemy, his two years of solitary confinement—speaks for itself. (And the phony “confession” he signed at a particularly low point when his injuries had brought him to the point of considering suicide does nothing to change my mind about his heroism. In the end, he defied his captors in every meaningful way and was momentarily defeated by them only once.) As does his lifetime of service to the American people, one given real meaning specifically by the fact, as noted above, that he specifically did not abandon his commitment to serve merely because he was twice thwarted in his bid for the presidency and instead simply returned to the Senate, following the admirable example of Henry Clay, who lost the election of 1824 to John Quincy Adams and then, after serving as the latter’s Secretary of State for four years, returned to the Senate where he served as Senator from Kentucky for two non-consecutive terms and died, like McCain, in office.

But it was McCain’s posthumous letter to America that I want the most to write about today. Lots of literary masterworks have been published posthumously—all three of Kafka’s novels, for example, came out after he died in 1924—but most have been works that their authors for some reasons chose not to publish or were unable to get published in their lifetimes, not letters that their authors specifically wished to be publicized after they were gone from the world. That concept, however, is not unknown…and the concept of creating what is called an ethical will in which a legator bequeaths, not physical possessions or money, but values and moral principles to his or her heirs is actually a Jewish practice that has its roots in medieval Jewish times.

There are early examples of something like that even from biblical times—the Torah contains the pre-posthumous blessings that both Jacob and Moses left behind for their heirs to contemplate and to allow to guide them forward after Jacob and Moses were going to be gone from the world. (When the New Testament author of the Gospel of Matthew portrays Jesus as doing the same thing, in fact, it is probably part of an ancient author’s effort accurately to depict Jesus as a Jewish man doing what Jewish men in his day did.) But the custom reached its fullest flower in the Middle Ages—the oldest extant ethical will from that period was written by one Eleazar ben Isaac of Worms in Germany and dates back to c. 1050. After that, there are lots of examples, many of which were collected and published in two volumes back in 1926 by Israel Abrahams under the title Hebrew Ethical Wills and still available for a very reasonable price. There is even a modern guide to preparing such a will to leave to your own descendants in Jack Riemer’s Ethical Will and How To Prepare Them: A Guide for Sharing Your Values from Generation to Generation, published in a revised second edition just a few years ago by Jewish Lights in Woodstock, Vermont.

And it is in that specific vein that I found myself reading Senator McCain’s letter to the American people: not as last-minute effort to make a few final points, much less to get a few last jabs in at specific, if unnamed, opponents. (The Bible has a good example of that too in David’s last message to the world, which includes a hit-list of people David hopes Solomon will find a way to punish—or rather, to execute—after David is gone from the world and Solomon becomes king after him.) The McCain letter, neither vengeful nor angry, is not at all in that vein. Nor is it particularly soothing: it is, in every sense, the literary embodiment of its authors hopes for the nation he served and his last word on the course he hopes our nation will take in the years following his death. To read the full text, click here.

Senator McCain identifies the core values he feels should lie at the generative core of all American policy: a deep dedication to the concept of personal liberty, an equally serious dedication to the pursuit of justice for all, and, to quote directly, a level of “respect for the dignity of all people [that will bring the nation and its citizens] happiness more sublime than life’s fleeting pleasures.” Furthermore, he writes unambiguously that, in his opinion, “our identities and sense of worth [are never] circumscribed, but enlarged, by serving good causes bigger than ourselves.”

He characterizes our country as “a nation of ideals, not blood and soil.” And then he writes this: “We are blessed and are a blessing to humanity when we uphold and advance those ideals at home and in the world.” But his tone is not at all self-congratulatory. Indeed, the very next passage is the one that seems both the most filled with honor and trepidation: “We weaken our greatness when we confuse our patriotism with tribal rivalries that have sown resentment and hatred and violence in all the corners of the globe. We weaken it when we hide behind walls, rather than tear them down; when we doubt the power of our ideals, rather than trust them to be the great force for change they have always been.” It is hard to read those words without reference to the current administration, and I’m sure that McCain meant them to be understood in that specific way. But the overall tone of the letter is not preachy or political, but deeply encouraging and uplifting. His final words to his fellow Americans are also worth citing verbatim: “Do not despair of our present difficulties,” the senator writes from the very edge of his life. “We believe always in the promise and greatness of America because nothing is inevitable here. Americans never quit, we never surrender, we never hide from history. We make history. Farewell fellow Americans, God bless you, and God bless America.”

I disagreed with John McCain about a lot. We were not on the same side of any number of the most important issues facing our nation, but those divisions fall away easily as I read those final words. Here, I find myself thinking easily, was a true patriot—a flawed man in the way all of us must grapple with our own weaknesses and failings, but, at the end of the day, a principled man and a patriot. His death was a loss to the nation and particularly to the Senate, but the words he left behind will, I hope, guide us forward in a principled way that finds in debate and respectful disagreement the context in which the American people can find harmony in discord (which is, after all, a peculiarly and particularly American concept) and a focused national will to live up our own Founders’ ideals.

In the physical universe, energy derives from tension, friction, and stress. In the world of ideas, the same is true: Socrates knew that and developed a way of seeking the truth rooted not in placid agreement but in vigorous debate. That concept, almost more than anything else, is what shines through Senator McCain’s literary testament to the nation. He notes wryly, and surely correctly, that we are a nation composed of 325 million “opinionated, vociferous individuals.” But he also notes that when debate, even raucous public debate, is rooted in a shared love of country, the result is a stronger, more self-assured nation, not a weaker one enfeebled by conflicting opinions. I think that too…and my sadness at the senator’s passing is rooted, more than anything else, in that specific notion.

John McCain’s life was a gift to our country and his death, a tragedy. May he rest in peace, and may his memory be a source of ongoing blessing for his family and for his friends, and also for us all.

#John McCain

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