2005-07-12-2024Z


Got horribly drunk last night, had diarrhea this morning. Beer, margarita, beer, another margarita, and several shots of tequila. But I'll survive, and will probably indulge, hopefully less, tonight as well.

Foreshadowings of Ishmael on page 233 of The Left Hand of Darkness, during a philosophical conversation between Genly Ai and Therem Harth:

"The Yomeshta would say that man's singularity is his divinity."

"Lords of the Earth, yes. Other cults on other worlds have come to the same conclusion. They tend to be the cults of dynamic, aggressive, ecology-breaking cultures. Orgoreyn is in the pattern, in its way; at least they seem bent on pushing things around..."

Like Daniel Quinn, Le Guin's character agrees that it's not human nature to be, as Agent Smith says, "a virus". It's just one cult among thousands, a cult that began roughly ten thousand years ago in Mesopotamia and China and quite quickly destroyed, conquered, or subsumed most other cults as it spread over the globe.

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