Huh, do you have a quote?

Madness already provided the quote, but here is the link.

It's more ambiguous that I recalled, but it still reads to me like "all of you" means "all you ensoulled beings on this world" rather than "all you sorcerers".

In the case of childhood amnesia, it's thought that we can rarely, if ever, achieve a 'copy-cue' of the exact childhood context that went into the encoding of our childhood memories (or even close too - much of this seems may reflect changes in bodily perspective).

If I'm understanding this correctly, the implication is that we can't remember what happened to us very early in life, at least in part, because we're effectively not the same person as we were then?

Lol - within this frame (which is to provide dramatic example), I'm simply suggesting that our being cued to remember 'past-selves,' schema that have structural access to only that 'semantic knowledge' that they had structural access to at the time, can momentarily dictate our perceptions and behavior.

The corollary being that, when we try too hard to remember, we run the risk of momentary possession by our own former self?

And what's wrong with wanting to control your surroundings?

I never claimed there was anything inherently wrong with that. I was merely making note of the implied hypocrisy.

Loneliness + increased pressure to float into sickness and ruin through aggressive hedonism seems - at least to my dumb analysis - to be one of the biggest traps facing people today.

I was going to reflexively poo-poo the idea that there's this massive and unprecedented social pressure towards what you term "aggressive hedonism", until I remembered what university was like when I was there: if you wanted a social life, it was pretty much mandatory to drink as if you had the liver of Dionysus. That was a decade ago and, from everything I've heard, it's only gotten worse since.

I'm still not convinced this is a really new phenomenon, though, or that it's genuinely the huge problem you seem to think it is. Classical Greek and Roman texts contain references to worries that young people are drinking too much or are generally too blindly hedonistic. It seems to be a constant narrative (at least in sufficiently complex societies) that we old farts (and those of us who are old farts at heart) see the next generation as descending into nihilistic hedonism.

And yet... we have not yet sunk into mindless decadence. Looked at from the present, the overall trend of history is towards people's lives improving. Yesterday's hedonistic (even sometimes downright selfish) pushing of moral boundaries opens the way for today being (IMO) objectively better for most people. I sure as fuck don't want to go back to the Victorian era (children working as virtual slaves in mines; men allowed to rape and beat their wives with no legal repercussions; levels of violent crime that make today look like a pacifist utopia; public hangings for what today we consider minor crimes...), nor even to the 1950s (homosexuality illegal; women and non-Whites second class citizens; censorship and possible legal punishments for criticising or lampooning Christianity...).

The fact that my country's current (Conservative!) prime minister wants my transsexual aunt to be able to legally marry her partner (whom she has loved and lived with for decades) is awesome, as far as I'm concerned. That his political heroine, Margaret Thatcher, would have been appalled at the idea just makes it more awesome. Of course, Queen Victoria would have been appalled at the idea of Margaret Thatcher (a female prime minister), and the Romans would have been appalled at the idea of a queen (another Boudicca!) reigning over Britain...

Being appalled at the antics of the next generation seems quite natural and normal. It doesn't necessarily herald the downfall of civilization, though.

Like all the mountains and islands were once trolls who stepped into
sunlight and turned into stone ... In other words, bullshit

Interesting juxtaposition with your Nietzsche quote.

"Catching" might reflect a sorcerous Cant?

That makes more sense. Not as entertaining, though.

Though, Serwa does carry Sorweel in her arms. (We do have it from Inrau's perspective that sorcerous speed is a thing; might sorcerous strength be a thing as well?)

I don't see why not. In that particular case, though, I think Serwa is just naturally pretty strong. Dunyain genes rather than magic.

Also, Duskweaver, do you think that if a Chorae hits an animated billow that those sorcerers/sorceresses are affected beyond that billow tail being de-sorcerized momentarily?

Honestly, I think the whole idea of the billows would be pointless if intercepting/deflecting a chorae still resulted in the sorcerer or witch plummeting out of the sky. Being splattered all over the landscape doesn't seem much of an improvement over being salted.

But then there's that WLW quote:

With their billows, he [Kellhus] explained, the odds were good that any one Chorae strike could be survived, so long as someone uninjured could carry the one struck away from the Horde.

that implies they do still plummet and have to be [caught and] carried by one of their companions. The actual catching seems implausible to me unless the witches/sorcerers stick really close together in the air, which would surely make it impossible to actually flutter their billows around sufficiently to act as a screen.

So I dunno. Maybe it's like in a Roadrunner cartoon where you don't actually start falling until you've had time to hold up a little wooden sign saying 'Help!', and that gives your friends time to fly over and catch you?

I seem to recall a description of a choraed Cishaurim as resembling a "sodden rag". That sounds like it's intended as an inversion of the salting (dessication?) of Schoolmen.

As for how the Swayali billows work, it always seemed obvious to me that disenchanting something that is moving by sorcery would not eliminate the momentum that sorcery had already imparted to the object.

Lol. First off. Yay! Welcome back, even if it's just for a post. I'm glad you've survived this journey through the trackless steppe.

Thanks! I can't promise to post very often. Or, for that matter, very coherently. But I'm back at least until Christmas.

Perhaps, the ratio of acceleration ... after the Bomb makes it especially apparent in my eyes but I don't actually have a personal perspective of living that history.

Well, me neither. I think that feeling of ever-accelerating change post-WW2 is pretty much global, though, not anything specific to Japan.

I wouldn't even try, friend. Just offering the description of my grip on the elephant .

Well, give me that and hold this bit of it instead. It keeps dribbling on my hand.