I have a lot less time to indulge my many hobbies besides reading and excercise since we launched a biotech start up in june of this year; and we work weekends.

Quote from: Madness on December 16, 2013, 11:35:53 pm

Lol, I'm breaking my moratorium on posting more than once today. Studying for my exam is killing me.

Hah, I hear you man. Gotta let loose somehow though!

Anyways, I have another question. Could anyone point to me where Akka first "comprehends the onta"? I know it's in TDTCB...at least I think it is....but I can't find it. As always, any help is appreciated.

An image struck Achamian: himself as a boy, climbing on the big rocks, the ones his father had used to dry the nets, pausing every few breathless instants simply to look around him. Something had happened. It was as though he’d opened different eyelids, ones beneath those he normally opened each morning. Everything was so agonizingly tight, as though the flesh of the world had been dried taut across the gaps between bone: the net against stone, the grid of shadows cast over the hollows, the watery beads cupped between the flex of tendons on his hands—so clear! And within this tightness, the sensation of inner blooming, of the collapse of seeing into being, as though his eyes had been wrung into the very heart of things. From the surface of the stone, he could see himself, a dark child towering across the disc of the sun.

The very fabric of existence. The onta. He had—and he could still never adequately express this—“experienced” it. Unlike most others, he’d known immediately he was one of the Few, known with a child’s stubborn certainty. “Atyersus!” he could remember crying, feeling the vertigo of a life no longer to be determined by his caste, by his father, or by the past.