The Thousandfold Thought

Frontispiece:
In pursuing yonder what they have lost, they encounter only the nothing they have.  In order not to lose touch with the everyday dreariness in which, as irremediable realists, they are at home, they adapt the meaning they revel in to the meaninglessness they flee.  The worthless magic is nothing other than the worthless existence it lights up.
   —THEODOR ADORNO, MINIMA MORALIA

All progressions from a higher to a lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and a residue of nameless rage
So. Here are the dead fathers.
   —CORMAC MCCARTHY, BLOOD MERIDIAN

Chapter One: Caraskand
My heart shrivels even as my intellect bristles.  Reasons—I find myself desperate for reasons.  Sometimes I think every word written is written for shame.
   —DRUSAS ACHAMIAN, COMPENDIUM OF THE FIRST HOLY WAR

Chapter Two: Caraskand
I tell you, guilt dwells nowhere but in the eyes of the accuser.  This men know even as they deny it, which is why they so often make murder their absolution.  The truth of crime lies not with the victim but with the witness.
   —HATATIAN, EXHORTATIONS

Chapter Three: Caraskand
If soot stains your tunic, dye it black.  This is vengeance.
   —EKYANNUS I, 44 EPISTLES

Here we find further argument for Gotagga’s supposition that the world is round.  How else could all men stand higher than their brothers?
   —AJENCIS, DISCOURSE ON WAR

Chapter Four: Enathpaneah
Like a stern father, war shames men into hating their childhood games.
   —PROTATHIS, ONE HUNDRED HEAVENS

I returned from that campaign a far different man, or so my mother continuously complained.  “Now only the dead,” she would tell me, “can hope to match your gaze.”
   —TRIAMIS I, JOURNALS AND DIALOGUES

Chapter Five: Joktha
To indulge it is to breed it.  To punish it is to feed it.  Madness knows no bridle but the knife.
   —SCYLVENDI PROVERB

When others speak, I hear naught but the squawking of parrots.  But when I speak, it always seems to be the first time.  Each man is the rule of the other, no matter how mad or vain.
   —HATATIAN, EXHORTATIONS

Chapter Six: Xerash
Of course we make crutches of one another.  Why else would we crawl when we lose our lovers?
   —ONTILLAS, ON THE FOLLY OF MEN

History. Logic. Arithmetic.  These all should be taught by slaves.
   —ANONYMOUS, THE NOBLE HOUSES

Chapter Seven: Joktha
Every woman knows there are only two kinds of men: those who feel and those who pretend.  Always remember, my dear, though only the former can be loved, only the latter can be trusted.  It is passion that blackens eyes, not calculation.
   —ANONYMOUS LETTER

It is far better to outwit Truth than to apprehend it.
   —AINONI PROVERB

Chapter Eight: Xerash
That hope is little more than the premonition of regret.  This is the first lesson of history.
   —CASIDAS, THE ANNALS OF CENEI

To merely recall the Apocalypse is to have survived it.  This is what makes The Sagas, for all their cramped beauty, so monstrous.  Despite their protestations, the poets who authored them do not tremble, even less do they grieve.  They celebrate.
   —DRUSAS ACHAMIAN, COMPENDIUM OF THE FIRST HOLY WAR

Chapter Nine: Joktha
In the skins of elk I pass over grasses.  Rain falls, and I cleanse my face in the sky.  I hear the Horse Prayers spoken, but my lips are far away.  I slip down weed and still twig—into their palms I pool.  Then I am called out and am among them.  In sorrow, I rejoice.
   Pale endless life.  This, I call my own.
   —ANONYMOUS, THE NONMAN CANTICLES

Chapter Ten: Xerash
Souls can no more see the origins of their thought than they can see the backs of their heads or the insides of their entrails.  And since souls cannot differentiate what they cannot see, there is a peculiar sense in which the soul cannot self-differentiate.  So it is always, in a peculiar sense, the same time when they think, the same place where they think, and the same individual who does the thinking.  Like tipping a spiral on its side until only a circle can be seen, the passage of moments always remains now, the carnival of spaces always sojourns here, and the succession of people always becomes me.  The truth is, if the soul could apprehend itself the way it apprehended the world—if it could apprehend its origins—it would see that there is no now, there is no here, and there is no me.  In other words, it would realize that just as there is no circle, there is no soul.
   —MEMGOWA, CELESTIAL APHORISMS

You are fallen from Him like sparks from the flame.  A dark wind blows, and you are soon to flicker out.
   —SONGS 6:33, THE CHRONICLE OF THE TUSK

Chapter Eleven: Holy Amoteu
Of all the Cants, none better illustrates the nature of the soul than the Cants of Compulsion.  According to Zarathinius, the fact that those compelled unerringly think themselves free shows that Volition is one more thing moved in the soul, and not the mover we take it to be.  While few dispute this, the absurdities that follow escape comprehension altogether
   —MEREMNIS, THE ARCANA IMPLICATA

As a miller once told me, when the gears to not meet, they become as teeth. So it is with men and their machinations.
   —ONTILLAS, ON THE FOLLY OF MEN

Chapter Twelve: Holy Amoteu
Death, in the strict sense, cannot be defined, for whatever predicate we, the living, attribute to it necessarily belongs to Life.  This means that Death, as a category, behaves in a manner indistinguishable from the Infinite, and from God.
   —AJENCIS, THE THIRD ANALYTIC OF MEN

One cannot assume the truth of what one declares without presuming the falsity of all incongruous declarations.  Since all men assume the truth of their declarations, this presumption becomes at best ironic and at worst outrageous.  Given the infinity of possible claims, who could be so vain as to think their dismal claims true?  The tragedy, of course, is that we cannot but make declarations.  So it seems we must speak as Gods to converse as Men.
   —HATATIAN, EXHORTATIONS

Chapter Thirteen: Shimeh
What frightens me when I travel is not that so many men possess customs and creeds so different from my own.  Nay, what frightens me is that they think them as natural and as obvious as I think my own.
   —SERATANTAS III, SUMNI MEDITATIONS

A return to a place never seen.  Always is it thus, when we understand what we cannot speak.
   —PROTATHIS, ONE HUNDRED HEAVENS

Chapter Fourteen: Shimeh
Some say I learned dread knowledge that night.  But of this, as with so many other matters, I cannot write for fear of summary execution.
   —DRUSAS ACHAMIAN, COMPENDIUM OF THE FIRST HOLY WAR

Truth and hope are like travelers in contrary directions.  They meet but once in any man’s life.
   —AINONI PROVERB

Chapter Fifteen: Shimeh
If war does not kill the woman in us, it kills the man.
   —TRIAMIS I, JOURNALS AND DIALOGUES

Like so many who undertake arduous journeys, I left a country of wise men and came back to a nation of fools.  Ignorance, like time, brooks no return.
   —SOKWË, TEN SEASONS IN ZEÜM

Chapter Sixteen: Shimeh
Doubt begets understanding, and understanding begets compassion.  Verily, it is conviction that kills
   —PARCIS, THE NEW ANALYTICS

Chapter Seventeen: Shimeh

Faith, they say, is simply hope confused for knowledge.  Why believe when hope alone is enough?
   —CRATIANAS, NILNAMESHI LORE

Ajencis, in the end, argued that ignorance was the only absolute.  According to Parcis, he would tell his students that he knew only that he knew more than when he was an infant.  This comparative assertion was the only nail, he would say, to which one could tie the carpenter-string of knowledge.  This has come down to us as the famed “Ajencian Nail,” and it is the only thing that prevented the Great Kyranean from falling into the tail-chasing scepticism of Nirsolfa, or the embarrassing dogmatism of well-nigh every philosopher and theologian who ever dared scratch ink across parchment.
   But even this metaphor, “nail,” is faulty, a result of what happens when we confuse our notation with what is noted.  Like the numeral “zero” used by the Nilnameshi mathematicians to work such wonders, ignorance is the occluded frame of all discourse, the unseen circumference of our every contention.  Men are forever looking for the one point, the singular fulcrum they can use to dislodge all competing claims.  Ignorance does not give us this.  What it provides, rather, is the possibility of comparison, the assurance that not all claims are equal.  And this, Ajencis would argue, is all that we need.  For so long as we admit our ignorance, we can hope to improve our claims, and so long as we can improve our claims, we can aspire to the Truth, even if only in rank approximation.
   And this is why I mourn my love of the Great Kyranean.  For despite the pull of his wisdom, there are many things of which I am absolutely certain, things that feed the hate which drives this very quill.
   —DRUSAS ACHAMIAN, COMPENDIUM OF THE FIRST HOLY WAR

A year or so ago, I became really interested in the chapter headers and went through reading them all.  Then I got frustrated because I knew I was missing connections between the names that cropped up continually.  So I went through and typed them all up, a few a night, after a month or so I'd done all five books. 

It seems like a useful resource, and I'm convinced Scott has put a lot of 'flags' of meaning into the chapter headers (though he may have embedded red herrings as well).  Reading through them has made me make all sorts of weird connections (that are mostly probably bunk) but I think they might spark some initial great discussion.

On the authorial front, I think these are the most blatent place for Scott to really get on his soapbox and articulate/bash-us-in-the-head-with-a-hammer-of-meaning about themes and direction of the work, spanning meta, micro and local.

It seems somewhat ironicly appropriate that the first post about the books should be about the chapter headers, so I really couldn't resist. So fair use and all that, since these are pretty brief, here are the the Chapter Headers for TDTCB:

The Darkness that Comes Before

Frontispiece:
I shall never tire of underlining a concise little fact which these superstitious people are loath to admit—namely, that a thought comes when “it” wants, not when “I” want . . .
   —FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL

Prologue – The Wastes of Kûniüri
If it is only after that we understand what has come before, then we understand nothing.  Thus we shall define the soul as follows: that which precedes everything.
   —AJENCIS, THE THIRD ANALYTIC OF MEN

Mid-prologue – The Wastes of Kûniüri
Nonmen, Sranc, and Men:
The first forgets,
The third regrets,
And the second has all of the fun.
   —ANCIENT KÛNIÜRI NURSERY RHYME

This is a history of a great and tragic holy war, of the mighty factions that sought to possess and pervert it, and of a son searching for his father.  And as with all histories, it is we, the survivors, who will write its conclusion.
   —DRUSAS ACHAMIAN, COMPENDIUM OF THE FIRST HOLY WAR

Chapter One – Carythusal
There are three, and only three, kinds of men in the world: cynics, fanatics, and Mandate Schoolmen.
   —ONTILLAS, ON THE FOLLY OF MEN

The author has often observed that in the genesis of great events, men generally possess no inkling of what their actions portend.  This problem is not, as one might suppose, a result of men’s blindness to the consequences of their actions.  Rather it is a result of the mad way the dreadful turns on the trivial when the ends of one man cross the ends of another.  The Schoolmen of the Scarlet Spires have an old saying: “When one man chases a hare, he finds a hare.  But when many men chase a hare, they find a dragon.” In the prosecution of competing human interests, the result is always unknown, and all too often, terrifying.
   —DRUSAS ACHAMIAN, COMPENDIUM OF THE FIRST HOLY WAR

Chapter Two – Atyersus
I write to inform you that during my most recent audience, the Nansur Emperor, quite without provocation, publicly addressed me as “fool.”  You are, no doubt, unmoved by this.  It has become a common occurrence.  The Consult eludes us now more than ever.  We hear them only in the secrets of others.  We glimpse them only through the eyes of those who deny their very existence.  Why should we not be called fools?  The deeper the Consult secretes itself among the Great Factions, the madder our rantings sound to their ears.  We are, as the damned Nansur would say, “a hunter in the thicket”—one who, by the very act of hunting, extinguishes all hope of running down his prey.
   —ANONYMOUS MANDATE SCHOOLMAN, LETTER TO ATYERSUS

Chapter Three – Sumna
If the world is a game whose rules are written by the God, and sorcerers are those who cheat and cheat, then who has written the rules of sorcery?
   —ZARATHINIUS, A DEFENCE OF THE ARCANE ARTS

Chapter Four – Sumna
To be ignorant and to be deceived are two different things.  To be ignorant is to be a slave to the world.  To be deceived is to be the slave of another man.  The question will always be: Why, when all men are ignorant, and therefore already slaves, does this latter slavery sting us so?
   —AJENCIS, THE EPISTEMOLOGIES

But despite stories of Fanim atrocities, the fact of the matter is that the Kianene, heathen or no, were surprisingly tolerant of Inrithi pilgrimages to Shimeh—before the Holy War, that is.  Why would a people devoted to the destruction of the Tusk extend this courtesy to “idolaters”? Perhaps they were partially motivated by the prospect of trade, as others have suggested.  But the fundamental motive lies in their desert heritage.  The Kianene word for a holy place is si’ihkhalis, which means, literally, “great oasis.” On the open desert it is their strict custom to never begrudge travelers water, even if they be enemies.
   —DRUSAS ACHAMIAN, COMPENDIUM OF THE FIRST HOLY WAR

Chapter Five – Momemn
The difference between the strong emperor and the weak is simply this: the former makes the world his arena, while the latter makes it his harem.
   —CASIDAS, THE ANNALS OF CENEI

What the Men of the Tusk never understood was that the Nansur and the Kianene were old enemies.  When two civilized peoples find themselves at war for centuries, any number of common interests will arise in the midst of their greater antagonism.  Ancestral foes share many things: mutual respect, a common history, triumph in stalemate, and a plethora of unspoken truces. The Men of the Tusk were interlopers, an impertinent flood that threatened to wash away the observed channels of a far older enmity.
   —DRUSAS ACHAMIAN, COMPENDIUM OF THE FIRST HOLY WAR

Chapter Six – The Jiünati Steppe
It is said: a man is born of his mother and is fed of his mother.  Then he is fed of the land, and the land passes through him, taking and giving a pinch of dust each time, until man is no longer of his mother, but of the land.
   —SCYLVENDI PROVERB

. . . and in Old Sheyic, the language of the ruling and religious castes of the Nansurium, skilvenas means “catastrophe” or “apocalypse,” as though the Scylvendi have somehow transcended the role of peoples in history and become a principle.
   —DRUSAS ACHAMIAN, COMPENDIUM OF THE FIRST HOLY WAR

Chapter Seven – Momemn
The world is a circle that possesses as many centres as it does men.
   —AJENCIS, THE THIRD ANALYTIC OF MEN

Chapter Eight – Momemn
Kings never lie.  They demand the world be mistaken.
   —CONRIYAN PROVERB

When we truly apprehend the Gods, the Nilnameshi sages say, we recognize them not as kings but as thieves.  This is among the wisest of blasphemies, for we always see the king who cheats us, never the thief.
   —OLEKAROS, AVOWALS

Chapter Nine – Sumna
And the Nonman King cried words that sting:
“Now to me you must confess,
For death above you hovers!”
And the Emissary answered ever wary:
“We are the race of flesh,
We are the race of lovers.”
   —“BALLAD OF THE INCHOROI,” ANCIENT KÛNIÜRI FOLK SONG

Chapter Ten – Sumna
How should one describe the terrible majesty of the Holy War? Even then, still unblooded, it was both frightening and wondrous to behold, a great beast whose limbs were composed of entire nations—Galeoth, Thunyerus, Ce Tydonn, Conriya, High Ainon, and the Nansurium—and with the Scarlet Spires as the dragon’s maw, no less.  Not since the days of the Ceneian Empire or the Ancient North has the world witnessed such an assembly.  Even diseased by politics, it was a thing of awe.
   —DRUSAS ACHAMIAN, COMPENDIUM OF THE FIRST HOLY WAR

Chapter Eleven – Momemn
Reason, Ajencis writes, is the capacity to overcome unprecedented obstacles in the gratification of desire.  What distinguished man from beasts is man’s capacity to overcome infinite obstacles through reason.
But Ajencis has confused the accidental for the essential.  Prior to the capacity to overcome infinite obstacles is the capacity to confront them.  What defines man is not that he reasons, but that he prays.
   —EKYANNUS I, 44 EPISTLES

Chapter Twelve – The Jiünati Steppe
I have explained how Maithanet yoked the vast resources of the Thousand Temples to ensure the viability of the Holy War.  I have described, in outline, the first steps taken by the Emperor to bind the Holy War to his imperial ambitions.  I have attempted to reconstruct the initial reaction of the Cishaurim in Shimeh from their correspondence with the Padirajah in Nenciphon.  And I have even mentioned the hated Consult, of whom I can at long last speak without fear of ridicule.  I have spoken, in other words, almost exclusively of powerful factions and their impersonal ends.  What of vengeance?  What of hope?  Against the frame of competing nations and warring faiths, how did these small passions come to rule the Holy War?
   —DRUSAS ACHAMIAN, COMPENDIUM OF THE FIRST HOLY WAR

. . . though he consorts with man, woman and child, though he lays with beasts and makes a mockery of his seed, never shall he be as licentious as the philosopher, who lays with all things imaginable.
   —INRI SEJENUS, SCHOLARS, 36, 21, THE TRACTATE

Chapter Thirteen – The Hethanta Mountains
Even the hard-hearted avoid the heat of desperate men.  For the bonfires of the weak crack the most stone.
   —CONRIYAN PROVERB

So who were the heroes and the cravens of the Holy War?  There are already songs enough to answer that question.  Needless to say, the Holy War provided further violent proof of Ajencis’s old proverb, “Though all men be equally frail before the world, the differences between them are terrifying.”
   —DRUSAS ACHAMIAN, COMPENDIUM OF THE FIRST HOLY WAR

Chapter Fourteen – The Kyranae Plain
Some say men continually war against circumstances, but I say they perpetually flee.  What are the works of men if not a momentary respite, a hiding place soon to be discovered by catastrophe?  Life is endless flight before the hunter we call the world.
   —EKYANNUS VIII, 111 APHORISMS

Chapter Fifteen – Momemn
Many have condemned those who joined the Holy War for mercenary reasons, and doubtless, should this humble history find its way into their idle libraries, they will blast me as well.  Admittedly, my reasons for joining the Holy War were “mercenary,” if by that one means I joined it in order to procure ends outside of the destruction of the heathen and the reconquest of Shimeh.  But there were a great many mercenaries such as myself, and like myself, they inadvertently furthered the Holy War by killing their fair share of heathen.  The failure of the Holy War had nothing to do with us.
Did I say failure?  Perhaps “transformation” would be a better word.
   —DRUSAS ACHAMIAN, COMPENDIUM OF THE FIRST HOLY WAR

Faith is the truth of passion.  Since no passion is more true than another, faith is the truth of nothing.
   —AJENCIS, THE FOURTH ANALYTIC OF MAN

Chapter Sixteen – Momemn
Those of us who survived will always be bewildered when we recall his arrival.  And not just because he was so different then.  In a strange sense he never changed.  We changed.  If he seems so different to us now, it is because he was the figure that transformed the ground.
   —DRUSAS ACHAMIAN, COMPENDIUM OF THE FIRST HOLY WAR

Chapter Seventeen – The Andiamine Heights
The event itself was unprecedented: not since the fall of Cenei to the Scylvendi hordes had so many potentates gathered in one place.  But few knew Mankind itself lay upon the balance.  And who could guess that a brief exchange of glances, not the Shriah’s edict, would tip the balance?
But is this not the very enigma of history?  When one peers deep enough, one always finds that catastrophe and triumph, the proper objects of the historian’s scrutiny, inevitably turn upon the small, the trivial, the nightmarishly accidental.  When I reflect overmuch on this fact, I do not fear that we are “drunks at the sacred dance,” as Protathis writes, but that there is no dance at all.
   —DRUSAS ACHAMIAN, COMPENDIUM OF THE FIRST HOLY WAR

Chapter Eighteen – The Andiamine Heights
. . . and that revelation murdered all that I once did know.  Where once I asked of the God, “Who are you?” now I ask, “Who am I?”
   —ANKHARLUS, LETTER TO THE WHITE TEMPLE

The Emperor, the consensus seems to be, was an excessively suspicious man.  Fear has many forms, but it is never so dangerous as when it is combined with power and perpetual uncertainty.
   —DRUSAS ACHAMIAN, COMPENDIUM OF THE FIRST HOLY WAR

Chapter Nineteen – Momemn
. . . even though the skin-spies were exposed relatively early in the course of the Holy War, most believed the Cishaurim rather than the Consult to be responsible.  This is the problem of all great revelations: their significance so often exceeds the frame of our comprehension.  We understand only after, always after.  Not simply when it is too late, but precisely because it is too late.
   —DRUSAS ACHAMIAN, COMPENDIUM OF THE FIRST HOLY WAR