But looking away is worse than looking right at it. Kjorel’s already figured that much ou...
But looking away is worse than looking right at it. Kjorel’s already figured that much out. To look at it is to understand, is to face it, is to give it no opportunity to surprise, is to let it become familiar even if it has in fact killed, to know the light-poured-in-itself-as-if-the-sea-aflame and prepare for when it asks of him… Kjorel blinks and this time, it’s as if there is an afterimage. An afterimage of his entire life. It cannot be what he thinks, this pillar, this tower. It cannot. But—eyes widening, throat convulsing, and now he’s the one who wants to gag, he’s the one who wants to scream—he knows that it is.
I have no idea if this book was in fact inspired by the writings of Walter Benjamin on types of time in his incomparable On The Concept Of History, but in a way it is even more impressive if it was not. As an intertext it would be marvelous, with the stark contrast of the politically-forefronted horror of 1930s Europe and the brittle but sincere era of peace in the in-book world of Šehhinah highlighting the overlaps in their visions of accumulated time and lives of the living and dead. It is somewhat too rooted in the potentiality laid out of the first two books to be believable as a deliberate pivot, and I would highly doubt the first two books are rooted in sophisticated thought and study rather than powerfully insightful yet naive thought and experience. I’ve been delaying reviewing this for a long time now because firstly I was unsure if a revision was about to come out at any time as it had for the first two books and their associated short story, and secondly because I have been overwhelmed by the prospect of doing it justice.
But I will read everything this author writes from this book on, this deserves no less than scholarship attention of the 2020s.
In Benjamin’s Thesis II is the passage: “There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim.”
A recount of the Covenant that underpins the series, and inside the series’ world history, and gives name to this book, from The Stars That Rise At Dawn:
Once, Heaven expected; all after death to wake to fire. Now understood desires many. One day at world end, all resurrect to more choices. Which choices? What you wish; I the flame know not. Yet. Your lives will argue for you… —Evian translation of God’s Covenant, originally delivered without words, 0 A.C. (After Covenant)
As I’ve spilled words on before, this is a marvelously inexhaustible demand and command. One that radiates possible interpretations and implications. One may be a warning about the power of humankind, to humankind: ‘*I* won’t give any rules. that’s *your* job. *you’re* giving *Me* suggestions for rules’ which logically very much includes ‘if you want to make up some terrible rules I’m listening and I’m learning. watch out.’ One may be an implicitly threatening suggestion of radiating power, of humankind to command God to create the future, of God to create the future, of any given human to create the future — one chip of the future, a plurality-weight that creates the future, one person’s or one moment’s argument of the future, out of billions, that is blessed as the future because it alone is capriciously-chosen, because it alone convinces, because it alone prevails, because it alone wrests the blessing? As in much of the series, it comments on jewish thought and mysticism on God and humankind, with a preference for thought-experiments involving reversals: the power of humankind to bless God with a command to use God’s power on, the power of God to bless humankind with Their obedience to humankind — an unknown form of obedience, for ‘humanity’ has no unified voice to follow. God also, it seems, does not know how to obey, but They hold onto all lives lived that They might need to obey, so that They can cite them....