a little island of light

CONNINGTON GLANCED INTO THE PIT. “THE BEAR WAS LESS HAIRY THAN THAT FREAK, I’LL—” JAIME’S GOLDEN HAND CRACKED HIM ACROSS THE MOUTH SO HARD THE OTHER KNIGHT WENT STUMBLING DOWN THE STEPS. HIS LANTERN FELL AND SMASHED, AND THE OIL SPREAD OUT, BURNING. “YOU ARE SPEAKING OF A HIGHBORN LADY, SER. CALL HER BY HER NAME. CALL HER BRIENNE.” CONNINGTON EDGED AWAY FROM THE SPREADING FLAMES ON HIS HANDS AND KNEES. “BRIENNE. IF IT PLEASE MY LORD.” HE SPAT A GLOB OF BLOOD AT JAIME’S FOOT. “BRIENNE THE BEAUTY.”

Updated link!

“I think all literature has ideas. […] Ideas about the human condition, and love, and God, and sex, and all of these things are ideas, but the truth is fiction is not a good vehicle for presenting abstract ideas. I mean, non-fiction, journalism, my profession, in which I had my professional degrees, is actually a better way to explicate if you have an idea about some political or scientific method. That’s why scientific journals are full of research reports, they're not full of science fiction stories. What fiction is good about is presenting emotion. Fiction is good about replicating the human experience, and the human heart in conflict is central to all of that. If the story you're telling me doesn't have characters in it that I care about in a situation that's going to engage my emotions, I'm not gonna find it very interesting.”

Literature is one of the few spheres that try to keep us close to the hard facts of the world, because by its very nature it is always psychological, because it focuses on the internal reasoning and motives of the characters, reveals their otherwise inaccessible experience to another person, or simply provokes the reader into a psychological interpretation of their conduct. Only literature is capable of letting us go deep into the life of another being, understand their reasons, share their emotions and experience their fate.

Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge); by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets); and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying. The weather bureau will tell you what next Tuesday will be like, and the Rand Corporation will tell you what the twenty-first century will be like. I don't recommend that you turn to the writers of fiction for such information. It's none of their business. All they're trying to do is tell you what they're like, and what you're like-what's going on-what the weather is now, today, this moment, the rain, the sunlight, look! Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But they don't tell you what you will see and hear. All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming, another third of it spent in telling lies. "The truth against the world!"-Yes. Certainly. Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There! That's the truth!

lots to say about israel's politicized and propagandized use of history and archaeology to further their narrative tbh. here's a good article about it.