Source: Redemption Ark (2002), Chapter 8 (p. 129)
“An awful misshapen monster, huge, his eyelight lost.”
Monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens, cui lumen ademptum.
Source: Aeneid (29–19 BC), Book III, Line 658 (tr. Mandelbaum); of Polyphemus.
Les esprits partagés, s'égarant dans des routes différentes, perdent l'immense avantage qui résulterait de leurs forces réunies.
[Jean-Baptiste Biot, Traité de physique expérimentale et mathématique, volume I, Deterville, 1816, http://books.google.com/books?id=J6QIAAAAIAAJ, ii]
“It is the invariable lesson to humanity that distance in time, and in space as well, lends focus.”
Source: The Foundation series (1951–1993), Foundation and Empire (1952), Chapter 13 “Lieutenant and Clown”
Context: It is the invariable lesson to humanity that distance in time, and in space as well, lends focus. It is not recorded, incidentally, that the lesson has ever been permanently learned.
“Huge, awful, hideous, ghastly, blind.”
Source: Translations, The Aeneid of Virgil (1866), Book III, p. 103
The acts might be brutal, but there must be a context to it. I certainly didn’t want to drop the reader into those incidents without telling the story of, well: Why are there refugees? Why were the Israelis and the Palestinians battling along the border? Who were the fedayeen? What was the Israeli response to that? But more than that, I think, for me, the book ends up being—this is going to sound strange—a dead end. Because I don’t know where to go from here, except to delve into human psychology. I think I understand how history works. I understand why one people are battling another people. I understand that they both want land. But ultimately there’s a level that I haven’t really got to yet…
On the multifaceted quality of history in “An Interview with Joe Sacco” https://believermag.com/an-interview-with-joe-sacco/ in Believer Magazine (2011 Jun 1)
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007)
