spielraum prophet

Today is a perfect day. About to become a partner, about to spend five weeks in Italy, about to sort out my finances. When I get back, I will get healthy and fit for summer. This is a perfect day.

Gold has been considered universal but it did lie upon the ground, unregarded for forty thousand years. Right now it is a distant third to fresh water and meat in the Spring of the new world. Important but no substitute for the stuff of survival. Skins and bones and furs, ploughshares beaten into spears, communal justice dealt here weekly, and just now word of the eating of human flesh in the outlands. This is what becomes of our hunger. May the God of the Starving Dog have mercy on our souls.

He was always a success, and it seemed reasonable to assume that he would be successful in this new endeavour as well. As it happened he had underestimated the particularities of politics and the specifics of the craft, assuming, one supposes, that they did not take time to master. In Malcolm’s world success had always bred success. In retrospect this view was not confident so much as arrogant.

Surprisingly, arrogance was not enough. It may have been enough for successful banking, where the framework for the exchange is established by mutual consent, generally because everyone at the table will win one way or another. Malcolm has discovered that politics is a different affair, one that admits neither rule nor consent, mutual or otherwise.

The best thing he could do in light of all this is to take a stand, returning to the backbench on the basis of a personal principle. Strategic withdrawal as a precursor to a renewed forward thrust.

It came back. No waiting.

A third time coming and the wave might have dragged him out but he was quick on his feet. He wouldn’t be swept away that easily. I’m talking about waves here, not fucking cancer. The cancer came and went. The waves would continue to break, long after we are all dead and gone.

Another reason, that’s what he said he wanted. Another reason to forget that afternoon. It was a red enamel brooch with emeralds set into the border, which was lacy with a silver filigree.
She had found the brooch in the dust just after lunch, and she knew immediately it was part of the Knights Band livery.