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
R. Scott Bakker
The Darkness that Comes Before (2003)
"We seek absolute awareness, the self-moving thought. The thoughts of all men arise from the darkness. If you
are the movements of your soul, and the
cause of that movement precedes you, then how could you ever call your thoughts your own? How could you
be anything other than a slave to the darkness that comes before? [...]
Only knowing the sources of thought and action allows us to own our thoughts and our actions, to throw off the yoke of circumstance. [...] The world slumbers, enslaved by its ignorance."
-- R. Scott Bakker
The Darkness that Comes Before (2003)
He knew nothing of what Eskeles called
grammar, the notion that a kind of invisible mechanism bound everything he said into patterns. [...]
But the patterns were undeniable, and no matter how much he wanted to dispute the fat man and his glib
I-told-you-so smile, he had to admit that he could not speak without using things such as subjects and predicates, nouns and verbs.
[...] Sorweel found himself more than a little troubled by this. How could he know these things
without knowing them? And if something as profound as grammar could escape his awareness -- to the point where it had simply not existed -- what else was lurking in the nethers of his soul?
-- R. Scott Bakker
The Judging Eye (2009)
