preservation nation

To observe the way a knowledge-system is knit together is to learn at least a minimum knowledge-of-knowledge, until someday -- or some century -- an Integrator (will) come, and things (will) be fitted together again. So time matter(s) not at all. The memorabilia (are) there, and (they are) given to (us) to preserve, and preserve (them we will) if the darkness in the world last(s) ten more centuries...

...Long ago, during the last age of reason, certain proud thinkers had claimed that valid knowledge was indestructible -- that ideas were deathless and truth immortal...There (is) objective meaning in the world, to be sure: the nonmoral logos or design of the Creator; but such meanings (are) God's and not Man's, until they (find) an imperfect incarnation, a dark reflection, within the mind and speech and culture of a given human society, which might ascribe values to the meanings so that they (become) valid in a human sense within the culture...but...cultures (are) not immortal and they...die with a race or an age, and then human reflections of meaning and human portrayals of truth reced(e), and the truth and meaning resid(e), unseen, only in the objective logos of God...

The Memorabilia (is) full of ancient words, ancient formulae, ancient reflections of meaning, detached from minds that...died long ago, when a different sort of society...passed into oblivion. There (is) little of it that (can) still be understood. Certain papers (seem) as meaningless as a Breviary would seem to a shaman of the nomad tribes. Others (retain) a certain ornamental beauty or an orderliness that (hints) of meaning...

Quoted, with adaptation, from Walter Miller's novel A Canticle for Leibowitz, first published in 1960.

"The loss of freedom will not come as a thunderclap. Rather, if it goes, it will slip silently away from us, little by little, like so many grains of sand sliding softly through an hour glass. The curbing of speech in the Senate on judicial nominations will most certainly evolve to an eventual elimination of the right of extended debate. And that will spur intimidation and the steady withering of dissent. An eagerness to win -- win elections, win every judicial nomination, overpower enemies, real or imagined, with brute force -- holds the poison seeds of destruction of free speech and decimation of minority rights. The ultimate perpetrator of tyranny in this world is the urge by the powerful to prevail at any cost. A free forum where the minority can rise to loudly call a halt to the ambitions of an over zealous majority must be maintained. We must never surrender that forum, the United States Senate, to the tyranny of any majority."

R.I.P. Senator Robert Byrd, 1917-2010