Book: The Years of Rice and Salt
Quotes of Book: The Years of Rice and Salt
Esmerine go out briefly to relieve herself, then return and pull off her shift again, her breasts silvery raindrops spilling down her ribs in the moonlight, over Bahram's hands as he warmed them, in that somnolent world of second-watch sex that was one of the beautiful spaces of daily life, the salvation of sleep, the body's dream, so much warmer and more loving than any other part of the day that it was sometimes hard in the mornings to believe it had really happened, that he and Esmerine, so severe in dress and manner, Esmerine who ran the women at their work as hard as Khalid had at his most tryrannical, and who never spoke to Bahram or looked at him except in the most businesslike way, as was only fitting and proper, had in fact been transported together with him to whole other worlds of rapture, in the depths of the night in their bed. As he watched her work in the afternoons, Bahram thought: love changed everything. book-quoteIn China the egalitarian movement came not just from Zhu's vision, but also the Taoist ideas of balance, as Zhu would always point out. In Travancore it rose out of the Buddhist idea of compassion, in Yingzhou from the Hodenosaunee idea of the equality of all, in Firanja from the idea of justice before God. Everywhere the idea existed, but the world still belonged to a tiny minority of rich; wealth had been accumulating for centuries in a few hands, and the people lucky enough to be born into this old aristocracy lived in the old manner, with the rights of kings now spread among the wealthy of the Earth. Money had replaced land as the basis of power, and money flowed according to its own gravity, its laws of accumulation, which though divorced from nature, were nevertheless the laws ruling most countries on Earth, no matter their religious or philosophical ideas of love, compassion, charity, equality, goodness, and the like. Old Zhu had been right: humanity's behavior was still based on old laws, which determined how food and land and water and surplus wealth around, how the labor of the eight billions was owned. If these laws did not change, the living shell of the earth might well be wrecked, and inherited by seagulls and ants and cockroaches. book-quotepowerwealthgreed
