Highlights - Dune
"Fear is the mind killer..."
Earlier this year I read Frank Herbert’s Dune, the godfather of all science fiction novels.
On one hand, I thought that while book had some fascinating parts it was very uneven on the whole. The story was oddly paced and was often a slog to get through. But on the other hand I found Herbert’s writing to be consistently profound, deep, and mesmerizing, and thought that the best paragraphs from the novel are up there with all other works of great literature.
So here’s a collection of what I thought were the best passages from Dune. Personal favourites in bold.
“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
—
Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.
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“She said a ruler must learn to persuade and not to compel. She said he must lay the best coffee hearth to attract the finest men.”
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“She said the mystery of life isn't a problem to solve, but a reality to experience.”
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A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.
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“Knowing where the trap is—that's the first step in evading it. This is like single combat, Son, only on a larger scale—a feint within a feint within a feint.. seemingly without end. The task is to unravel it.”
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The mind commands the body and it obeys. The mind orders itself and meets resistance.
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Yueh ventured a thin smile, thinking: I believe it has worked. Now, she'll think anything unusual in my manner is due to embarrassment. She'll not look for deeper reasons when she believes she already knows the answer.
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She thought of the boy's features as an exquisite distillation out of random patterns — endless queues of happenstance meeting at this nexus.
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For the first time, he was caught up in the thought that he might be part of a pattern more involuted and complicated than his mind could grasp.
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Jessica stopped beside him, said: "What delicious abandon in the sleep of a child."
He spoke mechanically: "If only adults could relax like that."
—
For the others, we can say that Muad'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It is shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad'Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson.
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Any road followed precisely to its end leads precisely nowhere. Climb the mountain just a little bit to test that it's a mountain. From the top of the mountain, you cannot see the mountain.
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The Duke watched Halleck, admiring the ugly lump of a man, noting the glass-splinter eyes with their gleam of savage understanding. Here was a man who lived outside the faufreluches while obeying their every precept.
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Command must always look confident, he thought. All that faith riding on your shoulders while you sit in the critical seat and never show it.
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Dry chuckles sounded around the table, and Paul realized that his father had said the precisely correct thing in precisely the correct tone to lift the mood here. Even the hint of fatigue in his voice was right.
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It was a scene of such beauty it caught all his attention.
Some things beggar likeness, he thought.
—
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There is probably no more terrible instant of enlightenment than the one in which you discover your father is a man— with human flesh.
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Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of human-kind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional greatness will destroy a man.
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A thing to note about any espionage and/or counter-espionage school is the similar basic reaction pattern of all its graduates. Any enclosed discipline sets its stamp, its pattern, upon its students. That pattern is susceptible to analysis and prediction.
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Growth is limited by that necessity which is present in the least amount. And, naturally, the least favorable condition controls the growth rate.
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There should be a science of discontent. People need hard times and oppression to develop psychic muscles.
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Failure was, by definition, expendable. The whole universe sat there, open to the man who could make the right decisions.
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The Baron shifted his attention to the guard captain—Umman Kudu: scissors-line of jaw muscles, chin like a boot toe—a man to be trusted because the captain's vices were known.
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"I never could bring myself to trust a traitor," the Baron said. "Not even a traitor I created."
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One thought remained to him. Leto saw it in formless light on rays of black: The day the flesh shapes and the flesh the day shapes. The thought struck him with a sense of fullness he knew he could never explain.
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Something had happened to his awareness this night—he saw with sharpened clarity every circumstance and occurrence around him. He felt unable to stop the inflow of data or the cold precision with which each new item was added to his knowledge and the computation was centered in his awareness.
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The mind goes on working no matter how we try to hold it back, she thought.
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Paul's mind had gone on in its chilling precision. He saw the avenues ahead of them on this hostile planet. Without even the safety valve of dreaming, he focused his prescient awareness, seeing it as a computation of most probable futures, but with something more, an edge of mystery-as though his mind dipped into some timeless stratum and sampled the winds of the future.
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Her body had known the fact long before her mind awakened to it.
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So many blank ends of meaning in her past reached out now and linked.
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Black is a blind remembering, she thought. You listen for pack sounds, for the cries of those who hunted your ancestors in a past so ancient only your most primitive cells remember. The ears see. The nostrils see.
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And he paused, shaken by the remembered high relief imagery of a prescient vision he had experienced on Caladan. He had seen this desert. But the set of the vision had been subtly different, like an optical image that had disappeared into his consciousness, been absorbed by memory, and now failed of perfect registry when projected onto the real scene.
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And the price we paid was the price men have always paid for achieving a paradise in this life—we went soft, we lost our edge.
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The mind can go either direction under stress-toward positive or toward negative: on or off. Think of it as a spectrum whose extremes are unconsciousness at the negative end and hyperconsciousness at the positive end. The way the mind will lean under stress is strongly influenced by training.
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There was a low humming of light here more basic in its harmony than any other music in his universe.
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The real wealth of a planet is in its landscape, how we take part in that basic source of civilization - agriculture.
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And he thought how strange it was that the mind, long fixed on a single track, could not get off that track.
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The highest function of ecology is understanding consequences.
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"Life improves the capacity of the environment to sustain life," his father said. "Life makes needed nutrients more readily available. It binds more energy into the system through the tremendous chemical interplay from organism to organism."
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Science is made up of so many things that appear obvious after they are explained.
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"Arrakis is a one-crop planet," his father said. "One crop. It supports a ruling class that lives as ruling classes have lived in all times while, beneath them, a semihuman mass of semislaves exists on the leavings."
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"No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero," his father said.
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Then, as his planet killed him, it occurred to Kynes that his father and all the other scientists were wrong, that the most persistent principles of the universe were accident and error.
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It takes an instant to interpret a known thing when that thing is exposed as something unknown.
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She knew what it was she had succumbed to that profound drive shared by all creatures who are faced with death— the drive to seek immortality through progeny.
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A leader, you see, is one of the things that distinguishes a mob from a people. He maintains the level of individuals. Too few individuals, and a people reverts to a mob.
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And what he saw was a time nexus within this cave, a boiling of possibilities focused here, wherein the most minute action-the wink of an eye, a careless word, a misplaced grain of sand— moved a gigantic lever across the known universe. He saw violence with the outcome subject to so many variables that his slightest movement created vast shiftings in the pattern.
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The vision made him want to freeze into immobility, but this, too, was action with its consequences.
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The meeting between ignorance and knowledge, between brutality and culture — it begins in the dignity with which we treat our dead.
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This was a dream for which men would die willingly. It was another of the essential ingredients that she felt her son needed: people with a goal. Such people would be easy to imbue with fervor and fanaticism. They could be wielded like a sword to win back Paul's place for him.
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The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future.
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He realized suddenly that it was one thing to see the past occupying the present, but the true test of prescience was to see the past in the future.
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Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.
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When law and duty are one, united by religion, you never become fully conscious, fully aware of yourself. You are always a little less than an individual.
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Gurney saw then the sinewy harshness in Paul that had never before been seen in an Atreides—a leathery look to the skin, a squint to the eyes and calculation in the glance that seemed to weigh everything in sight.
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Something had happened inside him while he faced the Sardaukar. A sum of decisions had accumulated in his awareness.
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"The people who can destroy a thing, they control it," Paul said.
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"The land is beautiful, true," Chani said. "But there is much grief in it."
"Grief is the price of victory" Jessica said.
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In that instant, Paul saw how Stilgar had been transformed from the Fremen naib to a creature of the Lisan al-Gaib, a receptacle for awe and obedience. It was a lessening of the man, and Paul felt the ghost-wind of the jihad in it.
I have seen a friend become a worshiper, he thought.
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There should be a word-tension directly opposite to adab, the demanding memory, she thought. There should be a word for memories that deny themselves.
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How can you tell what's ruthless unless you've plumbed the depths of both cruelty and kindness?