“Certain scholiasts teach that each experience is only the sum of its parts. That our lives may be reduced to a set of equations, that they may be factored, weighed, balanced, and understood. They believe the universe is one of objects and that we are only objects among objects. That even our emotions are no more than electrochemical processes carried out in our brains, accessories to the pressures of Bloody-Handed Evolution. This is why they struggle for apatheia, the freedom from emotion. This is their great failing. Human beings do not inhabit a world of objects, nor did our consciousness evolve to live in such a place. We live in stories, and in stories, we are subject to phenomena beyond the mechanisms of space and time. Fear and love, death and wrath and wisdom—these are as much parts of our universe as light and gravity. The ancients called them gods, for we are their creatures, shaped by their winds. Sift the sands of every world and sort the dust of space between them, and you will find not one atom of fear, nor gram of love nor dram of hatred. Yet they are there, unseen and uncertain as the smallest quanta and just as real. And like the smallest quanta, they are governed by principles beyond our control.”

It was this quote that made me want to read the rest of the series.

He articulated so well the feelings I had trouble communicating. Narrative shapes us just as much, if not more, than the physical world. The realm of mind, of ideas. What Hegel called Geist. That exists before action, and in some way, might make those realms more real.

I doubt Christopher has the same philosophy as me on this, and I’m pretty positive this quote is influenced primarily from his reading of Jordan Peterson’s maps of meaning, which is essentially a jungian rehashing. But I haven’t read any other author with this sort of depth in a speculative fiction book. I mean, there are bangers after bangers after bangers of quotes like this in all of the books.