How we cite our quotes: (Part.Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
Kindness, humility, piety, respect for other human creatures—these are the great desiderata of all who pursue virtuous action, and it matters not whether those who preach them heed their own advice. (1.3.1)
We know you're just burning to know what desiderata means—it's Latin for "things that are wanted or needed." So in other words, all those good character virtues are the desirable things for someone who wants to act virtuously. We'll just add that in that same chapter, Octavian's all about controlling emotions and passions, so we wonder: can desiring these virtues be a problem—even a vice—too?
Quote #2
It boots us nothing to feel rage for things that long ago transpired. We must curb our fury, and allow sadness to diminish, and speak our stories with coolness and deliberation. "Animum rege, qui nisi paret, imperat," quoth the poet Horace. "Rule thy passion, for unless it obeys, it rules you." (1.3.2)
That sounds all well and good, but isn't Octavian kind of due for some righteous anger? At the end of the day, he was more a slave and an experiment for the men than an actual human being with rights.
Quote #3
Dr. 09-01, who had rid in the carriage with us, explained, "In the original state of man, we were happy—when we were animals. But when we rose from four feet to two, we became precarious. Now we hold ourselves away from Nature. Bipedal, we teeter always on the brink of collapse, and worry about balance. Gentlemen, it is a great pity that, knowing of our previous felicity and our current distresses, we do not return to our four-footed posture and feel the soil again beneath our hands. 'Tis a damned shame that we do not choose to revert to the blissful state of mammalian repose." (1.5.29)
We'll just point out that it's hard to ignore the whole context surrounding Dr. 09-01's speech. After all, there are slaves in their midst—Octavian and his mom among them. Even if they're not exactly treated like four-footed animals since they're experiments in education for the scholars, the other slaves are just slaves to the men. It's got to be a little weird to hear this guy spout off on how it's so much better to be an animal when you're a slave, being treated like an animal.
Quote #4
"'Twas Greek, sir," Dr. 09-01 lied. "I was telling the boy that according to Plato, man is defined," he said, smiling affably and gesturing to the cart, "as a featherless biped with broad nails, receptive of political philosophy." (1.18.22)
Here's the context: A Customs agent just got tarred, feathered and beaten, and 09-01 is explaining to Octavian why taxation can cause such a violent reaction to a relatively innocent man. Only one of those violent men overhears 09-01's explanation and challenges him to speak up. 09-01, of course, is too smooth and smart to fall into that trap.
Quote #5
There might no other passage in the book that shows how truly Romantic Octavian is. We don't mean romantic like the stuff that goes on between couples—we mean Romantic, as in the sense of awe that can come from observing and trying to understand Nature.
Some of you philosophy heads are going to say, "Wait, a sec… Isn't Octavian really into Enlightenment here?" We'll give you that. Octavian's going on about how to observe and measure the distance between planets, and that's definitely all science-y, Reason-y stuff.
But it's what Octavian hopes to get out of it that reveals the Romantic ideals even within an Enlightenment-like passage. He's trying to understand the distance between people and how to make people become more intimate and close to one another. It is something that baffles and overwhelms him, and it's these feelings of total awe and the humble wishing Octavian shows that makes the whole thing romantic, big-R style.
Quote #6
I had no insight; no sense of what to say; was sensible of nothing but the darkness, which was parted, which had resolved itself so that objects there were defined, though they were not objects that could be seen by light, but properties of unbeing; the furniture of negation; and so I sat, perched upon the sofa in our frigid salon; I watched unbeing in the ebon room; and together, our teeth chattered; and outside in the city, the sun rose, and it was morning. (1.26.176)
Octavian's at a loss for how to respond to his mother after Lord Cheldthorpe's men have whipped them and thrown them into the ice-house. He doesn't know how to comfort her, and instead all he can register is this general sense of "unbeing."
Note that even though Octavian is observing objects in the dark room as "unbeing," he and his mother are also like these objects of "unbeing." That's why, when he writes that "I watched unbeing in the ebon room," Octavian is both watching objects that have no sense of being (a couch, a wall, maybe even his mother) and being "unbeing" himself—it's a moment of recognition and sympathy with a world of objects.
Quote #7
"Point B. A point of great gravity: No institution, like no fox, may long be sustained on its own flesh. We must devour elsewhere if we are not to devour ourselves, and so perish!" (2.3.7)
Enter Mr. Sharpe. Here he's addressing the College for the first time, and he's not holding back on his vision for the College (which his people will now be funding). His philosophy? Adapt or die. Unfortunately for pretty much everyone, Mr. Sharpe's vision changes the College into a completely practical institution. There go the operas, the concerts, the cool experiments, the literature… in other words, all the fun.
Quote #8
"Eh—," interposed Mr. 03-01, rising. He explained to us, "Eh—I am afraid… I am afraid that our system of metric designation has come to an end. Mr. Sharpe, reviewing the practice, had determined that it contributes to hierarchy and rank. So we shall… cast aside our numbers, my friends… like shackles… and instead… names. Names for all." (2.3.14)
Mr. Sharpe puts Mr. Gitney (03-01) in charge of dismantling the very system of naming he created. Note all the pauses and ellipses—clearly Mr. Gitney isn't comfortable with this new world order. One would think Mr. Sharpe would be all over Mr. Gitney's system because it tries to be objective, neutral, abstract—these are the principles Mr. Sharpe wants Octavian to pursue in his studies later on—but alas, he thinks it's hierarchical and ridiculous.
Quote #9
He held out the written pass. "This is what they want us to be," he said. "They want us to be nothing but a bill of sale and a letter explaining where we is and instructions for where we go and what we do. They want us empty. They want us flat as paper. They want to be able to carry our souls in their hands, and read them out loud in court. All the time, they're on the exploration of themselves, going on the inner journey into their own breast. But us, they want there to be nothing inside of. They want us to be writ on. They want us to be a surface. Look at me; I'm mahogany."
I protested, "A man is known by his deeds."
"Oh, that's sure," said Bono. "Just like a house is known by its deeds. The deeds say who owns it, who sold it, and who'll be buying a new one when it gets knocked down." (2.5.18-20)
This is a moment of truth passage. Bono has just exposed the problem with the entire College and its relationship to slavery—while the white men of the College go on with their philosophizing, the hard truth is that they still own slaves, so they can ponder all they like on the existence of humankind, but their actions show their own inhumanity. At the end of the day, it's undeniable that they're treating other human beings as superficial objects ("mahogany") in order to support their own dreams. This truth stings Octavian, and badly.
Quote #10
The African youth stood before us, a gawky and immobile spectacle. He said, "I cannot fight—nor can I refrain—without imputations of savagery."
And he finished, in a voice not of defiance, but suffused with realization: "I am no one. I am not a man. I am nothing." (2.34.17-18)
Even though this is a passage coming from Mr. Gitney and Mr. Sharpe's (dry) scientific article on the effect of smallpox on Africans, it's anything but boring. In fact, we'll admit that this passage drove us to squeeze a couple of tears out of our tear ducts. Why? Because this "African youth" Mr. Gitney is writing about is Octavian.
Octavian's just found out his mother has died and sees her dissected, lying on a lab table. So he responds in silence. But Mr. Sharpe says his silence is a sign of his natural African dumbness, so of course, Octavian responds to Mr. Sharpe in total anger, which just leads Mr. Sharpe to observe that—whoa—now Octavian is really a savage. Sigh. Octavian just can't win, and that's what he points out to the men in the room—it doesn't matter what human response he gives, he'll be seen as a savage animal.
What's ironic, of course, is that Octavian shows how human he is through his emotional responses. What the men are trying to corner him into becoming is an unrealistic, inhuman robot of a man—or, you know, somebody who probably just doesn't exist.
Quote #11
Consider, then, the full measure of my sadness, racing this inscription; not merely for Hosiah Lister, but for all of us; consider the dear cost of liberty in a world so hostile, so teeming with enemies and opportunists, that one could not become free without casting aside all causality, all choice, all will, all identity; finding freedom only in the spacious blankness of unbeing, the wide plains of nonentity, infinite and still. (4.11.9)
Octavian, captured by Mr. Sharpe and now bound and masked, has nothing to do but think, so he's thinking about the conditions of all those slaves out there, including Hosiah Lister, the old slave who fought and died for the Patriots.
Lister's epitaph is just one line about how—now dead—he has received freedom, and Octavian can't help thinking about how sad and yet how appropriate that epitaph is. After all, as far as Octavian knows, death is the ultimate release, the ultimate guarantor of freedom from bondage.
We want to point out that Octavian's conclusion—that death gives slaves a freedom of "unbeing" and "nonentity"—is a careful one. What do we mean? Well, Octavian isn't going around saying there's a hell or a heaven, despite all his prayers to God earlier in the book—he is still a scientist in the end, and a scientist should not conclude beyond what the evidence shows him or her.
He can only conclude, therefore, that whatever comes in death is what he sees—which are corpses, no longer conscious and responsive to an identity or human state of being. It's a point in the novel that subtly shows the fine line Octavian walks between religious faith and scientific reasoning.