Only a terrible twist of fate could leave a man in such a pitiful condition!
But there is hope. If you study risk, you will find there are two kinds: blind risk and calculated risk. The first one, blind risk, is suspect. Blind risk is the calling card of laziness, the irrational hope, something for nothing, the cold twist of fate. Blind risk is the pointless gamble, the emotional decision, and the sucker play. The man who embraces blind risk demonstrates all the wisdom and intelligence of a drunk stepping into traffic. However, calculated risk builds fortunes, nations, and empires.
Calculated risk and bold vision go hand in hand. To use your mind, to see the possibilities, to work things out logically, and then to move forward in strength and confidence is what places man above the animals. Calculated risk lies at the heart of every great achievement and achiever since the dawn of time. Trend followers thrive on calculated risk.
So, what if Adam went ahead and did it? What if he told Olive the truth?
Pretty fucking tragic twist of fate, but you don’t seem to remember that we first met years ago. An issue, since I remember a little too well. I like no one, absolutely no one, but I liked you from the start. I liked you when I didn’t know you, and now that I do know you it’s only gotten worse. Sometimes, often, always, I think about you before falling asleep. Then I dream of you, and when I wake up my head’s still there, stuck on something funny, beautiful, filthy, intelligent that’s all about you. It’s been going on for a while, longer than you think, longer than you can imagine, and I should have told you, but I have this impression, this certainty that you’re half a second from running away, that I should give you enough reasons to stay. Is there anything I can do for you? I’ll take you grocery shopping and fill your fridge when we’re back home. Buy you a new bike and a case of decent reagent and that sludge you drink. Kill the people who made you cry. Is there something you need? Name it. It’s yours. If I have it, it’s yours.
Adam's POV of Chapter 16
The Young Turks were oblivious to the irony inherent in their own uninhibited worship of prominent German materialists. Their chief idol was the German physiologist Ludwig Büchner, whose magnum opus, Kraft und Stoff (Force and Matter), was regarded by them as a sort of holy book. Their self-contradictory iconoclasm recalls Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky’s novel Besy (The Possessed), in which the protagonist assaults his landowner’s Christian icons with an axe, only to replace them with candle-bedecked lecterns bearing books by Ludwig Büchner, Jacob Moleschott, and Karl Vogt.3 In its German birth-place, the movement had negligible philosophical and political impact. In the Ottoman Empire, however, it struck root among a particularly influential circle of disciples. Although they were an extremely marginal group at the turn of the century, the Young Turks were destined to rule the Islamic caliphate for almost a decade, and then to go on to craft a secular nation-state out of its remains. It was thus by a bizarre twist of fate that the German doctrine of Vulgärmaterialismus came to bear its most significant fruits in a context entirely alien to its original environment, and that a further vulgarized version of its central tenets would in time form one of the ideological pillars of the modern Turkish nation-state.
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This is my choice, he thought as the Parshendi archers formed up. It's not some angry god watching me, not some spren playing tricks, not some twist of fate.
It's me. I chose to follow Tien. I chose to charge the Shardbearer and save Amaram. I chose to escape the slave pits. And now, I choose to try to rescue these men, though I know probably fail.
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