The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose

Blood bubbled from the man’s chest and he turned his lost eyes upward, already glazed, the capillaries breaking up. In those dark pools there sat each a small and perfect sun.

What joins men together, he said, is not the sharing of bread but the sharing of enemies.

And so these parties divided upon that midnight plain, each passing back the way the other had come, pursuing as all travelers must inversions without end upon other men’s journeys.

It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.

There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto, said the Mennonite.

The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have power to wake it. Hell aint half full. Hear me. Ye carry war of a madman’s making onto a foreign land. Yell wake more than the dogs.

Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.

No, said Tobin. The gifts of the Almighty are weighed and parceled out in a scale peculiar to himself. It’s no fair accountin and I dont doubt but what he’d be the first to admit it and you put the query to him boldface.