{"id":141,"date":"2002-06-03T20:22:22","date_gmt":"2002-06-04T00:22:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog-test\/?p=141"},"modified":"2002-06-03T20:22:22","modified_gmt":"2002-06-04T00:22:22","slug":"brust_steven_an","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/2002\/06\/brust_steven_an\/","title":{"rendered":"Brust, Steven, and Emma Bull: Freedom and Necessity; [personal] post-wedding post"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a> <\/a> <\/p>\n

And now good-morrow to our waking souls . . . <\/cite> -or- Reader, I married him.<\/p>\n

This past Saturday, to be precise.<\/p>\n

If you were there—we hope you had a good time. If you weren’t—we wish you could have been. If it had been practical, we would have invited everyone we know and<\/em> random people off the street to celebrate with us.<\/p>\n

<\/a>And yes, this has actual book log relevance, for two reasons. First, between reveling in wedded bliss (yay) and studying for the bar exam (boo), I have no idea how much time I’ll have to read this summer. (Again, I recommend BlogTracker<\/a>.) Second, on Saturday, I insisted on an hour alone before getting dressed and leaving for the ceremony. Besides just enjoying the opportunity to sit quietly by myself and think, I also read pieces from Steven Brust and Emma Bull’s Freedom and Necessity<\/cite><\/strong>. I didn’t get to re-read the whole thing, so I will post an actual entry about it when I finish the re-read—but it’s one of those books that’s important to me, in part for idiosyncratic personal reasons. This is part of a letter from one lover to another, late in the book.<\/p>\n

\n

Love, say the young bachelors, the wilder debutantes, the dissatisfied married men and women, is leg-irons; even those who seem happy in the state refer to it as being “bound,” as if love by its nature is a period of confinement. If that, too, is part of love’s proper definition, then I don’t love you. What I feel for you has given me freedom on a scale I have never conceived of—I, who have spent my whole adult life in the cause of liberty.<\/p>\n

Do you remember . . . when Engels asked me to agree that my first duty is to my class, and I told him that, having examined some of the options, I would accept that as true? One of the things I weighed against my duty to my class, marvelling at the mingled fear and cold-bloodedness with which I did it, was my duty to you. That was my first inkling of this new freedom. Here was no destructive polarity, no exclusive choice between passion and principles. My duty to you required my duty to my class. To deny the latter would have reduced and blasted the thing I offered to you, and tainted the former with a mean and cowardly spirit. How many seeming clever people are there, who would declare that the overthrow of principle in the name of love is romantic? Am I far off the mark in imagining your Dianic scowl (the one the huntress must have worn when siccing her dogs on a trespasser) at the news that I would entertain for a moment such a choice?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

And now good-morrow to our waking souls . . .  -or- Reader, I married him. This past Saturday, to be precise. If you were there—we hope you had a good time. If you weren’t—we wish you could have been. If it had been practical, we would have invited everyone we know and random people off the street … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Brust, Steven, and Emma Bull: Freedom and Necessity; [personal] post-wedding post”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,11,15],"tags":[143,148],"class_list":["post-141","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-personal","category-sf-and-fantasy","tag-brust-steven","tag-bull-emma"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=141"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}