Interesting Quotes to Juxtapose

[PK]

I'll keep the somewhat confused thoughts about who's doing what, whether it's fully deliberate, and what the cause and effect might be regarding observation for the other thread. Or maybe leave the last entirely and hope Nathan posts on it, as it would probably make more sense.

This exchange, however, rang a bell with me:

"...the world has been getting... well, a lot more complicated lately. And seemingly, a lot worse."

"Yeah," Nita said, thinking ruefully of the Manhattan skyline.

"By 'lately'," Tom said, just a little sharply, "I mean, 'over the last couple of thousand years.'"

After hunting for it in the wrong place for a while, I tracked down the one it made me think of.

High Wizardry, chapter "Reserved Words"

"And the pattern started shifting a couple thousand years ago," Kit said. "The Lone Power _had_ always won completely before. Then It started having wins taken away from It after the fact."

These seem an odd combination, somehow. :-P Effect of the Powers being outside time? Counterattack? Something else entirely?

[eveningstar]

Okay, I'm confused. But I see what you mean a little. That struck me too. After all, the Powers are, well, immortal. Could it be that now the Powers That Be are doing something against the Lone Power? I wonder what Diane is getting up to...

[Nerine]

That's a good point. I find it especially interesting that "a couple of thousand years" is mentioned in both excerpts, quite consistently. Because, of course, an important event (victory against the Lone Power) happened two thousand years ago (at least, according to the Bible)...
Knowing DD, this is not coincidence (especially since two thousand years is a rather short time, when you think about it, on a Universe-wide time scale. If she was going to pick a number randomly, it would probably be something more like two billion years.) Her books contain many religious references and I have a distinct feeling that this is leading somewhere important.
Of course, I could be wrong, but I don't think so...

Nerine

[Penelope]

It may not be a contradiction to say that seemingly the world has been getting worse, while at the same time in actuality the pattern has changed for the better...

[PK]

No, it might not -- the "seemingly" is why I said they were interesting, not contradictory. Birth pangs, perhaps? Or metamorphic throes, since nobody could exactly wrap the whole Lone Power up for a while to pupate while stationary.

[Lauren]

Hell

[Lauren]

Grr! It deleted what I wrote in the last post!
What I said was that maybe it has something to do with the population boom that has happened in the past several thousand years. I dunno, just a guess. Sounds dumb, doesn't it?

[semiramis]

lessee... I'm assuming we're saying two to three thousand-ish years ago, since the word "couple" was used, and if it was more, people generally use "several (from my expirience, "couple" as a vague term instead of specifically two = 2-3ish, "several" = 3-7ish, and anything above that depends on what you're counting)

My knowledge of history, chronology-wise, is abysmal... the only things I'm certain happened two-three thousand years ago, aside from the aforementioned Christianity-related stuff are... uh... was the beginning of the Age of Pisces around then? ...and the life of first emporer of China (and the founding of the qin dynasty) was about 22 hundred years ago... err.... the Roman empire fell within two hundred years of that timeframe... and there are a lot of significant mythical events that happen over the period of 2000 years (rebirth of the phoenix, blooming of the peach blossoms of immortality, etc.), but I'm not sure they count...

...ack. Can someone help me here? I've never been able to keep my dates straight...

(Oh, and Lauren--there's a little folder-with-pencil symbol above your posts that don't appear on other people's posts. if you click that within a certain amount of time since posting--i think it's either a day or an hour--then you can either edit or delete your post ^.^ it's a little annoying, since the icon doesn't say anything to obviously label it "delete/edit", but... yeah XD)

[Peter Murray]

Rome was founded about 700 BC, and was wrecked by Goths about 476 AD. So it's not too close to that timeframe.

I don't know what the limit is on editing, but I've edited posts of mine after a week, so there may not be one any more.

Update: Found a mistake in one of my April posts, and corrected it a couple of days ago. So, I still don't know what the limit is, but four months isn't it .

[semiramis]

Oh, okay, oops >.< Sorry XD

*gets tackled football-style by Poot and pushed fifty feet away*

[Lauren]

Since I can't edit it...(it won't let me) I guess then I will just have to say what I tried to say before. I thought that maybe the population boom over the last thousand years might have something to do with the Lone Power getting his losses taken away after the fact...

If there are more living bodies out there, wouldn't that be a chance to have more wizards too? Therefore making the threat to him greater?

Because it seems to me that all of the sudden, Earth's population went into triple fast forward...even up until the 1700s, there were only maybe a billion or so people on the planet.

All of the sudden the earths population doubled itself in a VERY short timespan...it took us several hundered thousand years to get up to 1 billion alone...yet only about 100-200 years to get to the second billion?

I don't know if this is a shot in the dark or not, I've just always thought it strange the population of our planet got so huge in such a short period of time. (I don't know alot about history either, I just remember my dad commenting on things like these...)