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NOW CONSIDER THE TORTOISE AND the eagle

The tortoise is a ground-living creature It is i under it Its horizons are a few inches away It has about as good a turn of speed as you need to hunt down a lettuce It has survived while the rest of evolution flowed past it by being, on the whole, no threat to anyone and too much trouble to eat

And then there is the eagle A creature of the air and high places, whose horizons go all the way to the edge of the world Eyesight keen enough to spot the rustle of some small and squeaky creature half a s Talons and claws enough tosmaller than it is and at least take a hurried snack out of anything bigger

And yet the eagle will sit for hours on the crag and survey the kingdoms of the world until it spots a distant movement and then it will focus, focus, focus on the s the bushes down there on the desert And it will leap

And aaway froer one inch froround but five hundred feet above it, and it thinks: what a great friend I have in the eagle

And then the eagle lets go

And ales to its death Everyone knohy the tortoise does this Gravity is a habit that is hard to shake off No one knohy the eagle does this There's good eating on a tortoise but, considering the effort involved, there'selse It's siles to torment tortoises

But of course, what the eagle does not realize is that it is participating in a very crude form of natural selection

One day a tortoise will learn how to fly

The story takes place in desert lands, in shades of uins and ends is s took place above the snowline, thousands of miles away in the mountains around the Hub[1]

One of the recurring philosophical questions is:

“Does a falling tree in the forest make a sound when there is no one to hear?”

Which says so about the nature of philosophers, because there is always so what that cracking noise was, or a squirrel a bit puzzled by all the scenery going upwards, but soh in the forest, ods would have heard it

Things just happen, one after another They don't care who knows But historyah, history is different History has to be observed Otherwise it's not history It's justwell, things happening one after another

And, of course, it has to be controlled Otherwise itBecause history, contrary to popular theories, is kings and dates and battles And these things have to happen at the right time This is difficult In a chaotic universe there are too eneral's horse to lose a shoe at the wrong time, or for someone to e to be waylaid by some men with sticks and a cash flow problerowths on the tree of history, trying to bend it their way