I’ve got to tell you, I’ve been getting up at 3:30 a.m. for work every morning this week, and it does not support my after-hours ambitions. My brain is just a bit mushy, and I have not gotten an awful lot of reading or writing or even watching done.
The next couple of chapters of Earthsea will have to wait. For today I want to share one of my favorite quotes from Gregory Maguire’s Wicked Years.
“The smallest indivisible part of a nation worth defending is not a field, a lake, a city, an industry, but a child.”
That’s from A Lion Among Men spoken by a sort of demonic nun to a talking lion about the grandchild of the Wicked Witch of the West. It’s not Maguire’s most elegant prose, but in context there is a desperation to it.
I think it is also startlingly true in a way that genre fiction excels at. That is one of the powers of genre. A line that might read as a blunt instrument elsewhere can cut to the quick when wielded by the outrageous and the supernatural.
The smallest indivisible part of a nation worth defending is a child. I have thought about that quote an awful lot. I don’t think it’s the thesis of any of the Wicked books, just a truth found along the way. Nevertheless, in this historical moment it rattles my teeth and rings in my ears.
The smallest indivisible part of a nation worth defending is a child. Any child. Every child.
Until next time.
chasetriesagain.com 