Robot.

But here’s the twist: Robots, apparently, desire to be soldiers.

Whereas my cat would no doubt be content to play the robot pur sang—mindlessly spinning and cleaning and freaking out when I pour water on him [it?]—the poor robot whose job he’d so heartlessly steal would be an ethical soldier, one capable of making “the right choice” about when to unleash a devastating hail of armor-piercing minigun rounds onto children, compact cars, noisy televisions, life-size cut-outs of Adnan “Crazy Cheeze” Sabri, &c.

To clarify my position on ethical robotic devastation, I should add that attempts to trick-out the ethics of human soldiers have so far led to nada; as my man Philip Zimbardo points out on TED, the adoption of the uniform of an “ethical” government has—since the slave-Imperium of Roma, since the slave-empires of Sumer and Egypt long before—provided only a smokescreen, a chance to faux-ethically rationalize away our wars.

Perhaps robots can do us one better. Or perhaps we might pass the job of soldiering on to the noble (and highly irrational) cat. While certainly unethical, any given cat-soldier would also be pissy and libertarian, unable and unwilling to coordinate with the next—thus preventing the formation of a feline SkyNet or Matrix. Wars would be shorter and center around the control and distribution of fish-guts and whole milk. And—when the cats (individually) took command of the Roomba factories—the hardwood floors of the world would look a lot shinier, a lot faster.

(Paritur pax catto?)

Biblioburro.

These words are all words I have encountered and considered, at least once:

We ask peace for the gods of our fathers, peace for our nature divinities. It is only just to assume that the object of all people’s worship is the same. We look up to the same stars, one sky covers us all and the same universe surrounds us. Do the means by which a man seeks the truth really matter? There is no single road by which we may arrive at so great a mystery.

—Symmachus, Relatio 3, trans. Smith.

My city is Rome, insofar as I am Antoninus; but insofar as I am a human being, my city is the Cosmos. Therefore all that benefits these cities is alone my good. (6.44)

Humans have come into being for the sake of each other, so teach them or learn to bear them. (8.59)

—Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, trans. J. Needleman & J. P. Piazza, The Essential Marcus Aurelius.

I only am he who places over you no master, owner, better God, beyond what waits intrinsically in yourself.

—Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass.

The earth’s a door, if you press your ear against it.

Music’s a wood you walk through.

—David Mitchell, Black Swan Green.

Bees [Lat. apes] are the smallest of birds, and are born from the bodies of oxen.

Bees live in community, choose the most noble among them as king, have wars, and make honey. Their laws are based on custom, but the king does not enforce the law; rather the lawbreakers punish themselves by stinging themselves to death.

—Hrabanus Maurus, De rerum naturis (On the Nature of Things), an encyclopedia covering “the entire field of sacred and profane learning.”

We’ve been locked in the world’s box,
love sets us free, time kills us.

—Adam Zagajewski, “Little Waltz,” trans. Clare Cavanagh.

If not while making this site, then during the completion of some other recent enterprise I have said, “Boy howdy, I’m glad to have read [those particular words].”

I have even juggled them before the emperors of sleep (there are three) and worn them as hats when my head grew cold. Words are powerful. They be illin.