The Way of Economy

Anne McCaffrey Crystal Singer embeds an intriguing aphorism in a passage reflecting upon the awakening of the protagonist, Killashandra, to her chosen craft and profession.

That was ever the way of technology: to take the worthless and convert it into wealth.

The sentence is set at the end of a paragraph in a spot and with punctuation to invite meditation. The way of technology is not necessarily an easier way. It is not one without toil. And McCaffrey's text makes this clear because the concluding sentence of the previous paragraph sets the tone

The two facets of singing crystal were linked: the good and bad, the difficult, the ecstatic.

Wicked play with parallelism where good is on an initial reading aligned with difficult and bad with ecstatic. But the alignment is perhaps chiasmic and the valuation is reversed: the bad ecstasy and the good difficulty. In any event the colon helps the reader focus upon the unasked question: how much wealth does it take for the way of technology to convert the worthless?


And so for day 429
15.02.2008