Lexicon

anything felt like murder. By the time she reached the doors, the room was full of howls. Like wolves.
    • • •
    Then the thing. Which at first seemed insignificant compared to what was happening, but she later came to understand was not. As she escaped the emergency room, Harry’s white paramedic van jumped the curb. Harry stared at her through the windshield. Then his eyes shifted to the room behind her. His expression tightened, filling with purpose, and he threw open the van door. She got to her feet and backed away, her hands up, thinking he was coming to kill her, that somehow despite what had happened earlier he had succumbed to the word. But he ran right by her, and she realized the purpose in his eyes was his own. He was going to help.
    She left. She made it two blocks before her gut clenched so badly she had to bend over. She gagged but nothing came out. A police car blew by, lights and sirens, heading for the ER. They would all go there: the cops, anyone trying to help, the injured. It would be endless. She broke into a shuffling run.
    Her eye was burning. It felt like a hard prick of light in there. The thing was, when the van’s door had bounced open, the glass had reflected the ER for a moment. It was only a flash. But she had the terrible feeling she had gotten something in her eye.

ARROGANCE AND DELUSION
    Discussion Board 14 / Thread 21 / Post #43
    In reply to: Post #39.
    > we learn nothing from God tearing down the Tower of Babel

    God didn’t destroy the Tower of Babel! That’s a common misconception.

    Genesis 11:5-8:

    And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men were building.

    And the Lord said,
Behold, the people are one, and have one language; now nothing will be restrained from them which they have imagined to do.

    Let us go down and confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.

    So the Lord scattered them across the face of the earth, and they left off to build the city.

    This is often mistold as Man trying to build a tower to Heaven, which God knocks down as an object lesson in humility. But note:
    (a) no destruction
    (b) God says nothing about the tower at all

    What moves God to action is the common tongue. The story of Babel isn’t about hubris. It’s about language.

[FOUR]
    The helicopter moved through darkness and Yeats peered through the plexiglass at what lay below. Broken Hill was a small cluster of sulfurous lights, like a ship on an ocean of black glass. Occasionally he caught a tiny spark or glimmer, but those were the only signs that something was happening.
    “Can’t raise any of them,” said a voice in his ear. He was wearing a headset; the voice belonged to Plath, sitting opposite him. “Eliot, the ground team, no one.” She swapped headsets and began to bark into that one and Yeats returned his attention to the landscape. A circular pinprick of lights came into view, surrounding a depthless black hole, which Yeats recognized as the main quarry. He’d never seen it in person before; it was larger than he’d expected. When he’d first taken an interest, some decades before, following hints of something ancient and significant buried there, he could still make out remnants of the hill that had loaned the town its name. Now that was gone—not just erased but inverted, to become this great pit. He found this notable for the demonstration of force it represented. Civilizations rose and fell; what caused them to be remembered was not their contribution to knowledge or culture, not even the size of their empires, but rather how much force they exerted upon the landscape. This was what survived them. A hundred billion lives had passed without leaving a mark since the Egyptians had raised their pyramids, changing the world not figuratively but literally. Yeats admired that. This hole in Broken Hill was nothing, of course, but it would outlast every person on the planet.
    “Okay,” said Plath. “We’ve got buildings on fire now.”
    He looked. There was indeed a flickering.
    “I have to say, I think we’re operating at a high degree of probability that Woolf has deployed the word.” Plath looked at him as if she expected a reaction here: if not an
Oh god no
then at least an
Are you sure
; some kind of response to validate her feeling that this was a shocking development, possibly the worst thing she could imagine.
    “Horrible,” he said.
    “I mean, we’re seeing bodies in the streets.