1.2.4-Shirley-keeldar

ClubNinetyThree: 1.2.4: Tormentum Belli
Turns out it wasn’t an explosion, but a caronade that’s broken free of its moorings and, in proper loose cannon style, is careening about causing murder, mayhem, and extreme property damage in the hold of the ship.

(Is it terrible I’d never really thought about what the expression “loose cannon” meant before, in literal terms? Because now I understand.  Oh, do I ever understand.)

I like this even better than everything being on fire. This is much more symbolic.

It is the entry into liberty of matter; you would say that this eternal slave is avenging itself; it seems that the malice in what we call inert objects exits and bursts all of a sudden; it appears to lose patience and take a strange, obscure revenge; nothing is more inexorable than the anger of the inanimate.

We are touching the inexorability theme, and we are connecting it to the very weapon the Royalists planned to use against France and against the revolution, and it is turning on them and taking vengeance. It is not too much a stretch at all to say that this is about the people of France as an inexorable force rising against oppressors who would use them for their own gain. Not that I’m all over connecting people to inanimate objects, but there’s still a lot in it…

"You cannot kill it; it is dead. And yet it lives.  It lives with a sinister life that comes to it from the infinite."

WORDS. I love this metaphor, I love this chapter, I am looking forward to reading piles and piles of analysis.

Oh, but also:

It was their passenger, the peasant, the man they had just spoken of a moment earlier.

Interesting that all of that gets enumerated right there, him being identified by all these external, transitory, and even false labels… Presumably right as he’s about to do something impressive.

And then we end in yet another cliffhanger! I hope The Peasant isn’t about to do anything TOO heroic and save the ship. Not that he isn’t free to be heroic — Royalists might be hateful and wrong about life, but that doesn’t stop them being brave — but I also just want terrible things to keep happening to this very symbolic ship.