How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
But surely [Thon Taddeo] must know that never during his lifetime can he be more than a recoverer of lost works; however brilliant, he can only do what others before him had done. And so it would be, inevitably, until the world became as highly developed as it had been before the Flame Deluge. (20.88)
Poor Thon Taddeo. But if you think about it, how much of our education is really about discovering "what others before [you] had done"? Is knowledge partially responsible for the cyclic nature of time?
Quote #8
Have we no choice but to play the Phoenix in an unending sequence of rise and fall? Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Carthage, Rome, the Empires of Charlemagne and the Turk. Ground to dust and plowed with salt. (25.27)
The image of the Phoenix is an ironic one. Generally, the idea of rebirth seems to be everyone's favorite part of the Phoenix myth. But with Zerchi standing at the edge of the fiery-death part, the idea loses a bit of the romance. (And, as A Canticle has shown us, the Phoenix's rebirth isn't exactly candy and sunshine either.)
Quote #9
Wherever Man goes, you and your successors will go. And with you, the records and remembrances of four thousand years and more. Some of you, or those to come after you, will be mendicants and wanderers, teaching the chronicles of Earth and the canticles of the Crucified to the peoples and the cultures that may grow out of the colony groups. (26.88)
And the circle is complete. Zerchi's speech to the priestly astronauts has undertones of Leibowitz's struggles during the Flame Deluge.