Leviathans of Frank Goddio, The judge on war of Cormac McCarthy

Imagine. I tried once earlier today, but must with all haste assure you how much harder it is to do at day. At work. Powersaws buzzing digital vertigo. Feeling a mind, mine?, concussing my esteem. But escape that and imagine the seacrusted megaliths, tributes from a different world, brooding for encapsulated aeons amidst this murk. 4 miles from the current shoreline, concealed from our squabbles, outlasting us, entombed. Have they smiled unseen for this long, godess Isis leaning to Hapi, god of abundance, just like us this weekend, we danced a lot too, to smirk together, concocting whispy plans immortal. Did they have the lived egos to match? These people even defied the sea. How many striations of cultural silt are there on this planet? Priceless, to worthless, to priceless.

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...All other trades are contained in that of war.

Is that why war endures?

No. It endures because young men love it and old men love it in them. Those that fought, those that did not.

That's your notion.

The judge smiled. Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all...

...Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak. Historical law subverts it at every turn. A moral view can never be proven right or wrong by any ultimate test. A man falling dead in a duel is not thought thereby to be proven in error as to his views. His very involvement in such a trial gives evidence of a new and broader view. The willingness of the principals to forgo further argument as the triviality which it in fact is and to petition directly the chambers of the historical absolute clearly indicates of how little moment are the opinions and of what great moment the divergences thereof. For the argument is indeed trivial, but not so the separate wills thereby made manifest. Man's vanity may well approach the infinite in capacity but his knowledge remains imperfect and howevermuch he comes to value his judgements ultimately he must submit to them before a higher court. Here there can be no special pleading. Here are considerations of equity and rectitude and moral right rendered void and without warrant and here are the views of the litigants despised. Decisions of light and death, of what shall be and what shall not, beggar all question of right. In elections of those magnitudes are all lesser ones subsumed, moral, spiritual, natural...

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- Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy