timelets

Whereupon she cried out to the nurses and the eunuchs, saying, “Bring me my children.” So they brought them to her in haste, and they were three boy children, one walking, one crawling and one sucking. She took them and setting them before the King, again kissed the ground and said, “O King of the age, these are thy children and I crave that thou release me from the doom of death, as a dole to these infants; for, if thou kill me, they will become motherless and will find none among women to rear them as they should be reared.”

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3444/3444-h/3444-h.htm#chap02

“I am the slave of this seal-ring standing in the service of him who possesseth it. Whatsoever he seeketh, that I accomplish for him, and I have no excuse in neglecting that he biddeth me do; because I am Sultan over two-and-seventy tribes of the Jinn, each two-and-seventy thousand in number every one of which thousand ruleth over a thousand Marids, each Marid over a thousand Ifrits, each Ifrit over a thousand Satans and each Satan over a thousand Jinn: and they are all under command of me and may not gainsay me.

When it was the Nine Hundred and Eighty-second Night,
I saw all manner of tradesmen seated in their shops and men and women and children, some standing and some sitting; but they were all stone; and the stuffs were like spiders' webs. I amused myself with looking upon them, and as often as I laid hold upon a piece of stuff, it powdered in my hands like dust dispread.

...what case befel the people of this city, that they are become stones? I would have thee tell me the truth of the matter, for indeed I am admiring at this city and its citizens and that I have found none alive therein save thyself.

ABDULLAH BIN FAZIL AND HIS BROTHERS.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3443/3443-h/3443-h.htm#chap29

When it was the Nine Hundred and Eighth Night,
...

The boy grew up till he attained the age of twelve,[FN#96] when the King being minded to have him taught the arts and sciences, bade build him a palace amiddlemost the city, wherein were three hundred and threescore rooms, and lodged him therein. Then he assigned him three wise men of the Olema and bade them not be lax in teaching him day and night and look that there was no kind of learning but they instruct him herein, so he might become versed in all knowledge. He also commanded them to sit with him one day in each of the rooms by turn and write on the door thereof that which they had taught him therein of various kinds of lore and report to himself, every seven days, whatso instructions they had imparted to him. So they went in to the Prince and stinted not from educating him day nor night, nor withheld from him aught of that they knew; and presently there appeared in him readiness to receive instruction such as none had shown before him. Every seventh day his governors reported to the King what his son had learnt and mastered.

-- A thousand nights and a night, vol 9. The Spider and the Wind.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3443/3443-h/3443-h.htm#chap13

What makes art in general, and literature in particular, remarkable, what distinguishes them from life, is precisely that they abhor repetition. In everyday life you can tell the same joke thrice and, thrice getting a laugh, become the life of the party. In art, though, this sort of conduct is called “cliché”.

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1987/brodsky/lecture/

“...he [Lincoln] managed polarities: they didn’t manage him.
...
Scale sets the ranges within which experience accrues. If, in evolution, edges of chaos reward adaptation; if, in history, adaptation fortifies resilience; and if, in individuals, resilience accommodates unknowns more readily than rigidity, then it stands to reason that a gradual expansion of edges better equips leaders for the unexpected than those that shock, leaving little time to adapt, or those inherited, which breed entitlement and arrogance, its companion.
..
Space is where expectations and circumstances intersect."
...
Tolstoy suggests, in the last pages of War and Peace, that the interdependence of time, space, and scale simultaneously reflects choice and necessity: the illusion of agency causes us to believe in free will even as inexorable laws deny the possibility. ”

---John Lewis Gaddis. “On Grand Strategy.”

Here the Prince passed one night; but, on the following morning, the King’s favourite concubine happened to cast eyes upon his beauty and loveliness, his symmetrical stature, his brilliancy and his perfect grace, and love gat hold of her heart and she was ravished with his charms....

“O King’s son, grant me thy favours and I will set thee in thy father’s stead; I will give him to drink of poison, so he may die and thou shalt enjoy his realm and wealth.”

--
Commentators compare this incident with the biblical story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife and with the old Egyptian romance and fairy tale of the brothers Anapon and Saton dating from the fourteenth century, the days of Pharaoh Ramses Miamun (who built Pi-tum and Ramses) at whose court Moses or Osarsiph is supposed to have been reared (Cambridge Essays 1858). The incident would often occur, e.g. Phædra-cum-Hippolytus; Fausta-cum-Crispus and Lucinian; Asoka’s wife and Kunála, etc., etc. Such things happen in every-day life, and the situation has recommended itself to the folklore of all peoples.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/54525/54525-h/54525-h.htm#f159

Мажордом. Он самый богатый делец в стране. Соперники страшно
ненавидят его. И вот один из них в прошлом году пошел на преступление. Он
решился отравить господина министра финансов.

Помощник. Какой ужас!

Мажордом. Не огорчайся прежде времени. Господин министр финансов
вовремя узнал об этом и скупил все яды, какие есть в стране.

Помощник. Какое счастье!

Мажордом. Не радуйся прежде времени. Тогда преступник пришел к
господину министру финансов я дал необычайно высокую цену за яды. И господин
министр поступил вполне естественно. Министр ведь реальный политик. Он
подсчитал прибыль и продал негодяю весь запас своих зелий. И негодяй отравил
министра. Вся семья его превосходительства изволила скончаться я страшных
мучениях. И сам он с тех пор еле жив, но заработал он на этом двести
процентов чистых. Дело есть дело. Понял?

But by the time people became concerned about... about students, by the time they came to consider just how you were reared, whether you should have been brought into existence at all, well by then it was too late. There was no way to reverse the process. How can you ask a world that has come to regard cancer as curable, how can you ask such a world to put away that cure, to go back to the dark days? There was no going back. However uncomfortable people were about your existence, their overwhelming concern was that their own children, their spouses, their parents, their friends, did not die from cancer, motor neurone disease, heart disease.

--- Kazuo Ishiguro. Never Let Me Go.