Since reading this book, how do you now feel about Columbus and why? How do you feel/What do you think about Christianity being used the way it was in the book?Specific quotes we noted are below.
10 – murderers, rapist, and thieves “suspension of any civil and criminal actions pending against him”
27 – Tagiri would find the “stories of those who has lost all choice”
46 - “to create a world where the destroyers did not triumph”
94 – “Just admit that there are some things worse than slavery. Just admit that maybe your set of values is as arbitrarily as any other culture’s values., and to try to revise history in order to make your values triumph in the past as well as the p[resent is pure cultural imperialism”
119 – “he had to believe that gold and great kingdoms were there to be found, even though he had no evidence for them”
150 – “Are you telling me that you aren’t a crazy, self-willed, time-wasting, donkey-headed fool after all? …I just don’t think you’ve caught the vision of what Pastwatch is all about.” J
“’I haven’t,” said Hanahpu. ‘I want to change the vision’”
156 - “only God can put such a fire in a man”
158 - “scholarly arrogance”
160 – “faith is for women, evidence for men… Christianity is for the faithful, and so there are more true Christians among women than among men,”
170 – hierarchy “The truth will still be true tomorrow, and everybody who needs to know it has an equal claim on learning it.”
191 – “his voice was a good as anyone else’s”
Maya civilization “would never have given rise to the democratic and tolerant and scientific values that eventually emerged from European culture”
192 – “’But outside the Americas, wherever the Europeans conquered, native culture survived,’ said Hanahpu. ‘Altered, yes, but still recognizably itself.’”
217 - “time is rational. Causality is irrational” sending a person back is a discrete event
224 – “we will sacrifice to create their history, as parents sacrifice to create healthy, happy children.”
242 – first we try to preserve ourselves, then our children, then our kin, then our village or tribe, then our memory, until finally we have the perspective trying to act for the good of humanity as a whole.
258 - There’s a difference and it’s damn hard to see between a hypocrite and Tagiri (moral ambiguity)
272 – “All I have to do is turn the Zapotecs into a great nation, link up with the Tarascans, accelerate the development of ironworking and shipbuilding, block the Tlaxcalans and overthrow the Mexica, and prepare these people for a new ideology that does not include human sacrifice. Who couldn’t do that?” J
277 – “now the property of” upon stepping on shore
284 – “slightly perverse spin …on the doctrine of Jesus” and 289
287 – “Let’s lay the groundwork of somewhat more egalitarian treatment of women now, at the beginning.
290 – “no captives, no slaves, no servants-for-life”
292 – “Earn my respect by your generosity and truthfulness.”
“His plans would all have to be adapted; only his purposes were unchangeable.”
294 – “such stories were needed in forging anew nation with a will to empire. The people had to have an unshakable belief in their own worthiness.”
304 – “pseudo-chaotic systems like weather were actually quite stable in their underlying patterns, and swallowed up random tiny fluctuations.”
312 – “this time technology would not outstrip the ability of human beings to understand it, to control it, to clean up after it.”
320 – “the idea that the stranger is not the person”
331 - “He lingered with her as long as possible and sometimes neglected his other tasks.”
362 – “Was there no justice? Could white men do anything to Indians, and no one would punish them?”
371 – “I would never forbid you to do anything, …I only ask you to wait and watch a little longer.”
377 – “if you weren’t helping, you were ignored.”
378 – “the gentleness of the Tainos was only one aspect of their character.”
“Solstice of 1493”
“They’re forgetting to be Spanish” “ But the Taino are also forgetting to be Taino” “They’re becoming something new, something that has hardly been seen tin the world before”
384 – “but to her there was little difference between Xibalba and Pastwatch. Call them gods or call them researcher, she didn’t see much practical difference. An you know, I can’t think of a significant difference, either.”
389 – “only an unworthy son would ask his father to apologize for coming home,”
RELATIONSHIPS – LOVE & ABUSE
142 – “She would never touch him, not really. She had his child, but the more she hungered for the man himself, the more she reached out to him, the more he would push her away; and yet if she did not reach out, he would ignore her completely; there was no path she could see that would lead her to happiness.”
“So he turned away, not wishing to hurt her and yet hurting her all the same, because he had to find a way to accomplish what God had given him to do.
“and spent the rest of the time haunting her own house”
143 – “She went to her bed and wept, for she was not part of his life at all, and she knew no way to enter it, and so she loved him all the more desperately, and knew all the more surely that it was some failing in her that made her unlovable to her husband.”
146 – Felipa knew that Columbus hated her now, and that she deserved his hatred, having given him nothing that he wanted.”
“when he talked to her of how sorry he was for his long neglect, she knew that this was said not because he wished her to live so he could do better in th3 future, but rather because he wanted her forgiveness so that his conscience could be free when at last her death feed him in every other way.”
147 – “And a small part of his dear father was far greater than all the love and attention of many lesser men. Or so he told himself to stave off the humiliation of tears during the loneliness of those first months.”
158 - “she will judge you as women judge men – not on the strength of their arguments, and not on their cleverness or prowess in battle, but rather on the force of their character, the intensity of the passion, their strength of soul, their compassion, and – ah, this above all-their conversation.”
198 – “Is that was Beatrice is? My chance to amend my mistakes with Felipa? Or simply a away to make new ones?”
309 – “Love is random, fear is inevitable.”
315 – what a woman should do. they don’t always do what their husbands tell them, but they do almost everything that their husband asks them to do, especially when their husbands do everything the women ask them to do.
“the village that teaches the white men how to be human has to be different from all other villages.”
317 – “The men learned that rather than have the public humiliation of their wives taking refuge in the house of Diko or Putukam, they would control their anger.”
384 – “Who else but you would understand what I achieved? Who else but me could know how far beyond our dreams you succeeded?”
394 – “There is no good thing that does not cost a dear price. …Happiness is not a life without pain, but rather a life in which the pain is traded for a worthy price.”
QUESTIONS & SIDE NOTES:
What if it weren’t Christianity?
Were the Tarascan really about to work with iron?
No mention of driving the Jews from Spain (and getting their money), only the Moors. 172? 209? Vehement quote 330?
How did he prepare for China and Japan? He didn’t learn the languages 333 or bring a translator 276 or appropriate gifts for a king.
Arawak language
30 – “They don’t need death or blood to talk to gods” Taino cohoba ceremony
34 – “been woven into the same great basket of life” the basket of fish
116 – “The winds of the south will carry you west, and the winds further to the north will return you easily to Europe” – Columbus traveled faster at night
123 on – story of 1 artisan and 1 monkey (twins, again) and 1 and 7 death (names by calendar date), Popol Vuh (sacred text), Maya (not Mayan)
136 – “it was navigation that inspired him” Felipa brought him the boxes of charts and maps (did he really marry her because he knew these maps existed)
139 - He knew there was land 3000 miles away (he just thought it was Cipangu - Japan)
174 – “this is not a military expedition (that was his second voyage with 17 ships, chains, dogs, soldiers)
180 – large canoes and ships with rudders (and sails)
182 – “extensive contact between Mesoamerica and the Caribbean islands”
184-185 – human sacrifice
310 – Guacanagarí (and Anacoana)
188-189 – small pox and plague and carrier virus (284) and “to keep the Indies from being swept away in a tide of European diseases,”” 297 and “inability of the Indies to organize serious resistance.” 298
279 – assumptions that gold given by god, slavery, gold for Spain, and cultural misunderstanding
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