Shield
His Grace, His Excellency, The Duke of Ankh, Commander Sir Samuel Vimes deserves all those honorifics. And if I am allowed to state one reason and one reason alone for that, for there are many, I will say this: he knows the value of a shield, in whatever form. One of the forms a shield can take is a nightwatchman's badge.
A badge isn't just something you just flip at people's faces to tell them who you are. The reason why a badge takes the form of a shield is that, according to Vimes, it shields the nightwatchman from himself. Because a nightwatchman is vested with the order of the law, and the painful authority of a nightstick, and the terrifying power of being allowed to do things and say how things should go, what identifies him as a nightwatchman should be a promise not to take all that power and wreak destruction to the world because of it. That is how a nightwatchman loves the law.
And that is how love is. For their intensity, most loves are like waterfalls, or whirlwinds, or wrecking balls, or other things starting with w that come at you with the full force of a fucking weapon. Part of the essence of love is like that, as it should overpower you, to even deserve the name. But in Pratchett and in Code Geass and all other masterpieces that have thought this through, a weapon needs a shield (and the greatest fighters understand that weapons are shields - a weapon is not for killing; it is so that no killing happens). In the same way, you cannot simply brandish a weapon because that weapon will kill you if don't know how to use it. You cannot simply brandish a weapon because that weapon will kill something in the world if you don't know how to use it. That is also precisely the way love should not be a weapon. You cannot just brandish love and drown everything in your love, because they will drown, especially if your love is coming from a place of anger at everything the world is. That is the most immediate temptation: to love the exact way that you are angry at the entire world. To love with the passion of anger, to love as though it were a weapon to be used against the world that has hurt you time and again.
If we follow Pratchett to the end, the greatest weapon in the world is not a weapon in the ordinary sense. The greatest weapon in the world is a shield. It is the embodiment not of protection from the world that is always painful in its worlding - and the world cannot but be painful - but it is the embodiment of control, of reining in whatever terror, and love, you will unleash to the world. It is what Plato has always talked about when referring to the well-ordered soul, it is Aristotle's aretê (αρετή, "virtue," connected with ευδαιμονία, eudaimonia, "flourishing"). And they weren't kidding when they said it's fucking hard to cultivate. Well, they didn't say it with the expletive, but for all its demands they might as well have.
It's difficult because you have to cultivate it, you don't have it. And it takes precisely it to cultivate it. The second to the most excellent man in the world is a fine, well-honed weapon, with a mind like a scalpel. The most excellent man in the world is a shield, who makes himself a shield. Whatever you choose to hold behind this shield will have all the safety in the world, but the perfect shield is one that ultimately makes everything safe because it does not need to be used against anything.
That is why we say love is trusting someone never to pull the trigger of the gun that you just handed to them - because love cannot but hurt, because this is also the condition of possibility for it to give you happiness. And ευδαιμονία is also translated as "happiness," the condition for which is understanding how you must make yourself into a shield. Translated properly: ultimately, you protect the people that you love from yourself, because you are necessarily the greatest threat to them. You alone can kill the people you love, because it is, after all, love.
A badge isn't just something you just flip at people's faces to tell them who you are. The reason why a badge takes the form of a shield is that, according to Vimes, it shields the nightwatchman from himself. Because a nightwatchman is vested with the order of the law, and the painful authority of a nightstick, and the terrifying power of being allowed to do things and say how things should go, what identifies him as a nightwatchman should be a promise not to take all that power and wreak destruction to the world because of it. That is how a nightwatchman loves the law.
And that is how love is. For their intensity, most loves are like waterfalls, or whirlwinds, or wrecking balls, or other things starting with w that come at you with the full force of a fucking weapon. Part of the essence of love is like that, as it should overpower you, to even deserve the name. But in Pratchett and in Code Geass and all other masterpieces that have thought this through, a weapon needs a shield (and the greatest fighters understand that weapons are shields - a weapon is not for killing; it is so that no killing happens). In the same way, you cannot simply brandish a weapon because that weapon will kill you if don't know how to use it. You cannot simply brandish a weapon because that weapon will kill something in the world if you don't know how to use it. That is also precisely the way love should not be a weapon. You cannot just brandish love and drown everything in your love, because they will drown, especially if your love is coming from a place of anger at everything the world is. That is the most immediate temptation: to love the exact way that you are angry at the entire world. To love with the passion of anger, to love as though it were a weapon to be used against the world that has hurt you time and again.
If we follow Pratchett to the end, the greatest weapon in the world is not a weapon in the ordinary sense. The greatest weapon in the world is a shield. It is the embodiment not of protection from the world that is always painful in its worlding - and the world cannot but be painful - but it is the embodiment of control, of reining in whatever terror, and love, you will unleash to the world. It is what Plato has always talked about when referring to the well-ordered soul, it is Aristotle's aretê (αρετή, "virtue," connected with ευδαιμονία, eudaimonia, "flourishing"). And they weren't kidding when they said it's fucking hard to cultivate. Well, they didn't say it with the expletive, but for all its demands they might as well have.
It's difficult because you have to cultivate it, you don't have it. And it takes precisely it to cultivate it. The second to the most excellent man in the world is a fine, well-honed weapon, with a mind like a scalpel. The most excellent man in the world is a shield, who makes himself a shield. Whatever you choose to hold behind this shield will have all the safety in the world, but the perfect shield is one that ultimately makes everything safe because it does not need to be used against anything.
That is why we say love is trusting someone never to pull the trigger of the gun that you just handed to them - because love cannot but hurt, because this is also the condition of possibility for it to give you happiness. And ευδαιμονία is also translated as "happiness," the condition for which is understanding how you must make yourself into a shield. Translated properly: ultimately, you protect the people that you love from yourself, because you are necessarily the greatest threat to them. You alone can kill the people you love, because it is, after all, love.
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