Thanks to Andy, I've now got my very own daemon (take a gander, just to the right there.) His name, apparently, is Achaean. Daemons, if you don't know, are the animals that each human has in the world of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, of which The Golden Compass is the first of three volumes and soon to be a movie. Our daemon is the embodiment of our soul, but also our best friend and dearest, most trusted, companion.
Read this trilogy now, before the first movie comes out. You won't regret it. Well, unless you agree with the following enlightening review from clearly an avid fan on Amazon:
"DUSTURBING.NOT for children. books two and three are blatant anti-christian works that will truly disturb the age group these books are intended for. as an adult reader, there are also subtle disturbing hints of inappropriate relationships between adults/children in the text. i do not know if a child would pick up on this, but an experienced reader will surely infer these things. before buying read page 320 of book 3. sick."
We must have different editions of this book, because page 320 in my version is actually quite beautiful. Lyra, our heroine, has traveled all the way to the land of the dead in an effort to find a dear friend. She discovers a hole between that dreary, horrid world and another, and discovers also that all the millions of ghosts doomed to 'living' in the land of the dead for all eternity can fling themselves through this gash in the fabric between worlds, joining forces with those who are fighting against evil, and 'dying' in the process.
No one spoke. Those who had seen how daemons dissolved were remembering it, and those who hadn't were imagining it, and no one spoke until a young woman came forward. She had died as a martyr centuries before. She looked around and said to the other ghosts:
"When we were alive, they told us that when we died we'd go to Heaven. And they said that Heaven was a place of joy and glory and we would spend eternity in the company of saints and angels praising the Almighty, in a state of bliss. That's what they said. And that's what led some of us to give our lives, and others to spend years in solitary prayer, while all the joy of life was going to waste around us and we never knew.
"Because the land of the dead isn't a place of reward or a place of punishment. It's a place of nothing. The good come here as well as the wicked, and all of us languish in this gloom forever, with no hope of freedom, or joy, or sleep, or rest, or peace.
"But now this child has come offering us a way out and I'm going to follow her. Even if it means oblivion, friends, I'll welcome it, because it won't be nothing. We'll be alive again in a thousand blades of grass, and a million leaves; we'll be falling in the raindrops and blowing in the fresh breeze; we'll be glittering in the dew under the stars and the moon out there in the physical world, which is our true home and always was.
"So I urge you: come with the child out to the sky!"
Read this trilogy now, before the first movie comes out. You won't regret it. Well, unless you agree with the following enlightening review from clearly an avid fan on Amazon:
"DUSTURBING.NOT for children. books two and three are blatant anti-christian works that will truly disturb the age group these books are intended for. as an adult reader, there are also subtle disturbing hints of inappropriate relationships between adults/children in the text. i do not know if a child would pick up on this, but an experienced reader will surely infer these things. before buying read page 320 of book 3. sick."
We must have different editions of this book, because page 320 in my version is actually quite beautiful. Lyra, our heroine, has traveled all the way to the land of the dead in an effort to find a dear friend. She discovers a hole between that dreary, horrid world and another, and discovers also that all the millions of ghosts doomed to 'living' in the land of the dead for all eternity can fling themselves through this gash in the fabric between worlds, joining forces with those who are fighting against evil, and 'dying' in the process.
No one spoke. Those who had seen how daemons dissolved were remembering it, and those who hadn't were imagining it, and no one spoke until a young woman came forward. She had died as a martyr centuries before. She looked around and said to the other ghosts:
"When we were alive, they told us that when we died we'd go to Heaven. And they said that Heaven was a place of joy and glory and we would spend eternity in the company of saints and angels praising the Almighty, in a state of bliss. That's what they said. And that's what led some of us to give our lives, and others to spend years in solitary prayer, while all the joy of life was going to waste around us and we never knew.
"Because the land of the dead isn't a place of reward or a place of punishment. It's a place of nothing. The good come here as well as the wicked, and all of us languish in this gloom forever, with no hope of freedom, or joy, or sleep, or rest, or peace.
"But now this child has come offering us a way out and I'm going to follow her. Even if it means oblivion, friends, I'll welcome it, because it won't be nothing. We'll be alive again in a thousand blades of grass, and a million leaves; we'll be falling in the raindrops and blowing in the fresh breeze; we'll be glittering in the dew under the stars and the moon out there in the physical world, which is our true home and always was.
"So I urge you: come with the child out to the sky!"
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