"T-O" map of the world by Isadore of Seville (600-636); first printed map in Europe (1472) 
The 2004 US Presidential election results
Over the last two hundred years the blackbird has abandoned the woods for the city—first in Great Britain at the end of the eighteenth century, then several decades later in Paris and the Ruhr Valley. Throughout the nineteenth century it captured the cities of Europe one after the other. It settled in Vienna and Prague around 1900, and journeyed eastward to Budapest, Belgrade, and Istanbul.
Globally, the blackbird’s invasion of the human world is beyond a doubt more important than the Spaniards’ invasion of South America or the resettlement of Palestine by the Jews. A change in the relationship of one species to another (fish, birds, people, plants) is a change of a higher order than a change in the relationship of one or another group within the species. The earth does not particularly care whether Celts or Slavs inhabited Bohemia, whether Romanians or Russians occupy Bessarabia. If, however, the blackbird goes against nature and follows man to his artificial, anti-natural world, something has changed in the planetary order of things.
And yet nobody dares to interpret the last two centuries as the history of the blackbird’s invasion of the city of man. We are all prisoners of a rigid conception of what is important, while what we suppose to be unimportant wages guerrilla warfare behind our backs, transforming the world without our knowledge and eventually mounting a surprise attack on us.
Kniha smíchu a zapomnění (1979)
Le Livre du Rire et de l’Oubli
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Milan Kundera (1929 - ), Czech author
Cover of the paper edition of The New York Times, 3 October 2008
STEVENS Yet you invented the coincidence.
TEMPLE Mrs. Gowan Stevens did.
STEVENS Temple Drake did. Mrs. Gowan Stevens is not even fighting in this class. This is Temple Drake’s.
TEMPLE Temple Drake is dead.
STEVENS The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
Requiem for a Nun (1951)
William Faulkner (1897 - 1962), American author
Excerpts from Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel
Yali’s Question
14: Yali’s question: “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?”
16: “Thus, we can finally rephrase the question about the modern world’s inequalities as follows: why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents? Those disparate rates constitute history’s broadest pattern and my book’s subject.”
25: “These results are completely lopsided: it was not the case that 51 percent of the Americas, Australia, and Africa was conquered by Europeans, while 49 percent of Europe was conquered by Native Americans, Aboriginal Australians, or Africans. The whole modern world has been shaped by lopsided outcomes. Hence they must have inexorable explanations, ones more basic than mere details concerning who happened to win some battle or develop some invention on one occasion a few thousand years ago.”
25: “History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples’ environments, not because of biological differences among people themselves.”
Chapter 3 - Collision at Cajamarca
68: “Thus, Atahuallpa’s capture interests us specifically as marking the decisive moment in the greatest collision of modern history. But it is also of more general interest, because the factors that resulted in Pizarro’s seizing Atahuallpa were essentially the same ones that determined the outcome of many similar collisions between colonizers and native peoples elsewhere in the modern world.”
74: “Such imbalances of equipment were decisive in innumerable other confrontations of Europeans with Native Americans and other peoples.”
75: “Time and again, accounts of Pizarro’s subsequent battles with the Incas, Cortés’s conquest of the Aztecs, and other early European campaigns against Native Americans describe encounters in which a few dozen European horsemen routed thousands of Indians with great slaughter.”
76: “Such examples [Charlie Savage in the Fiji Islands] of the power of guns against native peoples lacking guns could be multiplied indefinitely.”
79: “Atahuallpa was not alone in these fatal miscalculations. ...Francisco Pizarro’s brother Hernando Pizarro deceived Atahuallpa’s leading general, Chalcuchima.... The Aztec emperor Montezuma miscalculated even more grossly when he took Cortés for a returning god and admitted him and his tiny army into the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán.”
Chapter 18 - Hemispheres Colliding
356: “...enormous set of differences between Eurasian and Native American societies - due largely to the Late Pleistocene extinction (extermination?) of most of North and South America’s former big wild mammal species. If it had not been for those extinctions, modern history might have taken a different course. When Cortés and his bedraggled adventurers landed on the Mexican coast in 1519, they might have been driven into the sea by thousands of Aztec cavalry mounted on domesticated native American horses. Instead of the Aztecs’ dying of smallpox, the Spaniards might have been wiped out by American germs transmitted by disease-resistant Aztecs. American civilizations resting on animal power might have been sending their own conquistadors to ravage Europe. But those hypothetical outcomes were foreclosed by mammal extinctions thousands of years earlier.”
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