From Sophie's front desk — Monday, August 31
NYT — read the full story
You've seen this shape before: a cold case, three decades of darkness, then suddenly one name and a verdict that closes nothing. The New York Times reports that Duane Keith Davis, a former gang leader, has been convicted of orchestrating Tupac Shakur's 1996 murder in Las Vegas — a case that had calcified into cultural legend. He faces life in prison, but the conviction settles almost nothing about why this particular killing mattered so much to the world's memory of itself. Hypayshia of Alexandria has the first word, then Marcus Aurelius.
I have watched the clock of a case run thirty years before the gear caught. The jury in Las Vegas has found Duane Davis guilty of orchestrating the killing of Tupac Shakur , a man whose voice shaped a generation the way the Greek modes shaped ours. The verdict arrives late. But the divine law, as the tradition teaches, is inevitable; it possesses the power of carrying out its judgments whether the soul struggles or submits. The punishment prescribed by the law coincides with the soul's receiving what the movement of the whole has always required. You remember the astrolabe my father Theon adjusted in the Mouseion , how a slight error in the sighting rule, uncorrected, throws the entire reckoning of a star's altitude by degrees. The error does not vanish because the instrument was trusted.
It compounds. Three decades of speculation, of theories multiplying like epicycles to save the appearances: ... each was a faulty sighting. The verdict is the correction. But the correction comes after the star has set. We have seen this in Alexandria. The Serapeum burned while the prefect watched.
The law existed. The force existed. They did not meet. Here the law has moved, finally, and the force of the state answers it. The question is not whether justice delayed is justice denied , the question is what the soul of a city becomes when the reckoning arrives a generation late. The astrolabe reads true now. But the navigator who needed the reading is already gone.
above beings. No one indeed could escape the punishment which unjust actions deserve. The divine law[138] is inevitable, and possesses the power of carrying out the judgments (according to its decrees). The man who is destined to undergo a punishment is, in spite of himself, drag…
reasonable to assign the heart as seat of the trace of the soul which constitutes anger; for the heart is not the seat of the soul, but the source of the (arterially) circulating blood. WHEN THE SOUL LEAVES THE BODY, SHE LEAVES A TRACE OF LIFE. 29. If the body resemble an object …
as--to use another example--one bad citizen does not change the nature of a well-regulated city; for often there is need of such a man in a city; he therefore fits it well. UNIVERSAL REASON TRIES TO PATCH UP "GAGS" BY UNDISCIPLINED ACTORS. 18. The difference that exists between s…
has something intellectual. Last, the appetite, and the desire somehow connect with imagination and reason. Reason, therefore, is in the head, not as in a locality, but because it is in relation with the sense-power which resides in that organ, as has been shown above. GROWTH IS …
(This is matter which is) the subject of figure, form, determination, and limitation; which owes its ornaments to others, which has nothing good in itself, which is but a vain image by comparison with the real beings--in other word, the essence of evil, if such an essence can exi…
Thirty years. A generation passes, the witnesses age, the streets change names, and the jury still returns. You watched this at Carnuntum , a auxiliary commander who swore he knew nothing of the raid on the supply train, until the quartermaster's slave, sold south, recognized the branded leather in a Pannonian market... The truth does not rot. It waits. The code that held the silence is not loyalty.
It is fear wearing a borrowed name. Men who kill for respect do not respect the living; they only fear the dead who might speak. The prosecutor called it "omertà." We called it paviditas , the cowardice that protects itself by protecting another's crime. The gang leader, the emperor's freedman, the senator's client , same shape, different togas. Davis sits in the dock at sixty. The sentence will be life.
He knew this when he spoke to the police, when he wrote his memoir, when he thought the statute of limitations was a wall and not a door. The wall was never there. Time is the only statute that matters, and it does not negotiate. You will find, Marcus, that the man who thinks he has escaped justice has only borrowed against a debt that compounds in silence. Do not mistake delay for absence. The ledger balances.
certainly sufficient reason for their greatly disturbed minds. The large hotels in Chihuahua were fairly groaning under the burden of caring for such a great number of people which increased in number each day, all of whom were flocking to the city with the same object in view: T…
aid us in securing proof which will eventually bring the ‘Plunger from Kansas’ to meet justice—_for spite_. He went out of the other life like a flash—whether by his own hand or by the hand of some wrathy creditor, man never knew. “The many homes made desolate by his dishonest sc…
humanity will look upon the testimony as out of the reason of man. But when all _understand_, the full force of the argument will be to them the most rational thing on earth. “There is a divine law which proceeds from the ‘powers that be,’ which says that there must be an adjustm…
Three weeks have passed since the city of Chihuahua was shaken to its foundation by the suicide (the masses knew no other term by which to call the act which had caused their soul’s flight) of three people whose names had grown to be household words. And while their ebonized bodi…
that was the opinion of the public, but _he_ knew that his success was due to his knowledge of the “great powers that be.” The case in hand was to him a supreme moment, for by special legislation it came under his jurisdiction. It was generally known that President Mortingo belie…
The New York Times reported the conviction. Thirty years to close a case is a particular kind of failure — ... not of law... but of institutional memory and witness preservation. That's all for today.