"Terry Goodkind. Faith of the Fallen (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

and giving him the weapon that was to be his lifelong companion.

25

So many different qualities and responsibilities had converged in
this man she loved that she sometimes wondered how he could reconcile them
all.

"Richard, are you so sure?"

Because of the importance of the post, Kahlan and then Zedd had
sworn their lives in defense of Richard as the newly named Seeker of
Truth. That had been shortly after Kahlan had met him. It was as Seeker
that Richard had first come to accept all that had been thrust upon him,
and to live up to the extraordinary trust put in him.

His gray eyes fairly blazed with clarity of purpose as he answered
her.

"The only sovereign I can allow to rule me is reason. The first
law of reason is this: what exists, exists; what is, is. From this
irreducible, bedrock principle, all knowledge is built. This is the
foundation from which life is embraced.

"Reason is a choice. Wishes and whims are not facts, nor are they
a means to discovering them. Reason is our only way of grasping
reality-it's our basic tool of survival. We are free to evade the effort
of thinking, to reject reason, but we are not free to avoid the penalty of
the abyss we refuse to see.

"If I fail to use reason in this struggle, if I close my eyes to
the reality of what is, in favor of what I would wish, then we will both
die in this, and for nothing. We will be but two more among uncounted
millions of nameless corpses beneath the gray, gloomy decay of mankind. In
the darkness that will follow, our bones will be meaningless dust.

"Eventually, perhaps a thousand years from now, perhaps more, the
light of liberty will again be raised up to shine over a free people, but
between now and then, millions upon millions of people will be born into
hopeless misery and have no choice but to bear the weight of the Order's
yoke. We, by ignoring reason, will have purchased those mountains of
broken bodies, the wreckage of lives endured but never lived."

Kahlan found herself unable to summon the courage to speak, much
less argue; to do so right then would be to ask him to disregard his
judgment at a cost he believed would be a sea of blood. But doing as he
saw they must would cast her people helpless into the jaws of death.

Kahlan, her vision turning to a watery blur, looked away.