HumbleLunars/Literary

So, I kind of went off on some tangents here, but these are something. I'm afraid I don't read enough fantasy to have inspiration there. But, the poems definitily work.

Music
No Doubt, The Return of Saturn, copyright 2000 Interscope Records. ASIN: B00004SAWN

Sentimental music about marriage from a punk(ette) better known for rap crossovers and attacks on suburban America. The mature punks guide to alienation.

Offspring, Smash, Copyright 1994 Epitaph. ASIN: B000001IPL

The friendly, lovable face of "I'm going to kill you and leave you in a dumpster." This eminently huggable take on anger is how Lunars look to many Creation dwellers.

Tom Paxton, Can't Help but Wonder Where I'm Bound. Copyright 1999 Rhino Records ASIN: B00000GC12

This American folk artist is the human's guide to being human.

Movies
Paramount Studio, Braveheart. Mel Gibson, Randall Wallace. 1995. ASIN: B00003CX95

Kings get cruel, people snap and start burning shit under the leadership of a charismatic warrior.

Books

George Orwell, Burmese Days Availble On: http://www.george-orwell.org/Burmese_Days/

Orwell's portrait on an Englishman who sees all and does nothing in exotic Burma is a decent representation of many Lunars. Orwell's characters are perhaps a little schlubby for Exalted, but its a good read none the less.

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

Poverty, and alienation; unsparing shifts between realism and romanticism, and an absolutely beautiful ending....ok, well, most people love the ending. I hate the ending, but replace it with - "and then he Exalted and started kicking ass" and you might have a great prelude.

Herodotus, The Histories. Penguin Books 1999

Called "the father of history" by Cierco, Herodotus is often read for his narratives of the Persian War. For Lunars, look at his tales of strange and wonderous Barbarians, not to mention his portrait of the sheer brutality of the ancient world.

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Poetry

        William Butler Yeats
	Two Songs from a Play
	 
	I 
	I saw a staring virgin stand
	Where holy Dionysus died,
	And tear the heart out of his side,
	And lay the heart upon her hand
5	And bear that beating heart away;
	And then did all the Muses sing
	Of Magnus Annus at the spring,
	As though God's death were but a play.
	 
	Another Troy must rise and set,
10	Another lineage feed the crow,
	Another Argo's painted prow
	Drive to a flashier bauble yet.
	The Roman Empire stood appalled:
	It dropped the reins of peace and war
15	When that fierce virgin and her Star
	Out of the fabulous darkness called.
	 
	II 
	In pity for man's darkening thought
	He walked that room and issued thence
	In Galilean turbulence;
20	The Babylonian starlight brought
	A fabulous, formless darkness in;
	Odour of blood when Christ was slain
	Made all Platonic tolerance vain
	And vain all Doric discipline.
	 
25	Everything that man esteems
	Endures a moment or a day.
	Love's pleasure drives his love away,
	The painter's brush consumes his dreams;
	The herald's cry, the soldier's tread
30	Exhaust his glory and his might:
	Whatever flames upon the night
	Man's own resinous heart has fed.

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Dylan Thomas
Do not go gentle into that good night

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, 
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light. 

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W.B. Yeats
"The Second Coming"

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, 
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

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Quotes

This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune, -- often the surfeit of our own behaviour, -- we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as if we were villains by necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of planetary influence.
-King Lear, 1. 2

errr, umm.....well, some Lunars think like that.