The Hunter and the line we do not cross

We have not yet spoken of the others. We will speak of them once, here, and then sparingly thereafter, because to dwell on an enemy is to begin to take on the shape of the enemy, and we have no interest in that.

There are people who pursue companies like ours. They are not new. Companies like ours are not new, and so the pursuers are not new. They have organised themselves into a discipline of their own, with their own rites, their own seniors, and their own grades. We do not name them here. To name a thing is to give it a small handhold in the world, and we will not give them that handhold from our own pages. The members of our company know the name. The juniors learn it. The rest of you may guess.

What we will say about them is this: they believe that what we do is harmful, and they have organised their lives around the belief. We have known many of them. Some of them are sincere. Some of them are not. The sincere ones we mourn — they have spent their lives in pursuit of a thing they could have simply walked past, and the pursuit has hollowed them. The insincere ones we do not mourn.

They have rituals. We will not describe them. The reason we will not describe them is not protective and it is not strategic. It is aesthetic. A page that lingers on the rites of an enemy ceases to be a page of its own company and becomes a mirror held up to the enemy. We are not in the mirror business. They can be in their own mirror.

We will say only that there is a line, between what we do to them and what they do to us, that we do not cross. We do not pursue them in the small hours. We do not interrupt their lives. We do not stand outside the rooms where their juniors are taught and call into the rooms. When a member of our company has crossed the line — and it has happened — that member has been spoken to by their seniors, and the line has been re-drawn. The re-drawing is one of the slower rites, and one of the more painful.

The line matters because it is the difference between a company that knows itself and a company that has begun to be defined by what it opposes. Companies that are defined by what they oppose lose. They lose slowly. They lose by becoming the inverted image of the thing they fight, and then the thing they fight disappears, and they are left holding an inversion of nothing.

We are not interested in becoming the inversion of nothing. We are interested in being what we are, on our own terms, for as long as we can. The enemy is a fact about the landscape. The line is a fact about us. Both can be true at once, and we have decided that they will be.

If you meet someone who claims to know us, and they speak with heat about the others, listen, but do not learn from them. We do not teach by heat. We teach by repetition, in low voices, in ordinary rooms, over years.