concents

Most importantly, the avout have settled themselves in concents in order to look at the big picture.

Book Review: Anathem by Neal Stephenson | Heretical Ideas Magazine 2008

Their society—the "mathic" world—is clustered in walled-off areas known as concents built around giant clocks designed to last for centuries.

Novelist Neal Stephenson Once Again Proves He's the King of the Worlds 2008

With a single exception, women in the concents are the organisers, the nurturers, and (in the case of Erasmas 'circle) the love interests; virtually all the intellectual heavy-lifting that we see or hear of is left to the men.

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They do so very much delight in such kind of concents, that they oftentimes screw up the strings beyond the due measure, and stretch them till they crack.

From the Talmud and Hebraica 1602-1675 1979

Instead, they separate themselves into four basic groups: Unarians, who cloister themselves in the concents for a year, Decennarians, who separate themselves from the outside world for a decade, Centenarians, who separate themselves from the outside world for a century, and Millenarians, who go for one thousand year separations from the world outside.

Book Review: Anathem by Neal Stephenson | Heretical Ideas Magazine 2008

Another subsidiary project is a CD that re-creates the spooky a cappella hymns, based on mathematical proofs and behavior of cellular automata, sung by the clock-tenders inside the concents.

Novelist Neal Stephenson Once Again Proves He's the King of the Worlds 2008

The saecular settlements that Erasmas visits, likewise, look much the same, and all the religious traditions that he describes or comes into contact with are thinly-disguised flavours of Christianity; in addition, I remember only two languages, the elevated Orth of the concents and the inelegant Fluccish of outside (most avout can speak both).

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Such recitals are a major part of a concent's ritual practice, and, as we discover when avouts of different maths meet each other, of the communal identity that distinguishes the concents from each other.

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The concents are amalgams of monastery, university, and - as described by the pen of Erasmas - boarding school, and these institutions form the setting for much of the book, as well its conceptual and perceptual framework.

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We see only a single intellectual tradition: that of the concents, the network of which appears to stretch worldwide, but with little apparent difference between individual communities on anything other than an organisational and (to an extent) ritual level, despite the fact that concents are all fed with new recruits drawn from the saecular society around them.

Brit Lit Blogs 2009