The Book of Dust: The Secret Commonwealth

At the end of the novel, as the hero looked out from the mountains at a sunrise, which in the hands of another writer might have represented the dawn of a new age of enlightenment, free of superstition and darkness, the narrator turned away from commonplace symbolism of that kind with scorn. The final sentence read, “It was nothing more than what it was.”

Delamare knew that Talbot’s philosophy maintained that nothing was anything, fundamentally, but he didn’t question what the Oxford man said. If the phrase “useful idiot” had existed in their world, it would have expressed his opinion of Talbot precisely.

He told me there were truth tellers, and they needed to know what the truth was, so as to tell it. And there were liars, and they needed to know what the truth was, so they could change it or avoid it. And there were bullshitters, who didn’t care about the truth at all. They weren’t interested. What they spoke wasn’t the truth and it wasn’t lies; it was bullshit. All they were interested in was their own performance.