Life & Wisdom Quote by Kit Williams

Kit Williams is at his best when he sounds like he has accidentally wandered into meaning. The line is pure maker-logic: you’re solving a mechanical problem, and the solution quietly generates an extra, unintended mechanism, tucked right under the seat of power. A “spare drive” isn’t just an engineering byproduct; it’s a narrative gift. It implies redundancy, contingency, a hidden reserve of motion that exists whether the emperor knows it or not.

The choice to specify “directly below the emperor’s feet” is doing more than placing a gear. It drags the reader’s eye to the bodily reality beneath pomp. Emperors don’t float; they’re carried. They rest on systems they didn’t build and probably don’t understand. Williams’s almost fussy conditional - “or where they would be if he were to sit in the chariot” - punctures authority with a small, sly question: is the emperor even present? Or is this grandeur mostly staged, an empty seat waiting for someone to inhabit it?

Contextually, it reads like the diary of a puzzle-maker and illustrator, someone whose art thrives on concealed mechanisms and layered meanings. The subtext is that design itself can smuggle in commentary: build a chariot for an emperor and you may still end up constructing the real engine of the story underneath him. Power, the sentence suggests, is often just a passenger riding on clever, unseen gearing.