This War Can Make a Hero

This war can make a hero from a man like that
And claim the best in nameless piles of dirt.

Death is A Friend

Death is a friend we meet when we are young, fear when we are grown, and welcome when we are old.

Death Has This Much

Death has this much to be said for it: You don’t have to get out of bed for it. Wherever you happen to be They bring it to you—free. —Kingsley Amis

Catallaxy

Hayek derived the word "Catallaxy" (Hayek's suggested Greek construction would be rendered καταλλαξία) from the Greek verb katallasso (καταλλάσσω) which meant not only "to exchange" but also "to admit in the community" and "to change from enemy into friend." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catallactics

This Sandy and False Foundation

Very few of us realize with conviction the intensely unusual, unstable, complicated, unreliable, temporary nature of the economic organization by which Western Europe has lived for the last half century. We assume some of the most peculiar and temporary of our late advantages as natural, permanent, and to be depended on, and we lay our plans accordingly. On this sandy and false foundation we scheme for social improvement and dress our political platforms, pursue our animosities and particular ambitions, and feel ourselves with enough margin in hand to foster, not assuage, civil conflict in the European family. J.M. Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace

The Duty of Shareholders

"It is the duty of shareholders to periodically suffer losses without complaint"

A Frenchman is self-assured because he regards himself personally, both in mind and body, as irresistibly attractive to men and women. An Englishman is self-assured, as being a citizen of the best-organized state in the world, and therefore as an Englishman always knows what he should do and knows that all he does as an Englishman is undoubtedly correct. An Italian is self-assured because he is excitable and easily forgets himself and other people. A Russian is self-assured just because he knows nothing and does not want to know anything, since he does not believe that anything can be known. The German's self-assurance is worst of all, stronger and more repulsive than any other, because he imagines that he knows the truth—science—which he himself has invented but which is for him the absolute truth.

What Science?

"What science can there be in a matter in which, as in all practical matters, nothing can be defined and everything depends on innumerable conditions, the significance of which is determined at a particular moment which arrives no one knows when?"

Which Gang of Hooligans

"I wish they would decide once and for all which gang of hooligans constitutes the government of this country."

Poetry

"He said that poetry is no more a vocation than good health. What he needed was a job."

More Work for Repentance

"…and so there was an end of that short scene of life, which added no great store to me, only to make more work for repentance."

Daniel Defoe

Moll Flanders

Reserved for Further Afflictions

"…but I was reserved for further afflictions."

Daniel Defoe

Moll Flanders

The Necessity of the Absurd

"We owe civilsation to beliefs which in our modern opinion we no longer regard as true, which are not true in the sense of science (scientific truths), but which nevertheless were a condition for the majority of mankind to submit to moral rules whose functions they did not understand, they could never explain, [and] in which indeed to all rationalist critics very soon appeared to be absurd."

 Friedrich Hayek, "Evolution and Spontaneous Order"
The 33rd Meeting of Nobel Laureates at Lindau, 1983

Grande Latrocinium

"If justice has been abolished, what is empire but a fancy name for larceny [grande latrocinium]?"
Augustine quoted in Pelikan, Jesus Through the Centuries


Inferre autem bella finitimis et in cetera inde procedere ac populos sibi no molestos sola regni cupiditate conterere et subdere, quid aliud quam grande latrocinium nominandum est? http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/augustine/civ4.shtml

"But to make war on your neighbors, and thence to proceed to others, and through mere lust of dominion to crush and subdue people who do you no harm, what else is this to be called than great robbery?" http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/120104.htm

Horae Canonicae: Sext

You need not see what someone is doing
to know if it is his vocation,


you have only to watch his eyes:
a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon


making a primary incision,
a clerk completing a bill of lading,


wear the same rapt expression,
forgetting themselves in a function.


How beautiful it is,
that eye-on-the-object look.


To ignore the appetitive goddesses,
to desert the formidable shrines


of Rhea, Aphrodite, Demeter, Diana,
to pray instead to St. Phocas,


St Barbara, San Saturnino,
or whoever one's patron is,


that one may be worthy of their mystery,
what a prodigious step to have taken.


There should be monuments, there should be odes,
to the nameless heroes who took it first,


to the first flaker of flints
who forgot his dinner,


the first collector of sea-shells
to remain celibate.


Where should we be but for them?
Feral still, un-housetrained, still


wandering through forests without
a consonant to our names,


slaves of Dame Kind, lacking
all notion of a city


and, at this noon, for this death,
there would be no agents.

Happiness is Lived

Happiness is lived. Sorrow gets written down

Security Over Freedom

Perhaps some people prefer security over freedom because then they can blame someone else for their misery.

The Grave Consumes

The grave consumes the conquered and the conqueror.

Attend to the Best

"Probably as much bad music as good has been composed in the course of human history, but we do not expect courses in music appreciation to give it equal attention. Time being at a premium, we assume that they will attend to the best. I have adopted a similar strategy with respect to religion."

Divine Ambiguity

There are two theological statements I disagree with. The first is that there is nothing divine in the world. The second is that the divine will is unambiguous.

When Just a Boy

When just a boy, I loved two things
Two things appealed to me
One was heaven filled with stars
The other was the sea.

I could find the stars each night
Each night they came to me
And if they were obscured by clouds
I'd just wait patiently.

But the sea was hours away
And hours I could not give.
So I imagined more than I saw
So that my love could live.

Travel

Travel makes you realize just how many people there are in the world who are completely unaware of all the things that trouble you the most.

Review: Asking All The Wrong Questions

"Devising a test of literary merit is not actually that hard. Here it is: Would you read the thing again?"

Marjorie Garber's The Use and Abuse of Literature: Why does she ask all the wrong questions? - By William Deresiewicz - Slate Magazine

Berryman

"he said the great presence
that permitted everything and transmuted it
in poetry was passion
passion was genius and he praised movement and invention

I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can't

you can't you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don't write"

Berryman by W. S. Merwin | The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor

David Hume at 300 | Philosophy Now

David Hume at 300 | Philosophy Now: "With evolutionary theory at hand, it’s easy to see how logically flimsy the argument from design really is; but while Hume was able to demolish the design argument’s logical pretensions, he knew that he had no positive theory to offer in its stead. Indeed, our belief in God seemed to Hume to resemble our belief in the reality of the external world: we cannot adequately answer the skeptical arguments about God or external objects, but we cannot help believing in Him or them."

The Shadow Which Turns

"'Perhaps,' I thought, while her words still hung in the air between us like a wisp of tobacco smoke - a thought to fade and vanish like, smoke without a trace - 'perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols; vagabond-language scrawled on gate-posts and paving-stones along the weary road that other have tramped before us; perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in. our search, each straining through and beyond the other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us.'"

Burning Anew Among the Old Stones

The chapel showed no ill-effects of its long neglect; the art-nouveau paint was as fresh and bright as ever; the art-nouveau lamp burned once more before the altar. I said a prayer, an ancient, newly-learned form of words, and left, turning towards the camp; and as I walked back, and the cook-house bugle sounded ahead of me, I thought:

'The builders did not know the uses to which their work would descend; they made a new house with the stones of the old castle; year by year, generation after generation, they enriched and extended it; year by year the great harvest of timber in the park grew to ripeness; until, in sudden frost, came the age of Hooper; the place was desolate and the work all brought to nothing; Quomodo sedet sola civitas. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.

'And yet,' I thought, stepping out more briskly towards the camp, where the bugles after a pause had taken up the second call and were sounding 'Pick-em-up, pick-em-up, hot potatoes', 'and yet that is not the last word; it is not even an apt word; it is a dead word from ten years back.

'Something quite remote from anything the builders intended, has come out of their work, and out of the fierce little human tragedy in which I played; something none of us thought about at the time; a small red flame - a beaten-copper lamp of deplorable design relit before the beaten-copper doors of a tabernacle; the flame which the old knights saw from their tombs, which they saw put out; that flame burns again for other soldiers, far from home, farther, in heart, than Acre or Jerusalem. It could not have been lit but for the builders and the tragedians, and there I found it this morning, burning anew among the old stones.'

Here - My Last Love Died

"Here at the age of thirty-nine I began to be old. I felt stiff and weary in the evenings and reluctant to go out of camp; I developed proprietary claims to certain chairs and newspapers; I regularly drank three glasses of gin before dinner, never more or less, and -went to bed immediately after the nine o'clock news. I was always awake and fretful an hour before reveille.

Here -my last love died - There was nothing remarkable in the manner of its death. One day, not long before 'this last day in camp, as I lay awake before reveille, in the Nissen hut, gazing into the complete blackness, amid the deep breathing and muttering of the four other occupants, turning over in my mind what I had to do that day - had I put in the names of two corporals for the weapon-training course? Should I again have the largest number of men overstaying their leave in the batch due back that day? Could I trust Hooper to take the candidates class out map-reading? - as I lay in that dark hour, I was aghast to realize that something within me, long sickening, had quietly died, and felt as a husband might feel, who, in the fourth year of his marriage, suddenly knew that he had no longer any desire, or tenderness, or esteem, for a once-beloved wife; no pleasure in her company, no wish to please, no curiosity about anything she might ever do or say or think; no hope of setting things right, no self-reproach for the disaster. I knew it all, the whole drab compass of marital disillusion; we had been through it together, the Army and I, from the first importunate courtship until now, when nothing remained to us except the chill bonds of law and duty and custom. I had played every scene in the domestic tragedy, had found the early tiffs become more frequent, the tears less affecting, the reconciliations less sweet, till they engendered a mood of aloofness and cool criticism, and the growing conviction that it was not myself but the loved one who was at fault. I caught the false notes in her voice and learned to listen for them apprehensively; I recognized the blank, resentful stare of incomprehension in her eyes, and the selfish, hard set of the comers of her mouth. I learned her, as one must learn a woman one has kept house with, day in, day out, for three and a half years; I learned her slatternly ways, the routine and mechanism of her charm her jealousy and self-seeking and her nervous trick with the fingers when she was lying. She was stripped of all enchantment now and I knew her for an uncongenial stranger to whom I had bound myself indissolubly in a moment of folly."

Grief

I know that in the great cosmic equation, my grief amounts to nothing. But that does not make it any less mine.