The Theory of Historical Costs

"..sure, there's some graft, but there's just enough to make the wheels turn without squeaking. And remember this. There never was a machine rigged up by man didn't represent some loss of energy. How much energy do you get out of a lump of coal when you run a steam dynamo or a locomotive compared to what there actually is in that lump of coal? Damned little. Well, we do a hell of a lot better than the best dynamo or locomotive ever invented. Sure, I got a bunch of crooks around here, but they're too lily-livered to get very crooked. I got my eye on 'em. And do I deliver the state something? I damned well do."

The theory of historical costs, you might put it. All change costs something. You have to write off the costs against the gain. Maybe in our state change could only come in the terms in which it was taking place, and it was sure due for some change. The theory of the moral neutrality of history, you might call it. Process as process is neither morally good nor morally bad. We may judge results but not process. The morally bad agent may perform the deed which is good. The morally good agent may perform the deed which is bad. Maybe a man has to sell his soul to get the power to do good.

The theory of historical costs. The theory of the moral neutrality of history. All that was a high historical view from a chilly pinnacle. Maybe it took a genius to see it. To really see it. Maybe you had to get chained to the high pinnacle with the buzzards pecking at your liver and lights before you could see it. Maybe it took a genius to see it. Maybe it took a hero to act on it. 

Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men

The Awful Responsibility of Time

"...we shall go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time."

The end of All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren

Nothing is Ever Lost

"For nothing is lost, nothing is ever lost. There is always the clue, the canceled check, the smear of lipstick, the footprint in the canna bed, the condom on the park path, the twitch in the old wound, the baby shoes dipped in bronze, the taint in the blood stream. And all times are one time, and all those dead in the past never lived before our definition gives them life, and out of the shadow their eyes implore us."

Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men

You Call It Genius

"The Boss [Willie] isn't interested in money."

"What's he interested in, then?"

"He's interested in Willie. Quite simply and directly. And when anybody is interested in himself quite simply and directly the way Willie is interested in Willie you call it genius. It's only the half-baked people like Mr. Patton who are interested in money. Even the big boys who make a real lot of money aren't interested in money. Henry Ford isn't interested in money. He's interested in Henry Ford and therefore he is a genius."

Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men

Never Say that Nature Deceived Me

"...never say that Nature deceived me, that she is sardonic and cruel. Do not rail at her, as I do not. I am loth to go away -- from you all, from life with its spring. But how should there be spring without death? Indeed, death is a great instrument of life, and if for me it borrowed the guise of resurrection, of the joy of love, that was not a lie, but goodness and mercy....Nature -- I have always loved her, and she -- has been loving to her child."

Thomas Mann, The Black Swan

The End of Man is to Know

"It was like the second when you come home late at night and see the yellow envelope of the telegram sticking out from under your door and you lean and pick it up, but don't open it yet, not for a second. While you stand there in the hall, with the envelope in your hand, you feel there's an eye on you, a great big eye looking straight at you from miles and dark and through walls and houses and through your coat and vest and hide and sees you huddled up way inside, in the dark which is you, inside yourself, like a clammy, sad little foetus you carry around inside yourself. The eye knows what's in the envelope, and it is watching you to see you when you open it and know, too. But the clammy, sad little foetus which is you way down in the dark which is you too lifts up its sad little face and its eyes are blind, and it shivers cold inside you for it doesn't want to know what is in that envelope. It wants to lie in the dark and not know, and be warm in its not-knowing. The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can't know. He can't now whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed, all right, but he can't know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he has got or because of the knowledge which he hasn't got and which if he had it, would save him. There's the cold in your stomach, but you open the envelope, you have to open the envelope, for the end of man is to know."

Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men

Flare Up

"...it not infrequently happens that a race with sober, practical bourgeois traditions will towards the end of its days flare up in some form of art."

Thomas Mann, "Tristan," Stories of Three Decades

Simply One Wound

"The conscience, madame, is a bad business. I, and other people like me, work hard all our lives to swindle our consciences into feeling pleased and satisfied. We are feckless creatures, and aside from a few good hours we go around weighted down, sick and sore with the knowledge of our own futility. We hate the useful; we know it is vulgar and unlovely, and we defend this position, as a man defends something that is absolutely necessary to his existence. Yet all the while conscience is gnawing at us, to such an extent that we are simply one wound. Added to that, our whole inner life, our view of the world, our way of working, is of a kind -- its effect is frightfully unhealthy, undermining, irritating, and this only aggravates the situation. Well, then, there are certain little counter-irritants, without which we would most certainly not hold out. A kind of decorum, a hygienic regimen, for instance, becomes a necessity for some of us. To get up early, to get up ghastly early, take a cold bath, and go out walking in a snowstorm -- that may give us a sense of self-satisfaction that lasts as much as an hour. If I were to act our my true character, I should be lying in bed late into the afternoon. My getting up early is all hypocrisy, believe me."

Thomas Mann, "Tristan," in Stories of Three Decades

Out of Chaos

"He drew a deep breath, his lips closed firmly; he went back and took up his pen. No, he must not brood, he was too far down for that. He must not descend into chaos; or at least he must not stop there. Rather out of chaos, which is fullness, he must draw up to the light whatever he found there fit and ripe for form. No brooding! Work! Define, eliminate, fashion, complete!

And complete it he did, that effort of a labouring hour. He brought it to an end, perhaps not to a good end, but in any case to an end. And being once finished, lo, it was also good. And from his soul, from music and idea, new works struggled upward to birth and, taking shape, gave out light and sound, ringing and shimmering, and giving hint of their infinite origin -- as in a shell we hear the sighing of the sea whence it came."

Thomas Mann, "A Weary Hour," in Stories of Three Decades. Also translated as "The Harsh Hour."

A Nocturnal Art

"All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks."
G. K. Chesterton
1874-1936

On His Baldness

(Adapted from Chinese Translations)

In the morning, I hated to see my hair fall out.
In the evening, I hated to see my hair fall out.
I dreaded the time when it would all be gone.
But now it is, and I don't mind at all.
I am done with all that washing and drying.
I never have to pick up another comb.
I said goodbye to my stylist, forever.
Best of all, when the day is hot and humid
I don't have all that hair sticking to my head.
In a silver jar I have stored a cold stream.
On my bald head, I can sprinkle a cup full.
This is the water of natural law.
I sit and receive this cleansing joy.
Now I know why the monk who seeks enlightenment
First frees his soul by shaving his head.

Bai Juyi (A.D. 832)

The Positive Meaning of Goodness

The conclusion to Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (published between 1875-1877). The translation is by Constance Black Garnett and is available online at The Literature Network.

"Well, what is it perplexes me?" Levin said to himself, feeling beforehand that the solution of his difficulties was ready in his soul, though he did not know it yet. "Yes, the one unmistakable, incontestable manifestation of the Divinity is the law of right and wrong, which has come into the world by revelation, and which I feel in myself, and in the recognition of which--I don't make myself, but whether I will or not--I am made one with other men in one body of believers, which is called the church. Well, but the Jews, the Mohammedans, the Confucians, the Buddhists--what of them?" he put to himself the question he had feared to face. "Can these hundreds of millions of men be deprived of that highest blessing without which life has no meaning?" He pondered a moment, but immediately corrected himself. "But what am I questioning?" he said to himself. "I am questioning the relation to Divinity of all the different religions of all mankind. I am questioning the universal manifestation of God to all the world with all those misty blurs. What am I about? To me individually, to my heart has been revealed a knowledge beyond all doubt, and unattainable by reason, and here I am obstinately trying to express that knowledge in reason and words.

"Don't I know that the stars don't move?" he asked himself, gazing at the bright planet which had shifted its position up to the topmost twig of the birch-tree. "But looking at the movements of the stars, I can't picture to myself the rotation of the earth, and I'm right in saying that the stars move.

"And could the astronomers have understood and calculated anything, if they had taken into account all the complicated and varied motions of the earth? All the marvelous conclusions they have reached about the distances, weights, movements, and deflections of the heavenly bodies are only founded on the apparent motions of the heavenly bodies about a stationary earth, on that very motion I see before me now, which has been so for millions of men during long ages, and was and will be always alike, and can always be trusted. And just as the conclusions of the astronomers would have been vain and uncertain if not founded on observations of the seen heavens, in relation to a single meridian and a single horizon, so would my conclusions be vain and uncertain if not founded on that conception of right, which has been and will be always alike for all men, which has been revealed to me as a Christian, and which can always be trusted in my soul. The question of other religions and their relations to Divinity I have no right to decide, and no possibility of deciding."

"Oh, you haven't gone in then?" he heard Kitty's voice all at once, as she came by the same way to the drawing-room.

"What is it? you're not worried about anything?" she said, looking intently at his face in the starlight.

But she could not have seen his face if a flash of lightning had not hidden the stars and revealed it. In that flash she saw his face distinctly, and seeing him calm and happy, she smiled at him.

"She understands," he thought; "she knows what I'm thinking about. Shall I tell her or not? Yes, I'll tell her." But at the moment he was about to speak, she began speaking.

"Kostya! do something for me," she said; "go into the corner room and see if they've made it all right for Sergey Ivanovitch. I can't very well. See if they've put the new wash stand in it."

"Very well, I'll go directly," said Levin, standing up and kissing her.

"No, I'd better not speak of it," he thought, when she had gone in before him. "It is a secret for me alone, of vital importance for me, and not to be put into words.

"This new feeling has not changed me, has not made me happy and enlightened all of a sudden, as I had dreamed, just like the feeling for my child. There was no surprise in this either. Faith--or not faith--I don't know what it is--but this feeling has come just as imperceptibly through suffering, and has taken firm root in my soul.

"I shall go on in the same way, losing my temper with Ivan the coachman, falling into angry discussions, expressing my opinions tactlessly; there will be still the same wall between the holy of holies of my soul and other people, even my wife; I shall still go on scolding her for my own terror, and being remorseful for it; I shall still be as unable to understand with my reason why I pray, and I shall still go on praying; but my life now, my whole life apart from anything that can happen to me, every minute of it is no more meaningless, as it was before, but it has the positive meaning of goodness, which I have the power to put into it."

Philadelphia to Columbia, Flight 2340

Above clouds the texture of plowed and abandoned fields
A brilliant surface white and blue, worn and rutted to the horizon
The bleached bones of a great fish resting in a shallow blue sea.

Turning toward the sun, low on the curve of earth in late afternoon
The blues vanish into white light so bright it fills all the space of vision
Obliterates all form and color before descending through suddenly dirty clouds.

Blind as a snowstorm, the rumble of turbulence begins
The lifeless beauty of clouds drawn into engines
A vapor turned into scarred flesh and love that will last
Amid the violent motion that begins all life, transcends all suffering,
And folds the continents as easily as it folds the clouds.

Chicago Night

Eternal Youth

"Not everyone grows old, but everyone dies."

The Confessions of St. Augustine of Hippo

(397 - 398 AD)

African Iris

Congaree River, Near Columbia

Elmwood Cemetery

LUNCH IN ELMWOOD CEMETARY

We, an indiscriminate crowd, welcome you to lunch,
Impotent shadows of the past, not tortured in a Greek Hell,
But in the common grave of mankind, the abode of the dead,
Where the bad and the good, the slave and the master,
The pious and the wicked who share this life
Obediently follow the sunless chemistry of our bodies
To cure among stones according to some cosmic purpose
A great, indefatigable cohesion, an undiscovered Law
Awareness so useful we dare to call it Knowledge
An ignorance so vast we can safely call it God.

Imagine us in our young flesh without scars
Hoping someone vain and reckless will notice
Longing for gratification above the ground, an embrace,
A wound of passion in the earth that exhales our dust
A chance to rise above the sound of motion as reliable as the tides
Where the wise and foolish labor with equal skill to ignore us
Until they open the earth to bury or remove something.

There is no better way to make a man miserable
Than to convince him he should always be happy
Life is trial and error, a search for something that works,
A collection of scars and the stories that go with them
The happiest among us learn to laugh about them
Then leave one last scar on those who love us most
You shall know them by their tears and laughter.

For those who suffered in life, death is joy
For those who loved and were loved, death is sorrow
For those who had nothing, death is a world they already know
For those who had everything, death is a final and sumptuous act of charity
A command to let it all go and get out of the way
Our grave is just another act of creation
A vestige of our beginning, no prospect of the end.

Turbulence, Two

AN UNCERTAIN MOTION

An uncertain motion begins things,
Like smoke rising up from a fire
The turbulent air of summers and springs
Setting bounds on unstable desire.

Turbulence, One

"In infinite time, in infinite matter, in infinite space, is formed a bubble-organism, and that bubble lasts a while and bursts, and that bubble is Me.

This was the ultimate belief on which all the systems elaborated by human thought in almost all their ramifications rested. It was the prevalent conviction, and of all other explanations Levin had unconsciously, not knowing when or how, chosen it, as anyway the clearest, and made it his own.

But it was not merely a falsehood, it was the cruel jeer of some wicked power, some evil, hateful power, to whom one could not submit.

He must escape from this power. And the means of escape every man had in his own hands. He had but to cut short this dependence on evil. And there was one means — death.

And Levin, a happy father and husband, in perfect health, was several times so near suicide that he hid the cord that he might not be tempted to hang himself, and was afraid to go out with his gun for fear of shooting himself.

But Levin did not shoot himself, and did not hang himself; he went on living."

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1873 - 1877)