The Gods Themselves

"The results of human motivations and heavenly interventions make for preordained results, but preordained only in a way so complicated and with so many conflicting strands that no one but a seer or prophet could sort it all out beforehand and identify in the present the seeds of future results. This means that human beings -- and even to some extent the gods themselves -- are caught, like figures in a tapestry who cannot undo their thread, playing out their assigned roles of hero or king, loving mother or sexual prize, divine patron of this or that person or city, with only flickering insight into what result their character and needs will have upon the whole of the human enterprise."

Raise the Dead

"For me, the historian's principal task should be to raise the dead to life."

History Must be Learned in Pieces

"History must be learned in pieces. This is partly because we have only pieces of the past -- shards, ostraca, palimpsets, crumbling codices with missing pages, newsreel clips, snatches of song, faces of iols whose bodies have long since turned to dust -- which give us glimpses of what has been but never the whole reality. How could they? We cannot encompass the whole reality even of the times in which we live. Human beings never know more than part, as 'through a glass darkly'; and all knowledge comes to us in pieces."

The Return of Spring

"Thus, by the four-month death each year of the goddess of springtime in her descent to the underworld, did winter enter the world. And when she returns from the dark realms she always strikes earthly beings with awe and smells somewhat of the grave."

For Such a Son

For such a son who would not sacrifice such a daughter!

Schilleresque Noble Hearts

That's how it always is with these Schilleresque noble hearts; till the last moment every goose is a swan with them, till the last moment, they hope for the best and will see nothing wrong, and although they have an inkling of the other side of the picture, yet they won't face the truth till they are forced to; the very thought of it makes them shiver; they thrust the truth away with both hands, until the man they deck out in false colours puts a fool's cap on them with his own hands.

A Fortune All at Once

"But why, if you are so clever, do you lie here like a sack and have nothing to show for it? One time you used to go out, you say, to teach children. But why is it you do nothing now?"

"I am doing . . ." Raskolnikov began sullenly and reluctantly.

"What are you doing?"

"Work . . ."

"What sort of work?"

"I am thinking," he answered seriously after a pause.

Nastasya was overcome with a fit of laughter. She was given to laughter and when anything amused her, she laughed inaudibly, quivering and shaking all over till she felt ill.

"And have you made much money by your thinking?" she managed to articulate at last.

"One can't go out to give lessons without boots. And I'm sick of it."

"Don't quarrel with your bread and butter."

"They pay so little for lessons. What's the use of a few coppers?" he answered, reluctantly, as though replying to his own thought.

"And you want to get a fortune all at once?"

He looked at her strangely.

"Yes, I want a fortune," he answered firmly, after a brief pause.

Man in General

"And what if I am wrong," he cried suddenly after a moment's thought. "What if man is not really a scoundrel, man in general, I mean, the whole race of mankind--then all the rest is prejudice, simply artificial terrors and there are no barriers and it's all as it should be."

Tears and Tribulation

"Why am I to be pitied, you say? Yes! there's nothing to pity me for! I ought to be crucified, crucified on a cross, not pitied! Crucify me, oh judge, crucify me but pity me! And then I will go of myself to be crucified, for it's not merry-making I seek but tears and tribulation!. . Do you suppose, you that sell, that this pint of yours has been sweet to me? It was tribulation I sought at the bottom of it, tears and tribulation, and have found it, and I have tasted it; but He will pity us Who has had pity on all men, Who has understood all men and all things, He is the One, He too is the judge. He will come in that day and He will ask: 'Where is the daughter who gave herself for her cross, consumptive step-mother and for the little children of another? Where is the daughter who had pity upon the filthy drunkard, her earthly father, undismayed by his beastliness?' And He will say, 'Come to me! I have already forgiven thee once. . . . I have forgiven thee once. . . . Thy sins which are many are forgiven thee for thou hast loved much. . . .' And he will forgive my Sonia, He will forgive, I know it . . . I felt it in my heart when I was with her just now! And He will judge and will forgive all, the good and the evil, the wise and the meek. . . . And when He has done with all of them, then He will summon us. 'You too come forth,' He will say, 'Come forth ye drunkards, come forth, ye weak ones, come forth, ye children of shame!' And we shall all come forth, without shame and shall stand before him. And He will say unto us, 'Ye are swine, made in the Image of the Beast and with his mark; but come ye also!' And the wise ones and those of understanding will say, 'Oh Lord, why dost Thou receive these men?' And He will say, 'This is why I receive them, oh ye wise, this is why I receive them, oh ye of understanding, that not one of them believed himself to be worthy of this.' And He will hold out His hands to us and we shall fall down before him . . . and we shall weep. . and we shall understand all things! Then we shall understand all! . . . and all will understand, Katerina Ivanovna even . . . she will understand. . . . Lord, Thy kingdom come!" And he sank down on the bench exhausted, and helpless, looking at no one, apparently oblivious of his surroundings and plunged in deep thought. His words had created a certain impression; there was a moment of silence; but soon laughter and oaths were heard again.

They Grieve Over Men

"Not on earth, but up yonder . . . they grieve over men, they weep, but they don't blame them, they don't blame them! But it hurts more, it hurts more when they don't blame!"

Drink to Suffer

"That's why I drink too. I try to find sympathy and feeling in drink.. . I drink so that I may suffer twice as much!"

Forbidden by Science

"From compassion? But Mr. Lebeziatnikov who keeps up with modern ideas explained the other day that compassion is forbidden nowadays by science itself, and that that's what is done now in England, where there is political economy."

What Men Are Most Afraid Of

"Hm . . . yes, all is in a man's hands and he lets it all slip from cowardice, that's an axiom. It would be interesting to know what it is men are most afraid of. Taking a new step, uttering a new word is what they fear most . . ."

Then and Now

THEN: "God explains everything, even evolution."

NOW:"Evolution explains everything, even God."

Our Descendants Will Complain

"Life has gotten dramatically better for almost everyone in the Western world during the past half-century, yet people are no happier. Centuries to come may see life better still, and happiness not increased."

***

"It is ours to decide what the future will hold. And if we decide well, the future may hold an ever-better life, about which our descendants will complain."

Art and Religion

"Like art, religion has been a way of containing feelings that might otherwise tear individuals and societies apart. Armstrong leans heavily on the distinction first made by the ancient Greeks between the realms of mythos and logos. Logos is "a pragmatic mode of thought that enables people to function effectively in the world"; it is what we rely on when organising society or planning a journey. However, logos has its limitations: "It cannot assuage human grief or find ultimate meaning in life's struggles." For this, there is the realm of mythos or myth, to which religion and art belong. Religion offers us moments of what Armstrong calls, using another Greek term, ekstasis, a stepping outside of the norm for the sake of release and consolation."

Review of The Case for God

The Case for God

"He is not good, divine, powerful or intelligent in any way that we can understand. We could not even say that God 'exists', because our concept of existence is too limited."

Not of Flesh, But of Bronze

"No, those men are not made so. The real Master to whom all is permitted storms Toulon, makes a massacre in Paris, forgets an army in Egypt, wastes half a million men in the Moscow expedition and gets off with a jest at Vilna. And altars are set up to him after his death, and so all is permitted. No, such people, it seems, are not of flesh but of bronze!"

A Historical Living Process

“Listen, Rodion, and tell us your opinion. I want to hear it. I was fighting tooth and nail with them and wanted you to help me. I told them you were coming…It began with the socialist doctrine. You know their doctrine; crime is a protest against the abnormality of the social organization and nothing more, and nothing more; no other causes admitted!…”

“You are wrong there,” cried Porfiry Petrovitch; he was noticeably animated and kept laughing as he looked at Razumihin, which made him more excited than ever.

“Nothing is admitted,” Razumihin interrupted with heat.

“I am not wrong. I'll show you their pamphlets. Everything with them is ‘the influence of environment,’ and nothing else. Their favourite phrase! From which it follows that, if society is normally organized, all crime will cease at once, since there will be nothing to protest against and all men will become righteous in one instant. Human nature is not taken into account, it is excluded, it's not supposed to exist! They don't recognize that humanity, developing by a historical living process, will become at last a normal society, but they believe that a social system that has come out of some mathematical brain is going to organize all humanity at once and make it just and sinless in an instant, quicker than any living process! That's why they instinctively dislike history, ‘nothing but ugliness and stupidity in it,’ and they explain it all as stupidity! That's why they so dislike the living process of life; they don't want a living soul! The living soul demands life, the soul won't obey the rules of mechanics, the soul is an object of suspicion, the soul is reactionary! But what they want though it smells of death and can be made of India-rubber, at least is not alive, has no will, is servile and won't revolt! And it comes in the end to their reducing everything to the building of walls and the planning of rooms and passages in a phalanstery! The phalanstery is ready, indeed, but your human nature is not ready for the phalanstery—it wants life, it hasn't completed its vital process, it's too soon for the graveyard! You can't skip over nature by logic. Logic presupposes three possibilities, but there are millions! Cut away a million, and reduce it all to the question of comfort! That's the easiest solution of the problem! It's seductively clear and you musn't think about it. That's the great thing, you mustn't think! The whole secret of life in two pages of print!”

Talk Your Own Nonsense

"And what made me get so tight? Because they got me into an argument, damn them! I've sworn never to argue! They talk such trash! I almost came to blows! I've left my uncle to preside. Would you believe, they insist on complete absence of individualism and that's just what they relish! Not to be themselves, to be as unlike themselves as they can. That's what they regard as the highest point of progress. If only their nonsense were their own, but as it is…”

“Listen!” Pulcheria Alexandrovna interrupted timidly, but it only added fuel to the flames.

“What do you think?” shouted Razumihin, louder than ever, “you think I am attacking them for talking nonsense? Not a bit! I like them to talk nonsense. That's man's one privilege over all creation. Through error you come to the truth! I am a man because I err! You never reach any truth without making fourteen mistakes and very likely a hundred and fourteen. And a fine thing, too, in its way; but we can't even make mistakes on our own account! Talk nonsense, but talk your own nonsense, and I'll kiss you for it. To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's. In the first case you are a man, in the second you're no better than a bird. Truth won't escape you, but life can be cramped. There have been examples. And what are we doing now? In science, development, thought, invention, ideals, aims, liberalism, judgment, experience and everything, everything, everything, we are still in the preparatory class at school. We prefer to live on other people's ideas, it's what we are used to! Am I right, am I right?” cried Razumihin, pressing and shaking the two ladies’ hands.

Culture and Philosophy

Culture is a productivity tool. It can record and convey successful ideas to new generations. But culture can just as easily prevent and destroy successful ideas, too. For evolution, culture can be either an express lane or a dead end.

Art, science, and commerce adorn philosophy. A poor philosophy goes about in rags; a better one dresses well.

No Army Since Caesar

"Confederate defenders expected the swamps in tidewater South Carolina to stop Sherman before he got fairly started. Indeed, so far under water were the roads in this region that Union scouts had to reconnoiter some of them in canoes. But Sherman organized 'pioneer battalions' of soldiers and freedmen (some of the latter recruited from the thousands of contrabands who had trailed the army to Savannah) to cut saplings and trees to corduroy the roads, build bridges, and construct causeways. Meeting resistance from Wheeler's cavalry at some rain-swollen streams and rivers, the bluecoats sent out flanking columns that waded through water up to their armpits, brushing aside alligators and snakes, and drove the rebels away. Northward lapped the blue wave at a rate of nearly ten miles a day for forty-five days including skirmishing and fighting. Rain fell during twenty-eight of those days, but this seemed to benefit South Carolina only by slightly damping the style of Sherman's arsonists. 'When I learned that Sherman's army was marching through the Salk swamps, making its own corduroy roads at the rate of a dozen miles a day,' said Joseph Johnston, 'I made up my mind that there had been no army in existence since the days of Julius Caesar.'"

Ten Times More Difficult

"Even more important, perhaps, than the destructive vengeance of Sherman's army in spreading this demoralization was its stunning logistical achievements. Sherman himself later rated the march through the Carolinas as ten times more important in winning the war than the march from Atlanta to the sea. It was also ten times more difficult. Terrain and weather posed much greater problems in South Carolina than in Georgia. The march from Atlanta to Savannah proceeded 285 miles parallel to major rivers in dry autumn weather against token opposition. The march northward from Savannah was aimed at Goldsboro, North Carolina, 425 miles away, where Sherman expected to be resupplied by Union forces moving inland from Wilmington. Sherman's soldiers would have to cross nine substantial rivers and scores of their tributaries during what turned out to be the wettest winter in twenty years."

I Am a Contradiction

At first glance, I am a contradiction: a libertarian who who was raised on social security survivor's benefits; a graduate of public schools; and a graduate of a public university. Surely, if any one life can demonstrate the virtues of a progressive social system, my life does. Surely, only an ingrate would criticize a system that gave him so much.

But we don't get to choose our beginnings, only our destinations.

Not Pretty, and Hardly Glorious

"The war of plunder and arson in South Carolina was not pretty, and hardly glorious, but Sherman considered it effective. The terror his bummers inspired 'was a power, and I intended to utilize it....My aim then was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses and make them fear and dread us.' It seemed to work: 'All is gloom, despondency, and inactivity,' wrote a South Carolinian on February 28. 'Our army is demoralized and the people panic stricken....the power to do has left us...to fight longer seems to be madness.'"

Few Escaped

"Destroyed it [South Carolina] was, through a corridor from south to north narrower than in Georgia but more intensely pillaged and burned. Not many buildings remained standing in some villages after the army marched through. The same was true of the countryside. 'In Georgia few houses were burned,' wrote an officer; 'here few escaped.' A soldier felt confident that South Carolina 'will never want to seceed again....I think she has her 'rights' now.'

South Carolina Must Be Destroyed

"At the beginning of 1865 the only sizable portions of the Confederate heartland still untouched by invading Yankees were the interior of the Carolinas and most of Alabama. Grant and Thomas planned a two-pronged campaign to deal with the latter...

Destructive as these enterprises were, they became a sideshow to Sherman's march through South Carolina. As his army had approached Savannah in December 1864, Georgians said to Sherman: 'Why don't you go over to South Carolina and serve them this way? They started it.' Sherman had intended to do so all along. He converted Grant to the idea, and on February 1, Sherman's 60,000 blue avengers left Savannah for their second march through the heart of enemy territory. This one had two strategic purposes: to destroy all war resources in Sherman's path; and to come up on Lee's rear to crush the Army of Northern Virginia in a vise between two larger Union armies and 'wipe out Lee,' in Grant's succinct phrase.

Sherman's soldiers had a third purpose in mind as well: to punish the state that had hatched this unholy rebellion. The soldiers' temper was not improved by the taunts of southern newspapers against this 'grand army of Mudsills.' one of the mudsills, an Ohio private, vowed to make South Carolina 'suffer worse than she did at the time of the Revolutionary War. We will let her know that it isn't so sweet to secede as she thought it would be.' A South Carolina woman whose house was plundered recalled that the soldiers 'would sometimes stop to tell me they were sorry for the women and children, but South Carolina must be destroyed."

Vita Brevis

"Ars longa, vita brevis, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile."

"Art is long, life short, opportunity fleeting, experiment dangerous, and judgement difficult."

A Hard Rule

"The test of merit in my profession, with the people, is success. It is a hard rule, but I think it right."

Confederate General Albert Sidney Johnston, 1862

The Word of God

Of course we all should obey the word of God, once we all agree on exactly what He said.

Manifestation of the Spirit

I like to read the following passage from the first letter of Paul to the Corinthians as an early recognition of the utility of dispersed knowledge and a celebration of the spontaneous order.

"There are different kinds of spiritual gifts but the same Spirit; 
there are different forms of service but the same Lord;
there are different workings but the same God
who produces all of them in everyone.
To each individual the manifestation of the Spirit
is given for some benefit.

As a body is one though it has many parts,
and all the parts of the body, though many, are one body,
so also Christ."

The Rising Marginal Cost of Originality

"Suppose you are the two hundred and ninetieth city planner in the history of the world. All the good ideas have been used, all the so-so ideas have been used, and you need something new to make your reputation. You design Canberra. That done, you design the Combs building at ANU, the most ingeniously misdesigned building in my personal experience, where after walking around for a few minutes you not only don't know where you are, you don't even know what floor you are on.

I call it the theory of the rising marginal cost of originality—formed long ago when I spent a summer visiting at ANU.

It explains why, to a first approximation, modern art isn't worth looking at, modern music isn't worth listening to, and modern literature and verse not worth reading. Writing a novel like one of Jane Austen's, or a poem like one by Donne or Kipling, only better, is hard. Easier to deliberately adopt a form that nobody else has used, and so guarantee that nobody else has done it better.

Of course, there might be a reason nobody else has used it."

From www.daviddfriedman.blogspot.com

A Suitable Hard Drive

"I have learned that people are uploading their lives into cyberspace and am convinced that one day all human knowledge and memory will exist on a suitable hard drive which, for preservation, will be flung out of the solar system to orbit a galaxy far, far away."

Fish-a-tarian

"Then I would have a room-service dinner, and the only thing on the hotel menu that fit my fish-a-tarian diet was breaded fried shrimp with the texture of sandpaper, really just a ketchup delivery system."

A Good Time Tonight

"Well, we've had a good time tonight, considering we're all going to die someday."

Death-Thing

"I'm so depressed today. I just found out this 'death-thing' applies to me."

Consistently Good

"The constant work enhanced my act. I learned a lesson: It was easy to be great. Every entertainer has a night when everything is clicking. These nights are accidental and statistical: Like lucky cards in poker, you can count on them occurring over time. What was hard was to be good, consistently good, night after night, no matter what the abominable circumstances."

They Don't Get It

"In his standard warm-up for the studio audience, when he was asked, 'Do they get this show in Omaha?' Steve [Allen] would answer, "They see it, but they don't get it."

This is Funny

"This is funny, you just haven't gotten it yet."

Charging Up

"Through the years, I have learned there is no harm in charging oneself up with delusions between moments of valid inspiration."

Necessary Naivete

"Despite a lack of natural ability, I did have the one element necessary to all early creativity: naivete, that fabulous quality that keeps you from knowing just how unsuited you are for what you are about to do."

Perseverance

"Perseverance is a great substitute for talent."

Part of Life's Routine

"One day I was particularly gloomy, and Jim asked me what the matter was. I told him my high school girlfriend (for all of two weeks) had broken up with me. He said, "Oh, that'll happen a lot." The knowledge that this horrid grief was simply a part of life's routine cheered me up almost instantly."

The Thinking Man's Religion

Art becomes the thinking man's religion; artists, his prophets; and professors, his high priests.

Where the Shadows Fall

It is impossible to say that you know a place until you know where the shadows fall.

Against Cosmic Odds

When we are young, we believe life is something that can be torn from us only by a force of cosmic injustice. But as we age, we come to understand that one life is not nature's default. Life itself may be, but one life is not. One life is something held together for a little while, against cosmic odds.

Formula for Greatness

"My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary—but love it.

What is Necessary in Things

"I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer."

That Horrid Draught

"Anna Sergyevna was a rather strange creature. Having no prejudices of any kind, having no strong convictions even, she never gave way or went out of her way for anything. She had seen many things very clearly; she had been interested in many things, but nothing had completely satisfied her; indeed, she hardly desired complete satisfaction. Her intellect was at the same time inquiring and indifferent; her doubts were never soothed to forgetfulness, and they never grew strong enough to distract her. Had she not been rich and independent, she would perhaps have thrown herself into the struggle, and have known passion. But life was easy for her, though she was bored at times, and she went on passing day after day with deliberation, never in a hurry, placid, and only rarely disturbed. Dreams sometimes danced in rainbow colours before her eyes even, but she breathed more freely when they died away, and did not regret them. Her imagination indeed overstepped the limits of what is reckoned permissible by conventional morality; but even then her blood flowed as quietly as ever in her fascinatingly graceful, tranquil body. Sometimes coming out of her fragrant bath all warm and enervated, she would fall to musing on the nothingness of life, the sorrow, the labour, the malice of it.… Her soul would be filled with sudden daring, and would flow with generous ardour, but a draught would blow from a half-closed window, and Anna Sergyevna would shrink into herself, and feel plaintive and almost angry, and there was only one thing she cared for at that instant—to get away from that horrid draught."

Loyalty and Love

Here are the final words of George Orwell's chilling novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, where the character Winston Smith is finally reconciled with Big Brother, at the very moment of Smith's execution.

"He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother."

Big Brother appears when a leader asks us for loyalty and love more than independence; it continues until it has convinced us to participate in our own destruction; it ends only when we dare to disagree with what we know is wrong, refuse to love what is unlovable, and insist on our right to be left alone.

Through the Fire

Anna Sergyevna went very rarely to the town, generally only on business, and even then she did not stay long. She was not liked in the province; there had been a fearful outcry at her marriage with Odintsov, all sorts of fictions were told about her; it was asserted that she had helped her father in his cardsharping tricks, and even that she had gone abroad for excellent reasons, that it had been necessary to conceal the lamentable consequences … ‘You understand?’ the indignant gossips would wind up. ‘She has gone through the fire,’ was said of her; to which a noted provincial wit usually added: ‘And through all the other elements?’

The Courage to Believe in Nothing

"I shall be very curious to see the man who has the courage to believe in nothing."

A Humble Faith

Why should reason be offended at a humble faith, especially when reason more than anything else allows us to comprehend how little one man can understand; or when faith dares to call that vast ignorance God?

The Evidence of a Father

I grew up surrounded by the evidence of a father who died before I could remember him. Visits to his grave, photographs of him, his paintings, his brushes, his tubes of paint, his drawing tools, his books, the table he built and meticulously decorated, the sofa he made from the front seat of a Chevy, the lamp he made, and always the stories about him from my mother, my aunts, and my uncles. He was dead, but something about him was in every room and the very structure of that house, as real as the walls and doors. Death leaves an absence, but it transforms what remains.

Not a Temple

"The only good point in a Russian is his having the lowest possible opinion of himself. What does matter is that two and two make four, and the rest is all foolery."

"And is nature foolery?" said Arkady, looking pensively at the bright-coloured fields in the distance, in the beautiful soft light of the sun, which was not yet high up in the sky.

"Nature, too, is foolery in the sense you understand it. Nature’s not a temple, but a workshop, and man’s the workman in it."

Regrets Akin to Hopes

"Nikolai Petrovitch had lost his wife, Pavel Petrovitch had lost his memories; after the death of the princess he tried not to think of her. But to Nikolai, there remained the sense of a well-spent life, his son was growing up under his eyes; Pavel, on the contrary, a solitary bachelor, was entering upon that indefinite twilight period of regrets that are akin to hopes, and hopes that are akin to regrets, when youth is over, while old age has not yet come.

This time was harder for Pavel Petrovitch than for another man; in losing his past, he lost everything."

Getting Ready to be Great

"Madame Kukshin, too, went abroad. She is in Heidelberg, and is now studying not natural science, but architecture, in which, according to her own account, she has discovered new laws. She still fraternises with students, especially with the young Russians studying natural science and chemistry, with whom Heidelberg is crowded, and who, astounding the naïve German professors at first by the soundness of their views of things, astound the same professors no less in the sequel by their complete inefficiency and absolute idleness. In company with two or three such young chemists, who don’t know oxygen from nitrogen, but are filled with scepticism and self-conceit, and, too, with the great Elisyevitch, Sitnikov roams about Petersburg, also getting ready to be great, and in his own conviction continues the ‘work’ of Bazarov. There is a story that some one recently gave him a beating; but he was avenged upon him; in an obscure little article, hidden in an obscure little journal, he has hinted that the man who beat him was a coward. He calls this irony. His father bullies him as before, while his wife regards him as a fool … and a literary man."

Life Without End

"There is a small village graveyard in one of the remote corners of Russia. Like almost all our graveyards, it has a melancholy look; the ditches surrounding it have long been overgrown; grey wooden crosses have fallen askew and rotted under their once painted gables; the gravestones are all out of position, just as if someone had pushed them from below; two or three bare trees hardly provide some meager shade; the sheep wander unchecked among the tombs . . . But among them is one grave untouched by human beings and not trampled on by any animal; only the birds perch on it and sing at daybreak. An iron railing surrounds it and two young fir trees have been planted there, one at each end; Evgeny Bazarov is buried in this tomb. Often from the near-by village two frail old people come to visit it--a husband and wife. Supporting one another, they walk with heavy steps; they go up to the iron railing, fall on their knees and weep long and bitterly, and gaze intently at the silent stone under which their son lies buried; they exchange a few words, wipe away the dust from the stone or tidy up some branches of a fir tree, then start to pray again and cannot tear themselves away from that place where they seem to be nearer to their son, to their memories of him . . . Can it be that their prayers and their tears are fruitless? Can it be that love, sacred devoted love, is not all powerful? Oh, no! However passionate, sinful or rebellious the heart hidden in the tomb, the flowers growing over it peep at us serenely with their innocent eyes; they tell us not only of eternal peace, of that great peace of "indifferent" nature; they tell us also of eternal reconciliation and of life without end."

A Man Can Understand Everything

"A man can understand everything--how the ether vibrates, and what's going on in the sun; but why someone else blows his nose differently, that he is incapable of understanding."

The Great Dilemma

I have learned that the great dilemma in life is knowing when to exercise my will, and when to accept my fate; and that, sometimes, the two are really the same thing. From every act of will springs a forest of fateful consequences; and every fateful consequence is the raw timber of a new act of will. 

A Life Too Dangerous

Theater allows us to experience a way of living too dangerous to actually live just yet. 

Other People's Lives

We love obituaries. Other people become so much more interesting once they're dead. 

Couplet

Like fire upon the polar shelf

Creation must consume itself. 

The Lucky Ones

"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they're never going to be born."

The Root of All Evil (Part 2). The quote occurs around 46:50.

Madame le Professeur

Sing oh goddess, of misery and pain,
In windowless rooms of no forgiveness
Bunkers of the lost in a losing war,
Bring forth her stories lost with urgent need
Power denied the able in the world
With words that are not and can never be
Her words, the maternal voice unconstrained
Abandoned hymns to her name undefiled
Behind the slave-name made by her father
Whose nature had to own the things he saw,
How she had to make a world of her own
Of feminine light and masculine shade,
She who would rather be a witch than wife
Who traded uncanny knowledge for gold
Who rose up to challenge facts and phrases
The brutal instruments of her abuse
A contest to control her mind and will
To trade her body and cripple her with
Fear, until there was nothing left to trade,
How she would prefer things be different
But can’t let heal the bloody scabs of wrongs
The injustice of her place outside time
An actor in another’s play, a plot
Concealed but drawn deliberately vast
Appearing, deceptively, as kindness
As respect, as worship, even as love
A trick to make her think she is happy;
Courtesy is a wall to keep her out,
The trap of romance designed to get her
To ignore a long list of cruelties
A horror penetrating her long dream
The irrefutable proof of her worst fears
Her womb bruised by crimes of the wombless.

Tales of Immeasurable Consolation

What does religion offer us? Not facts, but tales of immeasurable consolation.

Ah, Women

"Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent."

Not the Past Itself

As a child, I was drawn to places and things abandoned by adults. I did not seek these for what they were. I sought them for what I imagined them to be. Perhaps all children live this way, even some adults, especially those who want to relive old happiness or settle old scores. For it is not the past itself that we seek, but what we imagine about it.

We Live Here

We live here. Only here, and nowhere else. But where we are is connected to a past that we continuously re-imagine, and a future that is filled with surprises. It turns out that "here" is more than one place at once. Perhaps that is the meaning of eternal life. It is too vast for any single life, and any single life is too small to contain more than just a few bits of it. 

Like New

Death is an old joke, but it comes like new to everyone.

The Romantic Structure of the Earth

"...he loved the romantic structure of the earth which filled his pockets with chinking coins."

Neither Poem Nor Novel

A few thoughts on re-reading Look Homeward, Angel. 

Wolfe's style is an unfortunate example of what happens when a born poet tries to write a great novel. The result is neither poem nor novel, but a mosaic of both genres, a strained ambition to contain everything in a single narrative. It might have been a great series of poems. It might have even been a great novel.

Wolfe is a random adverb generator. They appear in his sentences at the most unexpected places. "Remembering speechlessly," "He had long brown mustaches that hung straight down mournfully," "A brakeman came draftily into the dirty plush coach," and "The huge bulk of the hills was foggily emergent" are four examples from nearly the first page.

Finally, Wolfe believed in full employment for adjectives. Why use one when two or three might be lying around out of work? 

The Fruit of Forty Thousand Years

"Each moment is the fruit of forty thousand years. The minute-winning days, like flies, buzz home to death, and every moment is a window on all time."

I Made Him Happy

"You were hastening his death, carrying him to the extreme frenzy, the consumption of all the senses. And you were satisfying your own taste for fairy tales: you were proud of your inventions."

"Perhaps. But for the short while he still lived, I made him happy."

Arrival and Ground Transportation

1.

I entered San Francisco between two ages

A young woman who overplayed the bitch

A nearsighted old man who read the news

Like he had to smell the meaning of each word.

In the awkward intimacy of strangers

Closer than friends

We tried to think of something else.

It takes a day and nearly $900 to get here

Five hours in coach, $2 headphones, two movies

Three beverage carts, four cookies, two bags of peanuts

Three new time zones, two trips to the lavatory, no meal

And always the recirculated, desiccated, and odorous air.

An arm’s length away

Outside our little metal cloud

Life was impossible.

2.

On the edge of the continent

Alone in a dark seat on the dark side of earth

I rode away in a balm of luxurious darkness

Under storm clouds the weight of one atmosphere

A black sea containing all the names of creation

Past rooms with open windows and shaded lamps

Like aids to navigation, the lights of homes

Where people hammer out of darkness

Chains of meaning released into the world
A grammar made from darkness and surrendered to it.

Koan from The Gateless Gate

趙州、因僧問、其甲乍入叢林。
A monk said to Jõshû, "I have just entered this monastery.
乞師指示。
Please teach me."
州云、喫粥了也未。
"Have you eaten your rice porridge?" asked Jõshû.
僧云、喫粥了也。
"Yes, I have," replied the monk.
州云、洗鉢盂去。
"Then you had better wash your bowl," said Jõshû.
其僧有省。
With this the monk gained insight.

The Cardinal Virtues

Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.

A Rare Smile of Eternal Reassurance

He smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced—or seemed to face—the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished—and I was looking at an elegant young rough-neck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd. Some time before he introduced himself I’d got a strong impression that he was picking his words with care.

Pages and Everything

On a chance we tried an important-looking door, and walked into a high Gothic library, panelled with carved English oak, and probably transported complete from some ruin overseas.

A stout, middle-aged man, with enormous owl-eyed spectacles, was sitting somewhat drunk on the edge of a great table, staring with unsteady concentration at the shelves of books. As we entered he wheeled excitedly around and examined Jordan from head to foot.

“What do you think?” he demanded impetuously.

“About what?” He waved his hand toward the book-shelves.

“About that. As a matter of fact you needn’t bother to ascertain. I ascertained. They’re real.”

“The books?”

He nodded.

“Absolutely real—have pages and everything. I thought they’d be a nice durable cardboard. Matter of fact, they’re absolutely real. Pages and—Here! Lemme show you.”

Taking our scepticism for granted, he rushed to the bookcases and returned with Volume One of the “Stoddard Lectures.”

“See!” he cried triumphantly. “It’s a bona-fide piece of printed matter. It fooled me. This fella’s a regular Belasco. It’s a triumph. What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop, too—didn’t cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect?”

He snatched the book from me and replaced it hastily on its shelf, muttering that if one brick was removed the whole library was liable to collapse.

Testimony to Romantic Speculation

We all turned and looked around for Gatsby. It was testimony to the romantic speculation he inspired that there were whispers about him from those who found little that it was necessary to whisper about in this world.

The Meaning of Death

"Does death have any meaning? 

Well, yes, it does. Sex without death gets you single-celled algae and fungi; sex with a mortal soma gets you the rest of the eukaryotic creatures. Death is the price paid to have trees and clams and birds and grasshoppers, and death is the price paid to have human consciousness, to be aware of all that shimmering awareness and all that love."

Its Own Improbability

"I have come to understand that the self, my self, is inherently sacred. By virtue of its own improbability, its own miracle, its own emergence." (pg. 59)

Getting Something to Happen

"Life, we can now say, is getting something to happen against the odds and remembering how to do it." (pg. 63)

All There is to Biochemistry

"And that's basically all there is to biochemistry. Every cell is packed with thousands of different kinds of enzymes, each enzyme displaying a distinctive surface topology...and each thereby able to catalyze one or several specific chemical reactions." (pg. 39)

Self Assembly

"Amino acids that prefer to be next to one another, like a group of greasy ones, might associate to form one domain; amino acids with negative charges might line up next to amino acids with positive charges to form a second domain; a bulky amino acid might cause a protuberant domain to stick out farther. This all happens spontaneously -- the process is called self-assembly -- and the result is a protein with a distinctive overall shape and size that displays a collection of very specific domains." 

A Long, Existential Shudder

"We are told that life is so many manifestations of chemistry and we shudder, a long existential shudder." (pg. 33)

Our Thermal and Chemical Circumstances

"Life from non life, like wine from water, has long been considered a miracle wrought by gods or God. Now it is seen to be the near inevitable consequence of our thermal and chemical circumstances." (pg. 28-29)

A Simplicity of Heart

Sometimes they came and went without having met Gatsby at all, came for the party with a simplicity of heart that was its own ticket of admission.

The Inexhaustible Variety of Life

"...high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life."

The Edge of Stale Ideas

As for Tom, the fact that he “had some woman in New York.” was really less surprising than that he had been depressed by a book. Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart.

A Beautiful Little Fool

“It’ll show you how I’ve gotten to feel about—things. Well, she was less than an hour old and Tom was God knows where. I woke up out of the ether with an utterly abandoned feeling, and asked the nurse right away if it was a boy or a girl. She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. ‘all right,’ I said, ‘I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”

Deep Books and Long Words

“Tom’s getting very profound,” said Daisy, with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. “He reads deep books with long words in them."

The Dramatic Turbulence

I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.

Consoling Proximity of Millionaires

I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor’s lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dollars a month.

Fine Health

There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. (Chapter 1)

Freedom of the Neighborhood

It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road.

“How do you get to West Egg village?” he asked helplessly.

I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood.

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer. (Chapter 1)

Delayed Teutonic Migration

I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being the warm centre of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go East and learn the bond business. Everybody I knew was in the bond business, so I supposed it could support one more single man.

A Matter of Infinite Hope

"...the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth." (pg. 1)

The Mind of Man is Capable of Anything

"The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there -- there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were -- No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it -- this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity -- like yours -- the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you -- you so remote from the night of first ages -- could comprehend. And why not? The mind of man is capable of anything -- because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valour, rage -- who can tell? -- but truth -- truth stripped of its cloak of time. Let the fool gape and shudder -- the man knows, and can look on without a wink. But he must at least be as much of a man as these on the shore. He must meet that truth with his own true stuff -- with his own in-born strength. Principles won't do. Acquisitions, clothes, pretty rags -- rags that would fly off at the first good shake. No; you want a deliberate belief. An appeal to me in this fiendish row -- is there? Very well; I hear; I admit, but I have a voice, too, and for good or evil mine is the speech that cannot be silenced. Of course, a fool, what with sheer fright and fine sentiments, is always safe.

The Sums Not Counted

"Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin in Crete four thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas."