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.