Sunday, June 17, 2012

Human Being

"While the world was full of people, all too full, finding a genuine human being was not easy." -- Eiji Yoshikawa

Big Books

Books should not be too big. A big book is too often like one of those "pan for gold" attractions in the Rocky Mountains: a few bright chips amid much sand and water.
-- Seaweed Shark

Friday, June 15, 2012

Words

I like words. They are, after our bodies, pretty much our first playthings.
-- Seaweed Shark

Saturday, May 12, 2012

Noblest Spirits

"Only the noblest spirits can bear with equanimity the success of their friends."
-- Will Durant, Caesar and Christ p.289

Power & Pettiness

"I cannot at the same time do homage to power and pettiness -- to the truth of consummate science, and the mannerism of undisciplined imagination."
-- John Ruskin, Modern Painters V1, Intro, sec. 4

Thursday, May 03, 2012

Modern

"Looking to science for deliverance from the tragicomedy of history is part of what it means to be modern."
-- John Gray (The New Republic, April 20, 2012)

Something Special

"I further know that if God has something special for you, you have a knowledge of it inside you, which causes you not to be satisfied with anything that is not that thing."

-- Leonard Cheshire

Friday, April 27, 2012

Three Mysteries

CREATION, EVIL, TIME ~ three mysteries, about which it is only possible, in the last analysis, to say that they are somehow interconnected, and that their relationship to the greater mystery of divine Reality is one of limitation.
-- Aldus Huxley

The Principle of Democracy

The principle of democracy is freedom, the principle of war is discipline; each requires the absence of the other.
~ Will Durant

Saturday, April 14, 2012

The Function of Poetry

"'What is the use or function of poetry nowadays?' is a question not the less poignant for being defiandy asked by so many stupid people or apologetically answered by so many silly people. The function of poetry is religious invocation of the Muse; its use is the experience of mixed exaltation and horror that her presence excites. But 'nowadays'? Function and use remain the same; only the application has changed. This was once a warning to man that he must keep in harmony with the family of living creatures among which he was born, by obedience to the wishes of the lady of the house; it is now a reminder that he has disregarded the warning, turned the house upside down by capricious experiments in philosophy, science and industry, and brought ruin on himself and his family."

Robert Graves

Saturday, April 07, 2012

The Ugly Sea

"We are in rhythm with the old ocean: it rises irregularly twice in twenty-four hours, and then repents of rising; and so largely do we." -- R.A. Lafferty, "The Ugly Sea"

Tuesday, April 03, 2012

A Universal Corrosive

"I can think of lots of reasons why The Closing of the American Mind deserves as many readers as it earned in the eighties; Bloom’s sly wit and the torrential energy of his prose are worth the price of admission, in my opinion. But this one carries a special urgency. As well as anyone then or now, he understood that the intellectual fashion of materialism​—​of explaining all life, human or animal, mental or otherwise, by means of physical processes alone​—​had led inescapably to a doctrinaire relativism that would prove to be a universal corrosive."

Andrew Ferguson, The Weekly Standard, Apr 9, 2012, Vol. 17, No. 29

Sunday, April 01, 2012

The Fall of Rome and the Rise of Islam

A friend shared a link to Tom Holland's recent article in the Guardian, about the Fall of Rome and the rise of Islam.

I thought it very good: Holland is a fine writer. In true Blogger fashion I have some half-digested thoughts to share.

I always understood that among Sci-Fi fans, "the Mule" in the Foundation Trilogy has long been understood as an unflattering portrait of L. Ron Hubbard, whose inauguration of a science fiction religion had roughly the same effect on North American SF fans that Muhammad's revelation had on the post-classical world.

It seems astounding that Holland manages to all but ignore the fact that the Roman Empire was mostly replaced by Christian societies, not Islamic. Those Greek Egyptians who received that invoice for sheep that he mentions, were not exactly members of some pagan cult: Egypt had been Christian for 300 years by that time.

Then he also neglects to mention what may be the most interesting thing about Asimov and Herbert, which is that their books have scant or no Christian content. People had been writing novels about the Fall of Rome for hundreds of years -- you could fill a whole library with such books, though they are all unread today. I used to own one that I picked out of a dollar bin in Texas: a big fat elegant blue-backed thing from the 1890s with gold-edged pages and a pompous kind of title like "Sunlight and Shadow" or some such, execrably written by a dull and no-doubt fat 19th century Evangelical minister, and all about the spiritual awakening of some Roman aristocrat's beautiful daughter with milk-white skin and sexy lips, as she becomes attracted to the persecuted sect in the catacombs, falls under the sway of its compelling bearded bishop, and learns to recognize her True Lord in Christ. "Quo Vadis" is another such book, far more famous. Now why would Tom Holland make no mention of this?

He doesn't say much about Star Wars either, perhaps because its narrative of political rebellion, which could certainly be classical or proto-Christian, doesn't fit the pattern. How true, that what people don't say can reveal as much as what they do. "In other regions ... there are even more haunting silences." Indeed.

Holland's connection of late Roman catastrophe to Tolkien's Middle Earth history, by way of Arthurian romance, is ingenious, perhaps not ironclad but insightful. Tolkien's book does achieve much of its effect by its background reference to sprawling, ancient ruined places, to regions once beautiful and cultivated but now waste, grown up with tangled forest and now the haunt of murderous creatures. Schooled on such works, we want our ruins vast and gloomy. The real ruins scattered about the Holy Land almost always disappoint, in part because they are so small and beaten down, and washed in sun.

What myths will we tell ourselves, who live in a world where nothing can be conceded as true unless it is subject to measurement?

Saturday, March 31, 2012

Facts Absorbed Without Context

"Facts absorbed without context merely magnify the intellectual deficiencies of the autodidact."
Joe Queenan, New York Times, 3 October 2004

Nature

Nature is, what you may do.
Emerson (The Conduct of Life: Fate)

Friday, March 30, 2012

The People Without Stories

The fact that we tell stories is a symptom of our predicament. Gossip stories, adventure stories. We need them, yet they have a pernicious effect on us. Blessed would be the people without stories, if any such existed.

Dreaming

"Dreaming is a natural process, like eating or working, that we have the opportunity to make more beautiful if we wish to."
N.N. Scott, in conversation 2004

The Souls in Plato's Cave

"Like the souls in Plato's cave, we ourselves cast the shadows that make us aware of our existence, and at the same time block the light that is the source of our existence."
N.N. Scott, in conversation, 2004

Dangerous Stories

"Some stories are extremely dangerous, but not in the way most people believe: not because they refer to socially uncomfortable issues and facts. They are dangerous because they teach us to think in the wrong way about our problems."
N.N. Scott, in conversation, (2004)

Our Weak Points

"At this time, before things get really messy, we should work to clarify our understanding of our weak points, our doubt."
Dr. Peter Khan, in conversation, 2006

Your Pilgrimage

"You are now on your pilgrimage well begun, and from tomorrow on you are the guests of Baha'u'llah."
Ali Muhammad Varqa, in conversation, 2006.

A Genuine Human Being

"While the world was full of people, all too full, finding a genuine human being was not easy."
Eiji Yoshikawa, Musashi (1935) p.293

Thursday, March 29, 2012

Books Should Not Be Too Big

"Books should not be too big. A big book resembles one of those panning-for-gold tourist attractions in the Rocky Mountains: a few flakes of gold amid much sand and water."
N.N. Scott, 2006

A Good Ending

"The story should end where the next story most logically begins. A good ending is a good beginning."
(from one of my notebooks, 2006)

Overheard in Texas

"The more you look at someone, the more they become a human being, and the more trouble you have slitting their throat and dumping them into a hole in the ground."

Utter Naivete

The sign of utter naivete is to wander into tendentious, polemical discussions without realizing it -- like cave divers who swim beyond their air.

Competing for the Same Space

The atheistic cosmology is only the extreme state of the religious belief that the creator of the universe is separate, a thing we supplicate at a distance. These two viewpoints prompt such contention because they are both on the same side of the equation, and competing for the same mental space.

Too Complex to Study

"Physics [...] restricts itself to extremely simple questions. If a molecule becomes too complex, they hand it over to the chemists. If it becomes too complex for them, they hand it to biologists. And if the system is too complex for them, they hand it to psychologists ... and so on until it ends up in the hands of historians or novelists. As you deal with more and more complex systems, it becomes harder and harder to find deep and interesting properties."
Noam Chomsky, New Scientist, 19 March 2012

Stories of Ourselves

Art loses its way when what is right and wrong cease to matter, when our views become no more than stories of ourselves.
N.N. Scott

Made for War

The creature made for war who nevertheless yearns for peace is an emblem of the body, which was created for war with the world.
N.N. Scott (see Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, introductory aphorism XXIV)

Fallacies of Neuroscience

"This is pseudoscience of the first order, and owes what scant plausibility it possesses to the fact that it simply repeats the matter that it fails to explain. It perfectly illustrates the prevailing academic disorder, which is the loss of questions."
Roger Scruton, Spectator.co.uk., 17 March 2012

Originality in the arts and sciences

"When a well-known scientist, John Wheeler, writes that 'matter tells space-time how to curve, and curved space-time tells matter how to move', we may or may not be impressed, but it is hard to reorient one's worldview accordingly, to abandon the sense that there is an absolute "now" in every corner of the universe and that empty space is just a void ready to be filled, and cannot be bent, and is a distinct entity from time. The Einsteinian revolution may have redefined the absolute basics of matter, energy, space and time, but the limits of our mental equipment keep us in our evolutionary homelands, in the savannah of commonsense."
Ian McEwan, guardian.co.uk, Friday 23 March 2012

Saturday, March 17, 2012

What archivists provide

"Archivists provide the basis for your life by anchoring your rights and privileges in the public record."
-- Dr. David Gracy, University of Texas School of Information (in a lecture, 2005)