DonPJenn

Neil Postman - Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business: "We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares. But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us. This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right." Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

Excerpts from George Orwell's 'The Freedom of The Press', a proposed preface to Animal Farm (link below). It was not discovered until 1972. I found this information at the Orwell Foundation website. Of course, Animal Farm is an anti-Stalinist allegory. "Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. . . The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. . . . Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals." "But at least let us have no more nonsense about defending liberty against Fascism. If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. The common people still vaguely subscribe to that doctrine and act on it. In our country — it is not the same in all countries: it was not so in republican France, and it is not so in the USA today — it is the liberals who fear liberty and the intellectuals who want to do dirt on the intellect: it is to draw attention to that fact that I have written this preface." orwellfoundation.com/.../the…

Samuel Johnson: Interesting to note that W. Jackson Bate read and wrote about Johnson for well over half his life - this with a gusto that never waned. I like this from Bate: ". . . when thinking of [Samuel] Johnson I find myself haunted by an ancient Greek epigram about Plato. That in whatever direction you go you find Plato coming on his way back. He'd already been there." That Bate line captures Johnson perfectly. It also captures Bate himself, because no biographer has ever entered Johnson’s inner world with more sympathy, intelligence, and emotional attunement. The quotation expresses two essential truths about Johnson: ⸻ 1. Johnson had already thought through the problem you’re wrestling with Whether it’s: • happiness • ambition • disappointment • mortality • moral weakness • the fear of meaninglessness …Johnson has always “been there” first, confronted it honestly, and written about it with unmatched clarity. Readers keep finding that whatever they’re turning over in private, Johnson has already anatomized in The Rambler, Rasselas, the Lives, or even his casual talk. This is what Bate means: you meet Johnson coming back from the road you just set out on. ⸻ 2. Johnson’s breadth makes him feel inexhaustible Like Plato, Johnson roamed through: • ethics • psychology • politics • religion • language • human frailty And he left behind a body of work that covers so much of human experience that even seasoned scholars continue to find new angles. Bate spent more than half his life with Johnson because Johnson rewards a lifetime. Bate once described Johnson’s mind as “a continual struggle upward”—and Bate’s own devotion was to understand that ascent from every side. ⸻ 3. Bate and Johnson were temperamentally linked This is easy to overlook. Bate understood Johnson’s melancholy, self-discipline, compassion, and flashes of hilarity because he shared versions of them. Many readers of Johnson report a curious feeling—almost a companionship across centuries. Bate experienced that more intensely than anyone. ⸻ The quotation sits at the heart of it: Johnson, like Plato, is one of those writers who becomes a guide. You start reading him because you enjoy him; you keep reading him because he keeps arriving ahead of you.

If I have a patron Saint it is Samuel Johnson. There are many great stories about him but one of the most appealing is the one concerning his act of penance at Uttoxeter. His father had a book stall there when Samuel was a young man. Samuel was asked to tend the book stall once when his father Michael Johnson was ill. Samuel, out of pride, or arrogance, or who knows what, refused. Later, he reflected on his refusal and was overwhelmed with remorse. Exactly fifty years later as an act of penance he went to the very location in Uttoxeter where the stall had been located and stood bareheaded in the rain for quite some time. No doubt, the locals thought him mad. There is a monument there today that commemorates the event. I find the whole thing very moving. Re: Johnson - I make it a point to reread his "Rasselas" every year. That book packs a tremendous wallop. The point of it is that there is no definitive happiness to be found in this life. Sure, we have our moments of absolute reverie and contentment but then we hit those inevitable lows. This isn't pessimism, it's realism. The most moving passage, to me at least, is spoken by a sage: "My retrospect of life recalls to my view many opportunities of good neglected, much time squandered upon trifles, and more lost in idleness and vacancy. I leave many great designs unattempted, and many great attempts unfinished. My mind is burdened by no heavy crime, and therefore I compose myself to tranquility; endeavour to abstract my thoughts from hopes and cares, which, though reason knows them to be vain, still try to keep their old possession of the heart; expect, with serene humility, that hour which nature cannot long delay; and hope to possess, in a better state, that happiness which here I could not find, and that virtue which here I have not attained." Powerful stuff! "Samuel Johnson" by W. Jackson Bate (1977) remains the standard work. Bate also wrote a great bio of John Keats (1963). He received the Pulitzer Prize for each, an award until then given exclusively to biographers of American subjects. The Johnson study also received the National Book Award and the National Book Critic's Circle Award. If I were to recommend just one book on Johnson (save Boswell's biography, of course) it would be the Bate book on Johnson.

Samuel Johnson: Of all mortals, living or dead, I respect him most. To know there is an "Age of Johnson" in English Literature says it all. Much of my admiration can be described by way of his anti-heroic sense. First an extended quote from Joseph Sobran: "If the first half of his life was a quest for truth amid suffering [sound familiar?], the second half was a medley of compassion. His later years were characterized by extraordinary holiness, manifest in the most ordinary of circumstances. As in his writings, there was an immediacy, a freshness, to Johnson's charity: emptying his pockets to beggars who asked for a coin, slipping pennies into the pockets of sleeping waifs so that they might have money for breakfast, frequenting an unpopular pub merely because "the owner is a good Christian woman and has not much business." "He who waits to do a great deal of good at once, will never do anything." En route home from a tavern one night, he came upon a prostitute half dead with the cold. Wrapping her in his enormous brown coat, he picked her up and carried her home. There he nursed her back to health, arranged for medical attention, and provided her room and board. Some weeks later, he found her employment as a servant in a family of good reputation. Many would have hesitated to open their homes to a prostitute; others might have counted their duty discharged in providing a single night's shelter. Not so with Johnson, whose memory of the cold London streets never left him. This, then, is the meaning of Johnson. He had passed through tremendous suffering, but he had passed through to thankfulness and mercy. Those who must make a similar journey can find no better guide. And no one can read Johnson without resolving to bear up under sorrow and to render thanks to God." God, I love this man. He had a strong anti-heroic sense insisting that we must find happiness and express our moral character not in great events but in our daily affairs and domestic lives. If you read just one biography of Johnson I'd recommend W. Jackson Bates's Samuel Johnson (besides Boswell of course). W. Jackson Bate taught a course at Harvard - The Age of Johnson. (Tobias Smollet dubbed Johnson "The Great Cham" of literature). Man-o-man, I'd have loved to take that course. Of Johnson's writings I reread his Rasselas every year. It is relatively unknown as are most of Johnson's writings. This is a shame. One other thing, Johnson was an original member of "The Club," which met at The Turk's Head Inn, hence the sobriquet "The Turk's Head Oracle." (See attachment) Members included, Johnson, Boswell (The LIfe), Edmund Burke (Reflections on the Revolution in France), Oliver Goldsmith (The Vicar of Wakefield), Joseph Banks (who sailed with Captain Cook), Adam Smith (The Wealth of Nations), Sir Joshua Reynolds (the painter), Charles Fox (politician), Richard Brinsley Sheridan (dramatist), David Garrick (Shakespearean actor) and Edward Gibbon (yes, that Gibbon). It is doubtful whether any similar group has ever had so distinguished a membership. But it is acquaintance with Johnson that brings them together and they clearly recognize his considerable authority. It was because of his membership in the Club that he defined a "tavern chair the throne of human felicity."

Samuel Johnson on the madness of political zealots of which we have too damn many. "Of all kinds of credulity, the most obstinate and wonderful [in the sense of occasioning wonderment] is that of political zealots; of men, who being numbered, they know not how or why, in any of the parties that divide a state, resign the use of their own eyes and ears, and resolve to believe nothing that does not favour those whom they profess to follow." Simone Weil also touched on the madness of too close an association with the idea of party. Came to read Weil by way of Malcolm Muggeridge's admiration for her. A Weil revival is underway, in part due to the surges in nationalism, populism, tribalism and nativism about which she had so much to say in her work. Weil, a firm believer in free thought, argued that: "The intelligence is defeated as soon as the expression of one’s thought is preceded, explicitly or implicitly, by the little word “we”." Uncritical collective thinking holds the free mind captive and does not allow for dissent. To substantiate these claims, Weil offered three arguments: 1) A political party is a machine to generate collective passions. 2) A political party is an organization designed to exert collective pressure upon the minds of all its individual members. 3) The first objective and also the ultimate goal of any political party is its own growth, without limit. These tentacular organizations make people stupid, requiring a member to endorse ‘a number of positions which he does not know’. Instead, the party thinks on his behalf, which amounts to him ‘having no thoughts at all’. People find comfort in the absence of the necessity to think, she claims, which is why they so readily join such groups. Of course, political parties are here to stay. Our system of government could not run without them. But I do understand her point. It is all too evident on all manner of social media, both from the left and right.

Jefferson wrote this extraordinary letter of condolence upon hearing of the death of John Adams' wife, Abigail. MONTICELLO, November 13, 1818. The public papers, my dear friend, announce the fatal event of which your letter of October the 20th had given me ominous foreboding. Tried myself in the school of affliction, by the loss of every form of connection which can rive the human heart, I know well, and feel what you have lost, what you have suffered, are suffering, and have yet to endure. The same trials have taught me that for ills so immeasurable, time and silence are the only medi­cine. I will not, therefore, by useless condolences, open afresh the sluices of your grief, nor, although mingling sincerely my tears with yours, will I say a word more where words are vain, but that it is of some comfort to us both, that the term is not very distant, at which we are to deposit in the same cerement, our sorrows and suffering bodies, and to ascend in essence to an ecstatic meeting with the friends we have loved and lost, and whom we shall still love and never lose again. God bless you and support you under your heavy affliction.

Forrest McDonald - The Intellectual World of the Founding Fathers From link below: "It has been suggested by various intellectuals that the best thing Americans could do to commemorate the 200th anniversary of our Constitution would be to rewrite it to reflect the realities of the twentieth century. It has been suggested by various jurists that the Supreme Court is, and should be, doing just that. The assumption underlying both notions is that our pool of knowledge and understanding about human nature and political institutions is far more sophisticated than any that could have been available in the simple frontier society of eighteenth-century America. That assumption is as presumptuous as it is uninformed. To put it bluntly, it would be impossible in America today to assemble a group of people with anything near the experience learning, and wisdom that the fifty-five authors of the Constitution took with them to Philadelphia in the summer of 1787." neh.dspacedirect.org/.../f48…

From the first chapter of THE SHADOW LINE by Joseph Conrad: "Only the young have such moments. I don't mean the very young. No. The very young have, properly speaking, no moments. It is the privilege of early youth to live in advance of its days in all the beautiful continuity of hope which knows no pauses and no introspection. One closes behind one the little gate of mere boyishness--and enters an enchanted garden. Its very shades glow with promise. Every turn of the path has its seduction. And it isn't because it is an undiscovered country. One knows well enough that all mankind had streamed that way. It is the charm of universal experience from which one expects an uncommon or personal sensation--a bit of one's own. One goes on recognizing the landmarks of the predecessors, excited, amused, taking the hard luck and the good luck together--the kicks and the half-pence, as the saying is--the picturesque common lot that holds so many possibilities for the deserving or perhaps for the lucky. Yes. One goes on. And the time, too, goes on--till one perceives ahead a shadow-line warning one that the region of early youth, too, must be left behind." Powerful, vivid, come to life prose.

H. l. Mencken on Joseph Conrad, published in A BOOK OF PREFACES. Literary criticism at its finest: Under all his stories there ebbs and flows a kind of tempered melancholy, a sense of seeking and not finding. . . . I take the words from a little book on Joseph Conrad by Wilson Follett, privately printed, and now, I believe, out of print. They define both the mood of the stories as works of art and their burden and direction as criticisms of life. Like Dreiser, Conrad is forever fascinated by the "immense indifference of things," the tragic vanity of the blind groping that we call aspiration, the profound meaninglessness of life—fascinated, and left wondering. One looks in vain for an attempt at a solution of the riddle in the whole canon of his work. Dreiser, more than once, seems ready to take refuge behind an indeterminate sort of mysticism, even a facile supernaturalism, but Conrad, from first to last, faces squarely the massive and intolerable fact. His stories are not chronicles of men who conquer fate, nor of men who are unbent and undaunted by fate, but of men who are conquered and undone. Each protagonist is a new Prometheus, with a sardonic ignominy piled upon his helplessness. Each goes down a Greek route to defeat and disaster, leaving nothing behind him save an unanswered question. I can scarcely recall an exception. Kurtz, Lord Jim, Razumov, Nostromo, Captain Whalley, Yanko Goorall, Verloc, Heyst, Gaspar Ruiz, Almayer: one and all they are destroyed and made a mock of by the blind, incomprehensible forces that beset them. Even in "Youth," "Typhoon," and "The Shadow Line," superficially stories of the indomitable, that same consuming melancholy, that same pressing sense of the irresistible and inexplicable, is always just beneath the surface. Captain Mac Whirr gets the Nan-Shan to port at last, but it is a victory that stands quite outside the man himself; he is no more than a marker in the unfathomable game; the elemental forces, fighting one another, almost disregard him; the view of him that we get is one of disdain, almost one of contempt. So, too, in "Youth." A tale of the spirit's triumph, of youth besting destiny? I do not see it so. To me its significance, like that of "The Shadow Line," is all subjective; it is an aging man's elegy upon the hope and high resolution that the years have blown away, a sentimental reminiscence of what the enigmatical gods have had their jest with, leaving only its gallant memory behind. The whole Conradean system sums itself up in the title of "Victory," an incomparable piece of irony. Imagine a better label for that tragic record of heroic and yet bootless effort, that matchless picture, in microcosm, of the relentlessly cruel revolutions in the macrocosm! As Galsworthy has said, Conrad lifts himself immeasurably above them all. One might well call him, if the term had not been cheapened into cant, a cosmic artist. His mind works upon a colossal scale; he conjures up the general out of the particular. What he sees and describes in his books is not merely this man's aspiration or that woman's destiny, but the overwhelming sweep and devastation of universal forces, the great central drama that is at the heart of all other dramas, the tragic struggles of the soul of man under the gross stupidity and obscene joking of the gods.

"I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more — the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort — to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires — and expires, too soon — too soon before life itself." Joseph Conrad - Youth: A Narrative

Joseph Conrad (Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski): “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel — it is, before all, to make you see. That — and no more, and it is everything.” Rereading Conrad’s ‘The Mirror of the Sea’ the words above came immediately to mind. The enigmatic Pole never ceases to amaze. He wrote of “that infinite mystery born from the conjunction of water and sky.” There is this passage from that book on page 137 that shows his power of description: The sea - this truth must be confessed - has no generosity. No display of manly qualities - courage, hardihood, endurance, faithfulness - has ever been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power. The ocean has the conscienceless temper of a savage autocrat spoiled by much adulation. He cannot brook the slightest appearance of defiance, and has remained the irreconcilable enemy of ships and men ever since ships and men had the unheard of audacity to go afloat together in the face of his frown. From that day he has gone on swallowing up fleets and men without his resentment being glutted by the number of victims - by so many wrecked ships and wrecked lives. To-day, as ever, he is ready to beguile and betray, to smash and to drown the incorrigible optimism of men who, backed by the fidelity of ships, are trying to wrest from him the fortune of their house, the dominion of their world, or only a dole of food for their hunger. If not always in the hot mood to smash, he is always stealthily ready for a drowning. The most amazing wonder of the deep is its unfathomable cruelty.

Melville's reading: "Of Melville's more general reading, Shakespeare perhaps had the most impact. But in Moby Dick the influence of Carlyle was almost as apparent; and De Quincey, Sir Thomas Browne, Goethe, Montaigne, Emerson, & Hawthorne helped importantly to shape ideas and phrasing....Far outranking all other books in its all-pervading influence was the King James version of the Bible, which Melville read and reread, annotated and marked in more than one edition. Like Shakespeare, whatever Melville read he piratically made his own, extending, deepening, and embellishing his thefts so that no literary judge can but approve and applaud." Luther S. Mansfield & Howard P. Vincent - Explanatory Notes in The Hendricks House edition of Moby Dick Samuel Johnson was right: "The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's influence on Herman Melville was profound. In 1850, Melville was 31, already the successful author of adventure novels like Typee and Omoo, but he was growing restless with the lightweight romantic-exotic style that had made him famous. He had begun a new book (originally titled something closer to “The Whale”) that was initially conceived as another sea adventure, but he was struggling with its deeper ambitions. The manuscript was already substantial, yet it felt somehow incomplete or directionally uncertain to him. On August 5, 1850, Melville met Nathaniel Hawthorne at a picnic on Monument Mountain in the Berkshires (arranged by their mutual publisher friend David Dudley Field). The two men, both in their early-to-mid creative primes, instantly recognized a kindred spirit in each other. Melville was electrified by Hawthorne’s dark romanticism, psychological depth, and metaphysical preoccupations—qualities he himself was groping toward but hadn’t fully trusted or articulated. What followed was an intense, almost obsessive 18-month intellectual and emotional friendship (mostly conducted through letters and occasional visits, since Hawthorne lived in Lenox, Massachusetts, and Melville in nearby Pittsfield). Melville later wrote to Hawthorne: “Your heart beat in my ribs and mine in yours, and both in God’s.” He famously declared, in his review-essay “Hawthorne and His Mosses” (published anonymously in 1850), that Hawthorne was the American Shakespeare and that in him he had found “the great Art of Telling the Truth” veiled in darkness. The effect on Moby-Dick was dramatic and immediate. Scholars generally agree that after meeting Hawthorne, Melville radically expanded and rewrote large portions of the novel during late 1850 and the first half of 1851. The book grew from what might have been a straightforward yarn about whaling into the sprawling, Shakespearean, metaphysical tragedy we know today: Ahab’s monomania, the cetological chapters, the grand philosophical digressions, the dense symbolic texture—all of this deepened enormously under Hawthorne’s influence. Melville essentially finished the book in a white-hot burst of inspiration that he himself attributed (privately and publicly) to Hawthorne’s example and encouragement. He dedicated Moby-Dick “To Nathaniel Hawthorne / In Token of My Admiration for His Genius.” In a letter to Hawthorne while finishing the manuscript, Melville wrote: “I feel that I am going to write a wicked book, and feel as spotless as the lamb . . . From my twenty-fifth year I have been a sailor . . . but now I am coming to the inmost leaf of the bulb, and soon the flower must fall to the mould.” Hawthorne, in turn, told Melville that the book would be “a great, wonderful thing.” The meeting with Hawthorne was genuinely cathartic and transformative. It gave Melville the courage, the intellectual framework, and the emotional permission to push his novel to its wild, tragic, transcendent conclusion. Without Hawthorne, Moby-Dick might have remained a very good adventure novel rather than the masterpiece it became.

The quotable G. K. Chesterton: Do not be so open-minded that your brains fall out. Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously. The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people. There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less. The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried. Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it. Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions. There are those who hate Christianity and call their hatred an all-embracing love for all religions. Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference which is an elegant name for ignorance. The thing I hate about an argument is that it always interrupts a discussion. Let a man walk ten miles steadily on a hot summer’s day along a dusty English road, and he will soon discover why beer was invented. It has been often said, very truly, that religion is the thing that makes the ordinary man feel extraordinary; it is an equally important truth that religion is the thing that makes the extraordinary man feel ordinary. Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved. [Reminds me of Muggeridge: "The depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable reality but at the same time the most intellectually resisted fact."] If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.

From a column by Theodore Dalrymple, the finest essayist alive. You can fill in the blank, almost any politician or celebrity (or athlete) will do. Reminds me of that quote of Robert Heinlein below (attachment). "__________ has long been diagnosed with that most prevalent of mental disorders among politicians and other celebrities: narcissism, a condition in which a person’s sole topic of interest is me, I, and myself. They are the type of people who, in the absence of an audience, feel that they have ceased truly to exist. The attention of others is like a drug to them; without it they are as listless or as pointlessly agitated as an addict severed from his drug. But as soon as they receive an infusion of attention they come alive again. Their eyes regain a luster, energy flows through them like electricity through a wire. I have seen this happen quite a few times.

Willa Cather - My Antonia "All those fall afternoons were the same, but I never got used to them. As far as we could see, the miles of copper-red grass were drenched in sunlight that was stronger and fiercer than at any other time of the day. The blond cornfields were red gold, the haystacks turned rosy and threw long shadows. The whole prairie was like the bush that burned with fire and was not consumed. That hour always had the exultation of victory, of triumphant ending, like a hero's death-heroes who died young and gloriously. It was a sudden transfiguration, a lifting-up of day."

Schopenhauer recidivus: To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them. Every parting gives a foretaste of death; every coming together again a foretaste of the resurrection. Will minus intellect constitutes vulgarity. It is a clear gain to sacrifice pleasure in order to avoid pain. [The above reminds me of the words of Sir William Osler, MD: "It only happens that early in the fifth decade, just as business or political success is assured, Bacchus hands in heavy bills for payment, in the form of serious disease of the arteries or of the liver, or there is a general breakdown." Or as Captain Bligh remarked on the mutineers of the HMS Bounty, they gave in "to the allurements of dissipation."] The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped. The longer a man’s fame is likely to last, the longer it will be in coming. The person who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience. If there is anything in the world that can really be called a man’s property, it is surely that which is the result of his mental activity. The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it. Because people have no thoughts to deal in, they deal cards, and try and win one another’s money. Idiots! Every nation mocks at other nations, and all are right. Noise is the most impertinent of all forms of interruption. It is not only an interruption, but also a disruption of thought.

Came on to Soren Kierkegaard by way of Malcolm Muggeridge's "A Third Testament: A Modern Pilgrim Explores the Spiritual Wanderings of Augustine, Blake, Pascal, Tolstoy, Bonhoeffer, Kierkegaard, and Dostoevsky." A Kierkegaard miscellany: It is perhaps the misfortune of my life that I am interested in far too much but not decisively in any one thing; all my interests are not subordinated in one but stand on an equal footing. Busyness, keeping up with others, hustling hither and yon, makes it almost impossible for an individual to form a heart. [Reminds me of Thoreau: many fritter away their lives on trivialities.] The daily press is the evil principle of the modern world, and time will only serve to disclose this fact with greater and greater clearness. The capacity of the newspaper for degeneration is sophistically without limit, since it can always sink lower and lower in its choice of readers. At last it will stir up all those dregs of humanity which no state or government can control. Geniuses are like thunderstorms: they go against the wind, terrify people, clear the air. Wherever there is a crowd there is untruth. Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Everyday, I walk myself into a state of well-being & walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. But by sitting still, & the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. Thus if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right. The most common form of despair is not being who you are. Christ was crucified because he would have nothing to do with the crowd (even though he addressed himself to all). He did not want to form a party, an interest group, a mass movement, but wanted to be what he was, the truth, which is related to the single individual. Therefore everyone who will genuinely serve the truth is by that very fact a martyr. To win a crowd is no art; for that only untruth is needed, nonsense, and a little knowledge of human passions. But no witness to the truth dares to get involved with the crowd. The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly. There is nothing with which every man is so afraid as getting to know how enormously much he is capable of doing and becoming. A road well begun is the battle half won. The important thing is to make a beginning and get under way. To Dare is to risk losing your foothold for a moment, Not to Dare is to risk losing yourself. The melancholy have the best sense of the comic, the opulent often the best sense of the rustic, the dissolute often the best sense of the moral, and the doubter often the best sense of the religious. The objections against Christianity spring from insubordination, the dislike of obedience, rebellion against all authority. As a result, people have hitherto been beating the air in their struggle against objections, because they have fought intellectually with doubt instead of fighting morally with rebellion. There is no greater evil one can suffer than to hate reasonable discourse. The more a person limits himself, the more resourceful he becomes. Never cease loving a person, and never give up hope for him, for even the prodigal son who had fallen most low, could still be saved; the bitterest enemy and also he who was your friend could again be your friend; love that has grown cold can kindle.

W. H. Auden miscellany: Oh, how I wish that Orwell were still alive, so that I could read his comments on contemporary events! Without communication with the dead, a fully human life is not possible. Young people, who are still uncertain of their identity, often try on a succession of masks in the hope of finding the one which suits them -- the one, in fact, which is not a mask. What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish. My deepest feeling about politicians is that they are dangerous lunatics to be avoided when possible and carefully humored; people, above all, to whom one must never tell the truth. Whatever the field under discussion, those who engage in debate must not only believe in each other's good faith, but also in their capacity to arrive at the truth. Every man carries with him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow. Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before. Routine, in an intelligent man, is a sign of ambition. Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered. Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead. I think the first prerequisite to civilization is an ability to make polite conversation. It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it. One of the troubles of our times is that we are all, I think, precocious as personalities and backward as characters. The closest modern equivalent to the Homeric hero is the ace fighter pilot. Nobody is ever sent to Hell: he or she insists on going there.