Asked by an editor to list his qualifications for the ideal woman, Ring Lardner demanded:
1. Lockjaw
2. Hereditary obesity
3. Shortness of breath
4. Falling arches
5. Mechanical engineering
6. Draftsmanship
7. Absolutely fireproof
8. Day and night elevator service
9. Laundry sent out before 8:30 a.m. will be returned the same day.
10. Please report to the management any incivility on part of employees.
– Ring Lardner, Vanity Fair, 1926
What haven’t you bought this book yet?
There is no man, however wise, he said to me, who has not, at some time in his youth, said things, or even led a life, of which his memory is disagreeable and which he would wish to be abolished. But he absolutely should not regret it, because he can’t be assured of becoming a sage—to the extent that that is possible—without having passed through all the ridiculous or odious incarnations that must precede that final incarnation. – Marcel Proust, À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur, 1918
He’s back.
I reveal myself in my true colours, as a stick-in-the-mud. I hold a number of beliefs that have been repudiated by the liveliest intellects of our time. I believe order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. On the whole I think that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I am sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ideology. I believe that in spite of the recent triumphs of science, men have not changed much in the last two thousand years; and in consequence we must still try to learn from history. History is ourselves. I also hold one or two beliefs that are more difficult to put shortly. For example, I believe in courtesy, the ritual by which we avoid hurting other people’s feelings by satisfying our own egos. I think we should remember that we are part of a great whole, which for convenience we call nature. All living things are our brothers and sisters. Above all, I believe in the God-given genius of certain individuals, and I value a society that makes their existence possible. – Kenneth Clark, Civilisation, 1969
More from this guy:
A friend in need is an acquaintance. – Mariella Frostrup, Observer, 1998
Well, not really. I’m not a fan of fishing, but I am away on a trans-continental jaunt so This Day in History posts will be irregular for the next month or so. The less-than-a-dozen loyal fans of this isolated atoll in the ocean of blogdom must be content with a daily dollop of wisdom or whimsy drawn from the world’s best bathroom reading book for a while.
Today’s dose of that reads:
For Christmas that year, Julian gave Sassy a miniature Tyrolean village. The craftsmanship was remarkable. There was a tiny cathedral whose stained-glass windows made fruit salad of sunlight. There was a plaza and ein Biergarten. The Biergarten got quite noisy on Saturday nights. There was a bakery that smelled always of hot bread and strudel. There was a town hall and a police station, with cutaway sections that revealed standard amounts of red tape and corruption. There were little Tyroleans in leather britches, intricately stitched, and beneath the britches, genitalia of equally fine workmanship. There were ski shops and many other interesting things, including an orphanage. The orphanage was designed to catch fire and burn down every Christmas Eve. Orphans would dash into the snow with their nightgowns blazing. Terrible. Around the second week of January, a fire inspector would come and poke through the ruins, muttering, “If they had only listened to me, those children would be alive today”. – Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, 1976
We haven’t had any dazzling flashes of insight for a while. Here we go.
Though we cannot think alike, may we not love alike? May we not be of one heart, though we are not of one opinion? Without all doubt, we may. Herein all the children of God may unite, notwithstanding these smaller differences. – John Wesley, sermon 39 “Catholic Spirit”
Sorrow never comes too late. – Thomas Grey, “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College”
Love is like a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the snow weasels come. – Matt Groening, Love is Hell
The civility which money will purchase, is rarely extended to those who have none. – Charles Dickens, Our Parish
One must be always drunk. Everything lies in that; it is the only question worth considering. In order not to feel the horrible burden of time which breaks your shoulders and bows you down to earth, you must intoxicate yourself without truce, but with what? With wine, poetry, or art?– As you will ; but intoxicate yourself. – Charles Baudelaire, Little Poems in Prose
Every man has some reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has others which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But finally there are still others which a man is even afraid to tell himself, and every decent man has a considerable number of such things stored away. That is, one can even say that the more decent he is, the greater the number of such things in his mind. – Feodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground
Night is the darkest of weathers, necessity is the hardest of fates, sorrow is the sorest burden, sleep is most like death. – Anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet, c. 900
What’s Wrong with the Enlightenment?
Both my readers are asked to forgive me today for indulging in a rant, even though it is historically based. I have been wading too long in books by sundry atheists and secularists: Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress and Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters.
Such authors are fans of the Enlightenment who often frame the matter as the triumph of Reason over Revelation and claim that it is only when great thinkers began to reject religion was humanity able to accelerate toward a world of science, technological advancement, and an amelioration of society. Faith was a Bad Thing, the product of earlier ages of ignorance. David Hume, the Scottish skeptic, wrote in his 1757 Natural History of Religion:
Examine the religious principles, which have, in fact, prevailed in the world. You will scarcely be persuaded, that they are anything but sick men’s dreams: Or perhaps will regard them more as the playsome, whimsies of monkeys in human shape, than the serious, positive, dogmatical asseverations of a being, who dignifies himself with the name rational.
So much for the Ten Commandments, the Beatitudes, I Corinthians 13, and the simian whimsies that gave us Michelangelo’s Pietà, Mozart’s Requiem and “Amazing Grace”, though Voltaire did admit a certain utility in such fantasies.
I want my lawyer, my tailor, my servants, even my wife to believe in God, because it means that I shall be cheated and robbed and cuckolded less often . . . God is needed to provide a divine sanction for morality. It is absolutely necessary not only for ordinary people, but also for princes and rulers to have an idea of the Supreme Being, Creator, governor, rewarder, and avenger profoundly engraver on their minds …. If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.
The fruit of religion seemed to be intolerance, violence, obscurantism, and sexual repression and the sooner the last king was strangled with the entrails of the last priest, the better off humanity would be. In fact, the material betterment of humanity and profound social reforms that marked the centuries since the Enlightenment cannot be attributed to secularism and an elevation of Reason. The inventors of the steam engine, Newtonian physics, modern chemistry, antiseptic surgery, electromagnetic theory, the computer, genetic variability, and quantum mechanics, were all men of faith. It was Quakers, Anglicans, and Evangelicals who pressed for the abolition of slavery, and Methodists who led the way in penal and factory reform, etc.
But the West, having embraced Enlightenment principles and secularized society, seems not to have produced the utopia that was promised. Reason has justified the invention and use of poison gas, germ warfare, and atomic weapons, and provided excuses for class war, racial extermination, and genocide. What went wrong?
The great error of the Enlightenment was its mistaken anthropology. Hobbes’s view of human nature was abandoned (man is wolf to man), first for Locke (blank slate) and then Rousseau (born free but everywhere in chains). If humans were born good and only ruined by society, then changing society would lead to better humans; perfectibility was a possibility. If only we could get rid of the old ways: kings, popes, private property, the middle class, Jews, kulaks, people who wore glasses, city life, etc. Thus was born every conceivable -ism and their toxic waste products – positivism, Marxism, anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism, fascism, feminism, Marxist-Leninist-Mao Tse Tung Thought, Black Power, Arab Socialism, juche, Trotskyism, liberation theology, racial science, deep ecology, the Terror, Red Guards, the University of Regina, and cats and dogs living together.
The truth lies with Immanuel Kant who said “out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” Humans are born broken and every generation has to be tamed into sociability by law, custom, and family. Attack those and you get what you see today.
The libertarian takes the state for the great oppressor. But the conservative finds that the state is ordained of God. In Burke’s phrases, “He who gave us our nature to be perfected by our virtue, willed also the necessary means of its perfection. – He willed therefore the state – He willed its connexion with the source and original archtype of all perfection.” Without the state, man’s condition is poor, nasty, brutish, and short-as Augustine argued, many centuries before Hobbes. The libertarians confound the state with government. But government-as Burke continued-“is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants.” Among the more important of those human wants is “a sufficient restraint upon their passions. Society requires not only that the passions of individuals should be subjected, but that even in the mass and body, as well as in the individual, the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection. This can be done only by a power out of themselves; and not, in the exercise of its function, subject to that will and to those passions which it is its office to bridle and subdue.” In short, a primary function of government is restraint; and that is anathema to libertarians, though an article of faith to conservatives.
— Russell Kirk
Some more timely wisdom to chew over.
I would give nothing for that man’s religion whose very dog and cat are not the better for it. – Sir Rowland Hill
The Christian must be aware that he is moving towards a destination; and that the destination is not in this world. He must maintain a certain detachment from the things of this world; a chaste detachment; for where he is going cannot be here. Spectator and witness, perhaps actor in his turn, in some role for which he is or isn’t suited; bearing responsibilities to others in every single case. His suffering may be of more value than any achievement to which he may claim. He cannot vest his hopes in earthly things, knowing they will vanish. His finest possessions are not of this world, but from another: the phenomena of reciprocated love; of truth, goodness, and beauty apprehended, preciously kept in the purse of memory; of “news from a foreign country” received. This is all he will hold at the end of his journey, when his road through space and time lies behind him, and everything he once carried on his back has been used up, thrown or taken away, and even the old bag of his flesh is discarded. – David Warren, “Essays in Idleness”, 2014
Bishop Joseph Butler of Bristol in response to John Wesley’s conversion: “Enthusiasm, sir, is a horrid thing; a very horrid thing indeed.”
Whenever I think of the past, it brings back so many memories. – Steven Wright
What strange math. There is nothing like the tally of a life. All of our accomplishments, ridiculous. All of our striving, unnecessary. Our lives are unfinished and unfinishable. We do too much, never enough and are done before we’ve even started. We can only pause for a minute, clutching our to-do lists, at the precipice of another bounded day. The ache for more — the desire for life itself — is the hardest truth of all. – Kate Bowler, “One Thing I Don’t Plan to Do Before I Die Is Make a Bucket List”, New York Times, 2021
Time for more wisdom.
There are eras of human history in which the channels of thought have been too deeply cut and no change was possible, and nothing new ever happened, and “best” was a matter of dogma, but that is not the situation now. Now the stream of our common consciousness seems to be obliterating its own banks, losing its central direction and purpose, flooding the lowlands, disconnecting and isolating the highlands and to no particular purpose other than the wasteful fulfillment of its own internal momentum. Some channel deepening seems called for. – Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, 1974
There’s a problem when you date an older man; they’re kinda like a parking meter. He’s thinking, “How much money do I have to put into this chick?” and she’s thinking, “How much time before he expires?”. – Rhonda Shear, imdb.com
Since we cannot be universal and know all that is to be known of everything, we ought to know a little about everything. For it is far better to know something about everything than to know all about one thing. This universality is the best. If we can have both, still better; but if we must choose, we ought to choose the former. And the world feels this and does so; for the world is often a good judge. – Blaise Pascal, Pensées
Every human creature is deeply interested not only in the conduct, but in the thoughts, feelings, and opinions of millions of persons who stand in no other assignable relation to him than that of being his fellow-creatures. A great writer who makes a mistake in his speculations may mislead multitudes whom he has never seen. The strong metaphor that we are all members one of another is little more than the expression of a fact. A man would be no more a man if he was alone in the world than a hand would be a hand without the rest of the body. – James Fitzpatrick Stephen, Liberty , Equality, Fraternity, 1873
There is surely evil that no repentance can redeem. And Tolstoy, like many men of giant ego, was not really capable of true religious belief or feeling. When Tolstoy found God, it was God that was honoured, not Tolstoy. – Theodore Dalrymple, The Terror of Existence
