This collection is organized by keyword.
Use your browser's Find and Find Again... to follow a keyword
(Match Case)
| AMERICA | ANECDOTE | ART | BEHAVIOR | BELIEF |
| BIBLE | BOOK | CHARACTER | CHARACTER-book | CHILDREN |
| CLASSICAL | CRITICALINSIGHT | DEATH | DELUSION | DESCRIPTION |
| DISILLUSION | DRINK | EDUCATION | EXCERPT | GOD |
| HISTORICALINSIGHT | HISTORY | HUMOR | IMAGINATION | INVENTION |
| LAW | LITERATURE | MEDIEVAL | METAPHOR | MYTH |
| MUSIC | PHILOSOPHY | POETRY | POWER | PRAYER |
| QUOTE | RECIPE | REFERENCE | RELIGION | REVOLUTION |
| SCULPTURE | SEX | SHORTSHORY | SIN | SOCIETY |
| SCIENCE | TERM | TRAVEL | WAR | WRITING |
QUOTE HISTORICALINSIGHT EDUCATION
History should be learnt backwards: begin with yesterday's newspaper
and work back to King Alfred. This might mean starting with a
lie and ending with a fairy tale.
G. K. Chesterton
EXCERPT SOCIETY DISILLUSION CHARACTER HISTORICALINSIGHT
"Do you think," said Candide, "that men have always
massacred each other, as they do today, that they have always
been false, cozening, faithless, ungrateful, thieving, weak, inconstant,
mean-spirited, envious, drunken, greedy, miserly, ambitious, bloody,
slanderous, deranged, fanatic, hypocritical, and stupid?"
Candide by Voltaire
QUOTE RECIPE
And three Ramos gin fizzes are balm in Gilead...
1 jigger gin, 1 jigger milk, 1 egg white, 1 teaspoon bar sugar,
1 generous teaspoon lemon juice, 1 scant teaspoon lime juice,
5 or 6 drops orange flower water. Shake with shaved ice until
fluffy and strain into 8 oz. glasses.
New Orleans Holiday by Eleanor Early
IMAGINATION DELUSION RELIGION
(Peter the Hermit) Whatever he wished, he believed, whatever he
believed, he saw in dreams and revelations.
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Gibbon
SOCIETY PHILOSOPHY WAR POWER
"Wenn ich Kultur höre ... entsichere ich meinen Browning".
Meaning: "Whenever I hear the word culture... I release the
safety-catch of my Browning!" - Schlageter (Act 1,
Scene 1)-Hanns Johst
SIN DELUSION BEHAVIOR
Not without immense grief have I recently learned that (in another
country) very many persons of both sexes have sinfully consorted
with devils in male and female form.
Papal Bull 1484 Pope Innocent VIII
DEATH DISILLUSION ANECDOTE RELIGION PHILOSOPHY
Jesus alone hanging from the cross and Judas alone hanging from
a rope
?
DEATH QUOTE
Everyday above ground is a good day
DEATH ANECDOTE
The oldest man Thomas Carn who was born in 1381 in the reign of
Richard II and died in 1588 at the age of 207. Information recorded
in the parish register St Leonard's Shoreditch.
POETRY DELUSION
"Despair" described in Spenser's Fairie Queen
I.ix.28ff
CHARACTER EDUCATION
Sow a thought, reap an act
Sow an act, reap a habit
Sow a habit, reap a character
Sow a character, reap a destiny
CLASSICAL QUOTE
Nullum est sine nomine saxum
"A legend clings to every stone"
Pharsalia by Lucan 9.973
TERM
Pasquinade: anonymous attack written in a public place
ANECDOTE BIBLE DEATH
Agag obeys summons of Samuel to appear for his own execution.
gingerly, cheerfully.
POETRY DISILLUSION DESCRIPTION WAR POETRY
A wise man may grasp how ghastly it shall be
When all this world's wealth standeth waste
Even as now, in many places over this earth,
Walls stand wind baten, Heavy with hoar frost; ruined habitations.
Anglo Saxon poem
BELIEF EXCERPT RELIGION ART
Bernini's Ecstasy of Saint Teresa in the Cornaro Chapel
in Santa Maria della Vittoria depicts religious ecstasy. St. Teresa
wrote that an angel with a golden arrow pierced her heart repeatedly
"The pain was so great that I screamed aloud, but simultaneously
felt such infinite sweetness that I wished the pain to last eternally.
It was the sweetest caressing of the soul by God."
ART RELIGION CRITICALINSIGHT
Description of Rococco: a glimpse of the joys of paradise
QUOTE REVOLUTION PHILOSOPHY
Ecrasez l'infame
Voltaire
SOCIETY ART
Washington DC is the most grandiose piece of town planning since
Sixtus V's Rome
PHILOSOPHY CHARACTER
There is no hate without some reason.
There is no love totally innocent.
from NY Times Book Review
QUOTE HISTORY PHILOSOPHY EDUCATION CRITICALINSIGHT
Very simple ideas are only within the reach of very complicated
minds.
Remy de Gourmont
DEATH EXCERPT AMERICA
and there were the faces they had always seen, everywhere: always
different, they never changed; they welled up form the sourceless
springs of life with unending fecundity, with limitless variety,
with incessant movement, and with the monotony of everlasting
repetition.
Thomas Wolfe
AMERICA HISTORICALINSIGHT
The national purpose is consumption
HISTORY EXCERPT DEATH SOCIETY AMERICA
By the end of the 19th century, country towns had become charnel
houses and the counties that surrounded them had become places
of dry bones. The land and its farms were filled with the guilty
voices of women mourning for their children and the aimless mutterings
of men asking about jobs, News consisted of stories of resignation,
failure, suicide, madness, and grotesque eccentricity.
Wisconsin Death Trip by Michael Lesy
(in the US, 1/3 of the rural population moved to the cities between
1900-1920)
RELIGION DELUSION BEHAVIOR ANECDOTE MEDIEVAL
Simon Stylites, the Anachoret, spent 30 years on top of a 60 foot
high pillar on Mount Telenissa. He had an assistant replace the
worms that fell from his back.
HISTORY ANECDOTE DEATH POWER
Selim the Grim had 40,000 Shites killed. Richard the Lion Hearted
had the entire Saracen garrison of Jerusalem beheaded as he watched
from a viewing platform.
ANECDOTE
George Bernard Shaw wrote Winston Churchill:
"I enclose two tickets for the first night of my new play;
one for yourself and one for your friend- if you have one."
Winston Churchill wrote back to George Bernard Shaw:
"I am sorry I cannot attend for the first night of Pygmalion,
but I should be glad to come on the second night- if there is
one."
BELIEF PHILOSOPHY DEATH
It Atman (soul) is like a drop of water that has arisen from the
sea and in a shower has fallen into a puddle, then drifts into
a brook, finds its way into a stream, after that into a river,
passing through mountain gorges and wide plains, winding this
way and that, obstructed by rocks and fallen trees, til at last
it reaches the boundless sea from which it rose.
QUOTE EXCERPT WRITING HISTORICALINSIGHT
"There are circumstances, conditions, necessities, reasons-majeures"
Henry James
HISTORY ANECDOTE INVENTION SCIENCE
The astrolabe was invented and used by the Muslims to fix prayer
times, the beginning of Ramadan, and the direction of Mecca.
ANECDOTE RELIGION
St Gambrionus is the patron of beer making.
ANECDOTE HISTORY SCIENCE
Razi or Rhazes, a Moslem doctor and scholar, wrote an encyclopedia,
a dissertation on small pox, and built a hospital in Baghdad on
the location where it was discovered that a piece of meat rotted
slowest.
ANECDOTE HISTORY
Pope Stephen V had the corpse of his predecessor Pope Formosus
(891-896) exhumed, dressed in papal robes, enthroned and put on
trial. A Roman mob, empaneled as a jury, declared him guilty yelling,
"So be it!". The corpse was stripped, three of its
ringed fingers were hacked off, it was then dressed in sackcloth
and the decomposing remains tossed into the Tiber River. Pope
Stephen met his own end in a prison cell where he was strangled.
HISTORY RELIGION
Pope Boniface VI reigned three weeks. Pope Romanus reigned three
months. Pope Theodore II reigned 20 days. Leo V was imprisoned
by Christophorus who was himself jailed by Sergiuus III who had
both of them murdered. Theophilact was the father of Sergius by
his wife Theodora, who was the mother of five popes, was herself
descended from the powerful families Crescentii and Colonna. She
was a nymphomaniac as were her daughters Theodora and Marozia.
Sergius, her son, fathered with her a son who became Pope John
XI. Sergius, by his sister Marozia, while the family was living
in the Castle of St. Angelo, had a son who also was made a pope
called Pope John XII. The emperor Otto I was called into Italy
by this same Pope to form an alliance but instead Otto had him
removed and installed Pope John XIII- a vast improvement.
ANECDOTE MUSIC RELIGION BIBLE
The notes of the scale "Do Ra Me etc." are from the
hymn to St John that went "So that the marvels of thy deeds
may resound"
POETRY RELIGION TRAVEL
Whan the Aprill with his showres soote
The droughte of March hath perced to the roote
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages -Chaucer
HISTORY ANECDOTE LAW
Saxon law allowed for trial by combat between husband and wife.
The husband stood in a hip deep pit with a short club. The wife
wore a shift with a long sleeve in which was sown a heavy stone.
The wife circled the pit while the husband tried to seize and
drag her into the pit. She, of course, tried to brain him. Other
forms of trial are also mentioned and focus on equalizing the
fight between the husband and the wife.
MYTH
The Norse Armageddon as related in the saga Voluspa begins
when the god Heimdall blows his horn.
ANECDOTE WAR
The Norse killed a hated enemy by making him a Blod-orn or blood
eagle. The ribs were chopped off along the spine and spread apart.
The lungs then were torn and pulled out through the back.
HISTORY ANECDOTE
Ahmed ibn Fazlan wrote a description of the Rus "Of all the
people Allah created, they are the filthiest"
HISTORY ANECDOTE HISTORICALINSIGHT SOCIETY MEDIEVAL
The inability of the Magyar light cavalry to storm fortified positions
probably contributed to the founding of cities in the early 10th
century by the Europeans.
PHILOSOPHY CRITICALINSIGHT GOD
Spinoza was more audacious than Descartes. There was only one
substance. God and Nature were the same and identical. In his
Ethics Spinoza wrote that man ought to identify with nature
to understand himself. Spinoza was a determinist, a materialist
and a pantheist- but of a subtle kind.
ANECDOTE AMERICA
The apartment complex/mall culture of suburbia where as the Holiday
Inn slogan goes "The best surprise is no surprise".
WAR HISTORY ANECDOTE
The battle of Leuctra 371 BC. 6000 Theban soldiers decisively
beat 10,000 Spartans. The first instance known in history of a
deliberate concentration of attack upon the vital point of an
enemy line. General Epaminondas arrayed a 50 man deep column against
a 12 man Spartan column on the Spartan right wing. See also the
battle of Mantineia also fought against the Spartans.
PHILOSOPHY CLASSICAL CRITICALINSIGHT RELIGION MEDIEVAL
Platonic thought led to allegory: Every observed fact is an apparent
tangibility; but its reality consists in its unison with the ultimate
realities of rational conception. Neoplatonists and Stoics subsequently
placed little interest in fact or observation. The search for
the extra-rational and calm led through Plotinus to asceticism
and a view of matter as evil (dualistic ethics). Also the world
of spirits, some of whom were good as well as evil leading to
the studies of astrology, theuigy, magic and sorcery. Especially
in Plotinus's students Porphyry of Tyre and Iamblicus Neo-platonic
philosophy ultimately led to irrationality and folly as men tried
to contact the Absolute through magic. Christianity was affected
by these methods of thought and comprehension which led to a loss
of interest in the natural world. By the time of Pope Gregory
(590) intellectual decay had advanced in the Patristic mind from
indifference to the laws of physical phenomena to sheer barbaric
ignorance of the same.
PHILOSOPHY CRITICALINSIGHT MEDIEVAL
Philo introduced allegory to the Christian mind that often thought
from symbol to symbol as well as fact to fact.
POETRY MEDIEVAL
Saxon epic poem during the Danish invasion: MALDON or The Death
of Byrhtnoth PR1594 A1, PR1508 C7, (trans.) PR1508 C5, PR201
H5
QUOTE PHILOSOPHY POWER
Therefore it is that a man never by his authority attains to Virtue
and excellence. Study Wisdom,...by it ye may without fail attain
to power, even though not desiring it.
King Alfred The Life and Times of Alfred the Great by Charles
Plummer 1902
ANECDOTE MEDIEVAL LAW
Agabard Bishop of Lyons (d.840) opposed superstition and trial
by combat.
The church banned trial by combat in the C14
PHILOSOPHY REVOLUTION
St. Damiani denounced immorality in the 11th century. Wrote Liber
Gomorrhianus. His advice to the rich that he who gives to
the poor does not distribute his own but restores what belongs
to another is a reflection of Seneca and De Vita Beata cpt
20
PHILOSOPHY RELIGION BELIEF
Self mortification 1) purifies the body from carnality 2) atones
for sins 3) shows contrition in love of him who suffered though
sinless.
ANECDOTE RELIGION MEDIEVAL SIN DEATH GOD
The story is told by Bruno, the founder of the Carthusian Order.
A funeral procession was suddenly interrupted when the corpse
lifted its head and cried out "Justo Dei Judicio Accusatus
Sum!" *The burial was postponed. On the second day the corpse
again lifted its head and cried out in a louder voice "Justo
Dei Judicio Accusatus Sum!" On the third day the corpse raised
its head and shrieked aloud to the horrified crowds, "Justo
Dei Judicio Condemnatus Sum!"**
* "I am accused by God"
** "I have been condemned by God"
RELIGION DELUSION MEDIEVAL BEHAVIOR
The visions of Elizabeth of Schonau, Hildegard of Bingen (For
this see Six Medieviel Lives by Cambridge Syndics), Mary
of Ognies, Sister Mechthild of Magdeburg, the 13c diaries of the
Franciscan Salimbene, and the widespread eruption of madness in
12th century northern Italy.
RELIGION BELIEF HISTORICALINSIGHT SOCIETY BEHAVIOR
At Shanidar, Iraq a Neanderthal grave site dated 60,000 years
old was decorated with 6 different flowers and plants of medicinal
and economic value. (From On Human Behavior by Edward O.
Wilson)
ANECDOTE HISTORY POWER DEATH
Alberic Da Romano, brother of Eccelino, tyrant of Treviso: One
day he hanged 25 prominent men of Treviso, who had done him no
ill but because he feared they would. And 30 noble women, mothers,
wives, daughters of these were brought there to see them hanging,
and he had these women stripped half-naked that those who were
hanging might see them so. The men were hanged quite close to
the ground; and he forced these women to go so close that they
faces were struck by the legs and feet of those who were dying
in anguish. Alberic himself later died a horrible and painful
death.
ANECDOTE BEHAVIOR SOCIETY
The Bedi Sikhs, the highest caste in the Punjab, were known as
the Kuri-mar "daughter killers" who raised sons to marry
the daughters of lower caste families from whom they received
enormous dowries and wealth for their caste- which maximizes offspring
for the dominant caste
BEHAVIOR EDUCATION CHARACTER SCIENCE
Genetic studies of twins show heredity affects ability with numbers,
word fluency, memory, timing of language acquisition, sentence
construction, perceptual skills, psycho-motor skill, extro/introversion,
homosexuality, age of sexual activity, and some neurotic and psychotic
behavior plus personality traits, ideals, goals, vocations. Behavioral
genes influence range and intensity of emotional response, thresholds
of arousal, etc.
RELIGION MEDIEVAL
Honorius of Autun wrote the most popular sermon handbook in 1125.
LITERATURE CRITICALINSIGHT WRITING
The medieval writer never tried to write originally if he could
instead borrow the thought or expression from a classical writer.
ANECDOTE LAW AMERICA
A lawyer in the American frontier town of Tombstone Arizona (1880)
was fined $25 for contempt of court and responded, "Your
Honor, $25 wouldn't pay for half the contempt I have for this
court."
ANECDOTE MUSIC
The opening bars of Mahler's 9th Symphony are in imitation of
the arrhythmia of his own failing heartbeat.
ANECDOTE MEDIEVAL
In 1054 the Icelander Isleifer was made a bishop by the Holy Roman
Emperor Henry III upon being given a polar bear.
DESCRIPTION DEATH AMERICA
harvesting herring gulls frozen in the ice of Great South Bay
left "paired, red stumps" sticking up out of the ice.
Gatherers would cut off the birds leaving the stumps in the ice.
From Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek whick also recounts how
Eskimos bury a knife covered with blubber in the snow for a wolf
to find and lick with his frozen tongue and then bleeding to death.
HISTORY BOOK HISTORICALINSIGHT CLASSICAL
Later Roman Empire by AHM Jones see pgs 795-883 recounting
the destruction of Greek political institutions by the Romans,
the devaluation of citizenship, and the enslavement of free tenants.
The rise of mounted knights during the rule of the Franks as shock
troops overwhelmed the Germanic idea of freemen who served as
foot soldiers.
BOOK HISTORICALINSIGHT INVENTION
Medieval Technology and Social Change by Lynn White
Machina ex Deo Essays in the Dynanism of Western Culture
CB 358W45
Medieval Technology and Social Change
INVENTION WAR MEDIEVAL
A Trebuchet with a 50 foot beam, weighed 10 tons and fired a 300
pound weight 300 yards. The largest ever built hurled a weight
of 1000 pounds. Cannons appeared 1327.
ANECDOTE PHILOSOPHY CLASSICAL EDUCATION AMERICA RELIGION
Plato criticized two students who built an apparatus to demonstrate/solve
a geometrical problem for corrupting the purity of thought. Archimedes
was ashamed of his inventions. Inventions were considered the
work of slaves.
St Benedict, himself a nobleman, made labor a form of prayer.
Labor became the means of serving God. The Puritans picked up
on this idea which became the driving force behind Capitalism.
INVENTION HISTORICALINSIGHT SCIENCE MEDIEVAL
The monk united observation, speculation, and experiment. The
glory of medieval civilization was its discovery of power from
nature. eg. water power and wind power.
HISTORICALINSIGHT INVENTION
Faraday's dynamo looked back to William Gilbert's book on the
magnet (1600), which looked back to Peter of Maricourt's book
on the compass and his wheel that was turned by magnetic force.
ANECDOTE INVENTION
The flying monk about 1010. Eilmer of Malmesbury Abbey flew 600
feet in a glider but forgot to put on a tail and crashed. See
Encyclopedia Britanica 11th edition
HUMOR (Chicago)
Does this bus go to dah loop?
No, this bus go beep beep.
WAR CLASSICAL
Thucydides urged arbitration instead of war and called warfare
"criminal".
WAR ANECDOTE LAW
In 1306, the Norman lawyer Pierre Dubois called for the creation
of a Congress of States to settle disputes using military and
economic sanctions.
ANECDOTE HISTORY AMERICA BOOK
A chapter in The Great Frontier by Walter Webb (catalogue
1952CB 245W4) describes the Darien Company established in Panama
by Scotland- and how the East India Co. used the English government
to crush it.
ANECDOTE HISTORY MEDIEVAL
Before Gregory became pope he received permission to go to England
to convert the English- but two days outward bound from Rome on
his journey he saw a locust land upon a book he was reading. A
locust in Latin is LOCUSTA which becomes LOCO + STA which means
stop in this place, which he did. The next day a messenger arrived
with instructions for Gregory to return to Rome immediately. This
is an example of the REBUS view of history.
POETRY QUOTE
Whoever loved, that loved not at first sight? Marlowe Hero
and Leander
DESCRIPTION DELUSION EXCERPT
The old barque lumbered on, heavy with her age and the burden
of her cargo, while I lived the life of youth in ignorance and
hope. Youth by J. Conrad
TRAVEL CLASSICAL EXCERPT POETRY
Coelum non animum mutant qui trans more currunt
Scenes, but not the mind, are changed by travel. Horace Ep.1,ix,27
POETRY
Then lead calm vot'ress where some sheety lake
Cheers the lone heath, or some time hallow'd pile,
Or up-land fallows grey reflect its last cool gleam.
But when chill blus'tring winds, or driving rain
Forbid my willing feet, be mine the hut
That from the mountain side,
Views Wilds, and swelling floods,
And Hamlets brown, and dim-discovered Spires
And hears their simple Bell, and marks o'er all
Thy dewey fingers draw the gradual dusky veil
Ode to Evening by William Collins
QUOTE PHILOSOPHY
"our existence is nothing but a succession of moments perceived
through the senses"-Rousseau
HISTORICALINSIGHT PHILOSOPHY SCIENCE
The intellectual idea that later developed into evolution comes
from Goethe et al. that Nature and Truth were related and that
Nature, untampered with, became more perfect through Time. Total
absorption in Nature can heal and restore the crushed Spirit.
The moral grandeur of the universe.
BELIEF
16th c. sailors believed that crossing the equator or the line
about 100 leagues east of the Azores left behind fleas, etc. on
the European side of the line. Note: Don Quijote asks Sancho to
see if he is free of his fleas on his journey.
QUOTE
Nobody makes a greater mistake than he who does nothing because
he could do only a little.
Edmund Burke
PRAYER RELIGION GOD
The Great Liturgy: From all evil and wickedness; from the crafts
and assaults of the devil; and from everlasting damnation, from
all blindness of heart; from pride, vainglory, and hypocrisy;
from evil, hatred, and malice; and from all want of charity, From
all inordinate and sinful affections and from all the deceits
of the world, the flesh, and the devil, From all false doctrine,
heresy, and schism, from hardness of heart, and contempt of thy
Word and Commandment, from lightening and tempest, from earthquake,
fire, and flood; from plague, pestilence, and famine, from all
oppression, conspiracy, and rebellion; from violence, battle,
and murder; and from dying suddenly and unprepared, Good Lord,
Deliver us.
The Book of Common Prayer 1977
REVOLUTION QUOTE
Francois Noel Barbeuf denounced the Directory run by the middle
classes to halt the Revolution and protect property, "If
you follow the chain of our [society's] vices you will find that
the first link is fastened to the inequality of wealth"
REVOLUTION EXCERPT PHILOSOPHY
No es tu bien el que distribuyes al pobre. Le devuelves parte
de lo que le pertence, porque usurpas para ti solo lo que fue
dado a todos, para el use de todoes. La Tierra a todos pertenece.
No solo a los ricos.
San Ambrocio
ANECDOTE HISTORY
Frederick of Bavaria had the prophecies of Merlin translated into
Arabic and sent to the Sultan of Egypt.
ANECDOTE HISTORY WAR
Before the massacre of the city of Beziers, the Imperial Bishop
Arnald Amalaricus of Citeaux said "Kill them all, God will
recognize his own."
BELIEF CRITICALINSIGHT
Alanus de Insulis compiled a directory of all the objects of creation
and their symbolic meanings
ANECDOTE ART
Andre Breton, author of Les Manifestus du Surrealisme,
was invited to Mexico to teach. He wanted a table built- he drew
a table, diamond shaped, foreshortened front legs, long back legs-
in other words, an architectural drawing. The Mexican carpenter
made a table exactly like the one in the drawing. When M. Breton
saw it he said I have nothing to teach these people about surrealism
and returned to France.
ANECDOTE MUSIC
Mozart copied from memory the Miserere of Gregorio Allegri
for 9 voices in 2 choirs.
DESCRIPTION METAPHOR
"the whites of their lewd eyes grew yellow and clouded, like
clots of sour cream" The Love of Jeanne Ney by Ilya
Ehrenbourg Doubleday 1930 (304)
QUOTE HISTORY AMERICA
Campaign slogan of 1856 "Free labor, free speech, free men,
free Kansas and Fremont!
QUOTE SOCIETY
I know of no country in which there is so little true independence
of mind and freedom of discussion as in America
Alexis de Tocqueville
ANECDOTE
Casanova trained a parrot to squawk in French, "The Charpillon
is a worse whore than her mother" and sold it on the Stock
Exchange for 50 guineas.
HISTORICALINSIGHT
They destroy space with telephones and time with aeroplanes
The Mad Woman of Challot by Jean Giraudoux
also
"The longer you wear pearls the more real they become"
QUOTE
I could see through his forehead the narrowness of his ideas-
Andre Gide
I hate all careers that owe their existence only to the spitefulness
of men- Andre Gide
POETRY
From Helicon's harmonious springs
A 1000 rills their mazy progress take.
The laughing flowers, that round them blow,
Drink life and fragrance as they flow.
The Progress of Poesy Gray
BELIEFS
Abdals (Moslem) are men appointed by God through whom the world
is able to continue its existence.
POETRY
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Appareled in Celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
Intimations of Immortality by William Wordsworth
QUOTE DEATH CLASSICAL
aut pati, aut mori (either suffer or die)
ANECDOTE CLASSICAL
Caesar decided to kill the pirates who had kidnapped him because
they had laughed at his poetry-however, because they had treated
him well he allowed that their throats be cut before crucifying
them.
SOCIETY
Observation about Indians after the Conquest. The Indians govern
themselves. In each village there are 8 to 10 old Indians who
live at the expense of the others in absolute idleness...These
chiefs have a great interest in keeping their fellow citizens
in profound ignorance, and thus they contribute more than anyone
to the perpetuation of the prejudices, ignorance, and barbarism
of ancient habits.
ANECDOTE ART
Thieves once broke into Picasso's apartment in Paris and stole
his linen.
QUOTE REVOLUTION
All revolutions begin in cellars
RECIPE (White Chocolate Pecan Cookies)
Melt in a double boiler and Stir until smooth: 8 squares Semi-Sweet
Baking Chocolate (1 and 1/3 cups if using morsels or pieces)
Add and Stir: 1/2 stick softened unsalted butter (2 oz)
Add and Stir: 3/4 cup firmly packed light brown sugar, 1 tsp
vanilla, and 2 eggs Sift 1/2 cup flour with 1/4
tsp baking powder and Stir into mixture: Add and Stir: 2
cups pecans and/or walnuts and 1 package (6 squares ) White
Baking Chocolate coarsely chopped, or 1 cup white chocolate
chunks or morsels Drop by scant 1/4 cupfuls onto ungreased cookie
sheets. Bake at 350º for 13 to 14 minutes. Cookies will appear
puffed with a slightly glazed surface and feel set to the touch.
Cool for 3-4 minutes and remove from cookie sheets onto wire racks.
ANECDOTE BOOK
Dona Catalina de Erazu or the Nun Ensign. Fleeing her convent,
she became a soldier, a swordsman and a muleteer. she was sent
from Peru to Spain after her capture and from Span to the pope
in Rome who gave her a dispensation. Philip II gave her a pension
also. She is the heroine of the 1st American novel La Monja
Alferez 1653
ANECDOTE medieval
In the Nibelungenlied we see a faint glimmer of the doomed
splendor of Gunderic's Burgundian palace on the Rhine.
PHILOSOPHY HISTORICALINSIGHT
The Enlightenment's belief in the natural goodness/reasonableness
of man and the related belief that evil is a product of the social
and economic environment. The tradition of courtly love, not anti-Christian
but certainly un-Christian, like the Enlightenment, had a civilizing
power on human behavior.
ANECDOTE
Christopher Marlow's death described by Thomas Beard as a warning
example of God's vengeance. Beard being a Puritan. The Theatre
of God's Judgment (1597)
ANECDOTE HISTORY PHILOSOPHY
The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 created tremendous intellectual
ferment among the philosphes about God, natural science. See The
Lisbon Earthquake by T.D. Kendrick (1956)
TERM DISILLUSION
Zerreissenheit = disintegration eg. Goethe's Werther
PHILOSOPHY DISILLUSION
The only prospect that can please American Primitivists is one
with no trace of humankind at all. The great hope in mankind for
them has ended-...in the great disgust, - a disgust so universal
as to have little consoling power (313) A History of Western
Morals
See Walt Whitman Song of Myself #32 praising animals over
man
Contrast to the earlier view of the free natural man who was virtuous which was the 'religion" of the Enlightenment and Romanticism
and the still earlier view that man was good but his true nature was oppressed by religion, society, and his social environment.
or contrast to the optimism of Condorcet tracing man's rise through 10 epochs progressing toward the goal of history- universal happiness.
Without God man must depend on his own nature and rationality.
No reformer has been able to escape the need for an elite to guide men to their true interests.
POETRY
Twilight by Sara Teasdale
Dreamily over the roofs
The cold spring rain is falling;
Out in the lonely tree
A bird is calling, calling.
Slowly over the earth
The wings of night are falling;
My heart like the bird in the tree
Is calling, calling, calling.
The Look
Stephon kissed me in the Spring
Robin in the Fall,
But Colin only looked at me
And never kissed at all.
Stephon's kiss was lost in jest,
Robins lost in play
But the kiss in Robin's eyes,
Haunts me night and day.
RELIGION
The Peyote Cult Yale University Publications in Anthropology
#19 1938 LaBarre and Southwestern Journal of Anthropology
6:2 (1950), 220
HISTORY
Plantagenet Kings (Queen Matilda and Geoffrey P. of Anjou)
Henry II (1154-1189), Richard I (1189-1199), John (1199-1216),
Henry III (1216-1272), Edward I (1272-1307), Edward II (1307-1327),
Edward III (1327-1377), Richard II (1377-1399), Lancaster Henry
IV (1399-1413), Henry V (1413-1422). Henry VI (1422-1461), York
Edward IV (1461-1483), Edward V (1483), Richard III (1483-1485)
PHILOSOPHY QUOTE
Wovon man nicht sprechen kahn, daruber muss man schweigen. -Wittgenstein
(Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent).
CLASSICAL QUOTE
Quos Deus perdere vult, prius dementat.
(Those whom God wishes to destroy he first makes mad)
POETRY WAR
The Dark Angel by Lionel Johnson
And all the things of beauty burn
With flames of evil ecstasy
RELIGION EXCERPT BIBLE
-and he cried with a loud voice: "Hurt not the earth, neither
the sea, nor the trees- Revelation 7:3
POETRY
When fishes flew and forests walked and figs grew upon the thorn-
GK Chesterton
POETRY WAR
Incertainty that once gave scope to dream
Of laughing enterprise and glory untold,
Is now a blackness that no stars redeem.,
A wall of darkness in a night of cold
Robert Bridges 1931
QUOTE EDUCATION
The only time my education was interrupted was when I was in school-
George Bernard Shaw
QUOTE EDUCATION
The main thing children learn how to do in school is to lie- H.L.
Mencken
QUOTE DELUSION
"human life is a seeking without a finding, that its purpose
is impenetrable, that joy and sorrow are alike meaningless."
God's joke. divine mirth. Schadenfreude. Nihilism
QUOTE PHILOSOPHY
Symbols catch truth like nets but the mesh obscures the catch-Lynn
White Machina ex Deus (55)
EXCERPT DEATH DISILUSION
And I lead the old and the young, high-born and base born, ignorant
and learned, all of them I (delusion) lead them to joy and contentment;
for without me even kings, nobles, princes and the proudest men
would be in a strange despondency and would spend their time on
earth mournfully. Delusion speaks to Pilgrim from The Labyrinth
of the World by John Amos Comenius
QUOTE POETRY
The poet's business is not to save the soul of man but to make
it worth saving- James Elroy Flecker
EXCERPT POETRY
Like a small grey
coffeepot
Sits the squirrel
-Humbert Wolfe
POETRY WAR
Dulce et decorum est
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As undersea I saw him drowning
In all my dreams before my helpless sight
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning
Wilfred Owen
EXCERPT QUOTE
Mankind is the most pernicious race of odious vermin that nature
ever suffered to crawl on the surface of the earth- Swift's King
of the Brobdingnagians
EXCERPT PHILOSOPHY SCIENCE
Aristotle's incorrect law of inertia "Omne quod movetur ab
alio movetur" whatever is moved must be moved by another:
thus the planets were attached to rigid crystalline spheres whose
motion was maintained by angels
QUOTE PHILOSOPHY
Consciousness proceeds Being- Havel (President of Chek Republic)
EXCERPT POWER SOCIETY
The purpose of newspeak was not only to provide a medium
of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the
devotees of ING-SOC, but to make all other modes of thought impossible-
1984 by Orwell
BOOK HISTORICALINSIGHT
The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi 1944
"early capitalism disrupted traditional society everywhere,
stimulated growth of national states to deal with disruptions
and which set off forces that nearly destroyed civilization"
EXCERPT WRITING
"The mercantilists may be best described not by a definite
economic theorem which they held in common, but by a set of theoretic
tendencies, commonly found in combination; though severely prevailing
in different degrees in different minds" EB Mercantile Systems
CLASSICAL BOOK
Dating from 410, Prudentius' Psychomachia is a Christian
poem written in the manner of a classical epic. It relates how
virtues and vices, personified as female figures, battle for possession
of the human soul. It was an immensely popular work and 20 illustrated
manuscripts survive from the 9th-11th centuries. (See Binders
for selections)
BOOK REVOLUTION HISTORY
The World Revolution of Westernization by Theodore Von
Laue 1988 D 445 V73
Communism was an anti-Western world revolution- a counter revolution.
"Everywhere national exclusiveness grew with greater political
participation by the bulk of the population whose ignorance undermined
the faint but widespread cosmopolitanism of liberal middle class
culture" (47)
EDUCATION
When judgments about educational quality are made on the basis
of test performance, not only is the scope of the curriculum likely
to be diminished, but the climate for educational innovation is
likely to be dampened" National Elementary Principal
July August 1975
QUOTE
The cure for everything is salt water be it in the form of sweat,
tears, or sea water.
BELIEF RELIGION MYTH
On the island of Bali great grandparents are reincarnated as their
great grandchildren. Should they meet in such an inappropriate
situation the former must pay the latter a penny.
EXCERPT PHILOSOPHY POWER
"total personal power taken to its extreme contradicts itself
by its very existence, for total domination can become a form
of extreme dependence on the object of one's power, and total
powerlessness can become the secret path to control of the subject
that attempts to exercise such power. The Phenomenology
of Mind by Hegel
ANECDOTE HISTORY BOOK DEATH MEDIEVAL
Queen Austrechildis, the fierce wife of Guntram of Burgundy, attributed
her dying to the potions of the doctors and bound Guntram by a
terrible oath to kill each of them over her grave. Samuel Dill
(261) Roman Society in Gaul in the Merovingian Age 1926
DC65 D5. see especially "The Social Aspect" and "Monachism"
discussion of ascetics and also Queen Radegund's convent and its
scandalous demise. Also by Dill Roman Society In the Last Century
etc. reprinted 1958
POETRY
Sam Daniel 1562-1619 Care-Charmer Sleep
Care charmer Sleep, son of the sable Night
Brother to Death, in silent darkness born,
Receive my languish and restore the light;
With dark forgetting of my cares return
And let the day be time enough to mourn
The shipwreck of my ill-adventured youth:
POETRY CLASSICAL
Sidonius Apollonaris PA6221 A2. Some pastoral descriptions of
Gaul. Portrait of Theodoric (Ostrogoth) at Ravenna who had the
Synagogue rebuilt after it was burned.
RELIGION CLASSICAL
PHILOSOPHY
The shortest way to understanding medieval philosophy is to read
Plato's Timaeus
QUOTE HISTORICALINSIGHT
Certainly, no fact in the long history of the world is so startling
as the wide and repeated exterminations of its inhabitants. Darwin
Voyage of the Beagle cpt 6 :179
CLASSICAL HISTORICALINSIGHT
A great debt is owed to Cassiodorus who convinced the clergy the
classics had a rightful place in Christian education
REFERENCE CLASSICAL BOOK
Medieval Portraits from East and West by E. Duckett D115D8
BOOK
What Happens in Hamlet by Dover Wilson
ANECDOTE
The Tahitians saw and called the first horses they saw "man
carrying pigs"
REFERENCE CLASSICAL BOOK
Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire by M. Rostovtzev
1926
QUOTE DESCRIPTION REVOLUTION EXCERPT
The people are like men walking though a pond with water up to
their mouths; at the smallest depression of the ground or rise
in the level of the water they will lose their footing, sink,
and drown. Taine commenting on the Ancien Regime
ANECDOTE CLASSICAL
The fate of a critic. Philoxenus of Cythera 5 century BCE, a poet,
refused to praise a poem of the tyrant Dionysius and was sentenced
to work in the quarries. He wrote The Banquet which was
a precursor of Petronius Arbityer's Banquet of Trimalchio.
CLASSICAL EXCERPT EB
On the Satryican the Encyclopedia Britanica 11th says "There
is perhaps not a single sentence in Petronius which implies any
knowledge or a sympathy with the existence of affection, conscience,
or honor, or even the most elementary goodness of heart"
EXCERPT EB DESCRIPTION
On the Petchenegs or Patzinaks (EB14th) "They were the most
dreaded and detested of all the nomads; Matthew of Edess calls
them 'the carrion-eaters, the godless, unclean folk, the wicked,
blood-drinking beasts.' Other anecdotes are current of their shamelessness
and many of their cruelty;...The modern descendent are despised
by other Bulgarians for their bestiality and stupidity but dreaded
for their savagery. They are a singularly repellent race, short
legged, yellow-skinned, with slanting eyes and projecting cheekbones.
Their villages are generally filthy, but the women's costumes
show a barbaric profusion of goldlace.
ANECDOTE LITERATURE
A 13c French writer made Oberon the son of Julius Caesar and Morgan
La Fey.
TRAVEL
Ibn Battuta, a 14 century traveller
See The Travels of Ibn Battuta by H.A.R. Gibb G370 I2x;
also Ibn Battuta in Black Africa by Said Hamdun and Noel
King 1975
ANECDOTE
The traditional Saudi headdress- the black AGHAL was of Bedouin
origin and was originally used to hobble camels.
TRAVEL
William Dampier, buccaneer, navigator, "accounts of his voyages
are famous. He had a genius for observation. His style is usually
admirable-easy, clear, and manly. works edited by J. Masefield
1906.
QUOTE EXCERPT BIBLE
I returned and saw that under the sun, the race is not to the
swift, nor the battle to the strong, neight yet bread to the wise,
nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of
skill, but time and chance happen to them all. Ecclesiates
EXCERPT
If I drink water while this doth last, May I never again drink
wine. For how can a man, in his life of a span, Do anything better
than dine? We'll dine and drink, and say if we think That anything
better can be; And when we have dined, wish all mankind May dine
as well as we.
And though a good wish will fill no dish, And brim no cup with
sack, Yet thoughts will spring as the glasses ring, To illumine
our studious track. On the brilliant dreams of our hopeful schemes,
The light of the flask shall shine; And we'll sit til day, but
we'll find the way To drench the world with wine. from Crotchet
Castle by T.L. Peacock. spoken by Mr. Trillo
QUOTE
Laughter is an involuntary action of certain muscles, developed
in the human species by the progress of civilization. Peacock.
Crotchet Castle spoken by Mr. MacQuedy
EXCERPT CHARACTER PHILOSOPHY
King Melvas, a monarch who "had a total and most complacent
indifference to everything but his own will and pleasure. The
Misfortunes of Elphin by Peacock.
ART
The Baroque demands not realism but expressiveness.
HISTORIALINSIGHT
The French, about 1620, cut the Spanish lines of communication
between northern Italy and the Netherlands at Val Telline. Unfortunately,
for the Protestant cause, the French were forced to withdraw (thus
exposing much of Germany to the Catholic Hapsburgs) because of
the rebellion of the Hugenots against Louis XIII.
CHARACTERS
Squire Western, the hearty Tory in Fielding's Tom Jones
Trulliber, the boorish curate in Joseph Andrew
Ebenezer MacCrotchet,Esq of Peacock's Crotchet Castle 1831
Vautrin, cynaical ex-convict, from Balsac's Pere Goriot
Mr. Neech, schoolmaster, from Sinister Street by Compton
Mackenzie. BK II,cpt.1
EXCERPT TRAVEL CLASSICAL POETRY
At Procul Extremis Terrarum from Pharsalia BK4.1 Lucan
(And far away in the outermost region of earth...)
BOOK
The Golden Legend by William Caxton BX4654 J33
BOOK EXCERPT HISTORY
Journey Into Darkness by John Terrell E125 N9T4. An account
of Alvar Nunez de Vera Cabeza de Vaca's journey from Florida to
the Pacific 1528-1536. An astounding story including details of
the Indians and their society; opposums, armadillos, Gila monsters,
buffalo, Pueblos, legends of the seven Cities of Cibola. Some
portions copied in notebooks.
The Spaniards in Santo Domingo "The Four Horsemen rode through
the mahogany and palm forests and lush valleys. With them sped
the spectres of torture, desecration, hypocrisy, lust, impiety,
licentiousness, and greed. The lagoons were mirrors of blood...The
New World was built upon nothing more substantial than the bones
of the conquered."
The savages who inhabited the miserable land and endured the
abominable climate of southern and eastern Texas could be depended
upon to do only one thing with unfailing regularity- change. Degenerate,
verminous, dwelling in utter degradation, they had no conception
of the meaning of integrity or responsibility. Their promises
were worthless. Their declarations were meaningless. They knew
as much about the next moment as what they would do when it arrived.
They lived more by instinct than by thought, uncomprehending in
their responses to the dominate urges to feed and fornicate (169)
Compare this to Darwin's description of the Indians of Tierra
del Fuego.
TRAVEL
Ibrahim ibn-Ia'qub. Traveled to Slav lands of the Elbe River.
CF National Geographic Ibn Ahmad Fadlan trip to Volga region
circa 921. A copy of this in your library in The Western Tradition
by Eugen Weber "Ibn Fadlan: The Swedish Rus on the Volga"
They are the filthiest of God's creatures. They do not wash after
discharging their natural functions, neither do they wash their
hands after meals. They are as lousy as donkeys. They arrive from
the distant lands and lay their ships alongside the banks of the
Atul, which is a great river, and there they build big houses
on its shores. Ten or twenty of them may live together in one
house, and each of them has a couch of his own where he sits and
diverts himself with the pretty slave girls whom he has brought
along for sale. He will make love with one of them while a comrade
looks on; sometimes they indulge in a communal orgy, and, if a
customer should turn up to buy a girl, the Rus man will not let
her go till he has finished with her.
They wash their hands and faces every day in incredibly filthy
water. Every morning the girl brings her master a large bowl of
water in which he washes his hands and face and hair, then blows
his nose into it and spits into it. When he has finished the girl
takes the bowl to his neighbor- who repeats the performance. Thus
the bowl goes the rounds of the entire household. (231)
REFERENCE MEDIEVAL
Chronology of the Medieval World 800-1491 by R.L.Storey
D118 S855
Dictionary of the Middle Ages by J.R.Staayer D114 D5
Who's Who In the Middle Ages by John Fines D115 F5
ANECDOTE RELIGION CRITICALINSIGHT
The Jews and Christians accepted astrology as a true science based
on the scriptural passage Genesis 1,14-16 that the lights of heaven
rule the earth.
RELIGION EXCERPT
from The Rule of St. Benedict BX3004 E6 We must be on our
guard, then, against evil desires, for death lies close by the
gate of delight. cpt.7. Also see The 12 Degrees of Humility
See cpt. 40 on drink.
cpt. 45 If anyone make a mistake in the recitation of psalm, response,
antiphon, or lesson, and do not make humble satisfaction there
before all, let him undergo greater punishment, because he would
not repair by humility the fault that he created through carelessness.
But boys for such faults shall be whipped.
EXCERPT
These people who denounced red tape did not have the job of cleaning
up the mess when the red tape was cut through. Red Tape, White
Behavior, and Blue Water, that was the British Empire, and each
of the three was indispensable to its lasting might and glory.
The Red Tapeworm Compton MacKenzie. Also his The Lunatic
Republic 1959.
HISTORY BOOK
The Age of Reconnaissance by J.H. Perry G60 P36 interesting
about ships and sailing
Travel and Discovery in the Renaissance 1420-1620 by Bories
Penrose G95 P45
EXCERPT DEATH
from Uncle Tom's Cabin cpt 26 (the death of Eva) Farewell,
beloved child! the bright, eternal doors have closed after thee;
we shall see thy sweet face no more. O, woe for them who watched
thy entrance into heaven, when they shall awake and find only
the cold gray sky of daily life, and thou gone forever!
EXCERPT WRITING
On Wyoming. It's all a bunch of nothing- wind and rattlesnakes-
and so much of it you can't tell where you're going or where you've
been and it don't make much difference" a ranchhand quoted
by Gretel Ehrlich from The Art of Writing
EXCERPT QUOTE CLASSICAL DEATH POETRY
Hadrian's own deathbed verse Ad Animam Suam
Animula vagula blandula/ Hospes comesque corporis,/ Quae nunc
abibis in loca/ Pallidula, rigida, nudula,/ Nec ut soles dabis
iocus. (TRANS: Little soul, wandering gentle guest and companion
of the body, into what places will you go now, pale, stiff, and
naked, no longer sporting as you did!)
POETRY DEATH EXCERPT
Ah no! it is not dead, nor can it die,/ But lives for aie, in
blissful Paradise./ Where like a new borne babe it soft doth lie./
In bed of lillies wrapt in tender wise./ And compact all about
with roses sweet,/ And daintie violets from head to feet.// There
thousand birds all of celestial brood,/ To him do sweetly caroll
day and night./ And with straunge notes, of him well understood./Lull
him a sleep in Angelick delight;/ Whilst in sweet dreame to him
presented bee/ Immortal beauties, which no eye may see. Spenser
Astrophel for Sidney
POETRY DEATH
Thomas Nashe's beautiful lyrical lament "Adieu, farewell
earth's bliss" from Summer's Last Will 1592. Works
PR2721 M2x
ANECDOTE
The famous Chinese examinations in which the candidate was told
to write down everything he knew
ANECDOTE HISTORY CLASSICAL
The Byzantine empress Irene 752-803 restored image worship and
later was canonized by the Greek church. To prevent her son Constantine
VI from taking the throne from her she had his eyes stabbed out.
She never lost sight of political power.
BOOK
A History of English Literature by Alistair Fowler (Harvard)
1987 reviewed as "a remarkable achievement 17c News
V.47 (1&2). He is a Spenserian scholar.
BOOK
Francis Beaumont's masterpiece The Knight of the Burning Pestle
PR 2427 A127
BOOK
Eaters of he Dead by Crichton DL31 c74 based on a manuscript
by Ibn Fadlan 922 supporting the hypothesis that Neanderthals
survived into modern times.
ANECDOTE
Pope Honorius III condemned Scotus (1225), writing that his thoughts
were "pollulating with worms of heretical perversity".
ANECDOTE CLASSICAL RELIGION
SATOR
AREPO
TENET
OPERA
ROTAS
"The sower with purpose holds the wheeled plow"
ANECDOTE HISTORY
The Assyrian Shalmanaser I exiled 10,000 enemy soldiers to Assyria
but first he had all of them blinded. There is another story of
a Byzantine emperor whose soldiers were blinded.
ANECDOTE LAW CLASSICAL
In the Athenian assembly or EKKLESIA, promptness was encouraged
form attendees. Slaves, carrying a rope dipped in red paint, swept
the streets of late comers. Those who were found with red paint
on their clothes paid a fine. Everyday Life Through the Ages
ANECDOTE CLASSICAL SCULPTURE
Wigs were very popular in Imperial Rome. Stone busts have been
found with removable stone wigs. which like lids, could be replaced
to anticipate changing fashions. Everyday Life Through the
Ages
ANECDOTE CLASSICAL
In Rome, by law, prostitutes were required to either wear a yellow
wig or dye their hair. Later, this became a fashionable style
and to meet the demand, large quantities of blond hair ware imported
from Germany. Everyday Life Through the Ages
LAW AMERICA
Port Authority Terminal NYC rules:
No person shall spit, urinate, or defecate on any part of the
terminal other than in a urinal or toilet intended for that purpose.
No person shall make, continue, cause or permit to be made or
continued any unauthorized, objectionable or disturbing noises.
Copied from a steel plate on the lower level embedded in tile
and concrete.
CLASSICAL ANECDOTE
At a feast given by the Emperor Elagalabus he had served 600 ostrich
brains and peas mixed with grains of gold. Other side dishes included
milk-fed snails, dormice stuffed with minced pork, pepper, pine
kernels and liquamen. Liquamen was a kind of anchovy sauce and
was the main seasoning agent used by the Romans. Garlic was seldom
used.
HISTORY
Guilds existed for lensmakers, gunsmiths, locksmiths, small instrument
makers, scales, playing card illuminators, spigots for barrels,
gut strings for viols, fountains, treadles for polishing machines,
pin makers.
RELIGION BEHAVIOR
Islam divides conduct into five categories: required, permitted,
neutral, discouraged, prohibited
EXCERPT DEATH DISILLUSION
My birth was the first of my misfortunes- Rousseau
It's unjust to smile at the hero who lies mortally wounded on the stage and sings an aria. We lie on the ground and sing for years.- Kafka
Optima Dias Primus Fugit- Virgil (The best days are the first to flee)
RELIGION PHILOSOPHY
Buddhism aims at freedom from suffering ie. existence which is
birth, decay, sickness and death.
CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY EXCERPT
Nam in omni adveritatae fortunae infellicissimum genus est.- Boethius
For in every ill-turn of Fortune the most unhappy kind of misfortune
is to have been happy
QUOTE DEATH DISILLUSION
O, it was well with me in days ere I was born - Housman
QUOTE DEATH CLASSICAL
No man should be called happy until he is dead- Diogenes
QUOTE POETRY
What if a Day, or a month, or a year
Crown thy delights with a 1000 sweet contentings?
Cannot a chance of a night, or an hour
Cross thy desires with as many sad tormentings?
CLASSICAL MYTH DEATH
The legend of Silenus, a satyr, the teacher of Dionysus, who captured
by Midas told him the wisdom of happiness: That the only thing
better than dying young was not to be born at all. See Oxford
Companion to Classical Literature
CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY DEATH
All classical civilization is summed up by Sophocles, "Never
to have lived were best"
QUOTE DEATH
The best of all fates is to die in your nurse's arms- Madame de
Sevigne
BIBLE ANECDOTE
Kings II.2.24 Elisha has two she-bears maul 42 children for taunting
him.
DESCRIPTION
Chapter 32 of Uncle Tom's Cabin opens "The dark places
of the earth are full of the habitations of cruelty" A picture
of an anti-Eden as Tom is taken to the plantation of Simon Legree.
"trailing wearily behind a rude wagon..." See "Passages"
in this folder.
HISTORY EDUCATION PHILOSOPHY
Montesqueu and Voltaire believed that history was "philosophy
taught through examples"
QUOTE
The color of the object illuminated partakes of the color of what
illuminates it- Leonardo da Vinci
QUOTE POETRY EDUCATION PHILOSOPHY
Thy Heaven doors are my Hell gates
To the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself
The Tigers of Wrath are wiser than the Horses of Instruction
Enthusiastic admiration is the first principle of knowledge
That which can be made explicit to the idiot is not worth my care
- Blake
EXCERPT PHILOSOPHY DEATH
We know that the schemes of man are quickly at an end, that we
must soon lie down in the grave with the forgotten multitudes
of former ages, and yield our place to others who, like us, shall
be driven a while by hope or fear about the surface of the earth,
and then like us be lost in the shades of death. Samuel Johnson
Rambler 203
DESCRIPTION POETRY
By gloomy twilight, half reveal'd
With signs we view the hoary hill,
The leafless wood, the naked field,
The snow topp'd cot, the frozen rill.
No musick warbles through the grove,
No vivid colors paint the plain;
No more, with devious steps, I rove
Through verdant paths, now sought in vain.
Samuel Johnson Winter
AMERICA EXCERPT
A letter writer in Memphis called political opponents "mangy,
bubonic rats, yellow to the core." Inside USA John
Gunther "Tennessee"
ANECDOTE AMERICA SOCIETY
Memphis banned showing the movie Brewster's Millions because the
relationship of Jack Benny and Rochester "presented too much
familiarity between the races".
EXCERPT AMERICA SOCIETY
A newspaper in 1860 wrote of Tennessee governor Browlow, "He
is a loathsome fistula...a foul bubble floating on the surface
of a cesspool...there is no more decency in his speeches...then
in the yelling of hyenas, the cursing of pirates, or the objurations
of harlots..."
POETRY
"the great flabber dabber flat clapping fish with hands"-
Christopher Smart 1722-1771. An extravagant religious poet writing
nearly incomprehensibly but with modern verbal affects. See Jubilate
Agno, and A Song to David
BOOK
Natural History of Selborne by Gilbert Whites- a classic
of natural history. An example of the English post-Renaisance
writing style.
That the Moon May Be A World by John Wilkins 1638
POETRY
John Wilnot Earl of Rochester. The opening couplet of Sodom (a
play) parodies the opening of Dryden's The Conquest of Granada
: Thus in the zenith of my lust I reign/ I eat to swive and swive
to eat again. characters in poem include Borastus, Fuckadilla,
Princess Swivea, Prince Prikkett. The setting of the stage is
"an Antichamber hung with Aretino's Pastures. For Aretino
see The Works of Aretino by Samuel Putnam illus. by Marquis
de Bayros- a private edition of 1250 sets (1926) PQ 4563 A25
QUOTE EXCERPT BEHAVIOR
Man's face is really a microcosm, or miniature world. It proves
the order of his development, and the cause of his embryonic life.
Every face proclaims its possessor as to his race, sex, age, temperament,
moral character, health, and position in intellectual rank. It
reveals also his mental aptitudes, often his habitual behavior,
his vices and virtues (47) The Art of Make-Up by Serge
Strenkovsky 1937
QUOTE RELIGION
Let them bear children til they die of it; that is what they are
for- Luther
QUOTE RELIGION
...weak, frail, impatient, feeble, and foolish...inconstant, variable,
cruel, and void of the spirit of counsel. (about women) -John
Knox
RELIGION PHILOSOPHY
Luther condemned reason as "the devil's harlot"
HISTORICALINSIGHT RELIGION
the Reformation was a medieval reaction to humanism as well as
a reaction to Church corruption and ritual sacramentalism. The
Making of the Modern Mind by John Randall (1940)
CLASSICAL SOCIETY
The Greek rhetorician Timagenes resented Rome's periodic fires
because the rebuilding of Rome improved her.
QUOTE SIN
The lust of the flesh pertaineth to voluptuousness- Innocent III
PHILOSOPHY
The prime author and mover of the universe is intelligence. Therefore,
the final cause of the universe must be the good of the intelligence,
and that is truth. Truth then must be the final end of the whole
universe, and about the consideration of that end wisdom must
primarily be concerned...Of all human pursuits, the pursuit of
wisdom is the most perfect, the most sublime, the most useful,
and the most agreeable. Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologica
II,ii,66,i.
PHILOSOPHY
The ignorant man is driven only by his lusts. For the ignorant
man is not only distracted in various ways by external causes
without ever gaining the true acquiescence of his spirit, but
moreover lives, as it were unwitting of himself, and of God, and
of things. And as soon as he ceases to suffer, ceases also to
be- Spinoza Letters II.ii,270
PHILOSOPHY EXCERPT
Inward peace of mind, consciousness of integrity, a satisfactory
review of our own conduct; these are circumstances very requisite
to happiness, and will be cherished and cultivated by every honest
man who feels the importance of them. from Inquiry etc. by Hume
See also his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779) notably the brilliant part VI "the world, therefore, I infer, is an animal."
ART TERM CRITICALINSIGHT
The rule of the three unities in art of Time, Place, and Action
was decreed by Castelvetro in 1560.
SOCIETY POWER EXCERPT DESCRIPTION
"On the Alto de Cruziero the threats to infants and small
children in the environment seem to come from everywhere: the
polluted and overly 'treated' faucet water, the gritty dirt under
little bare feet, the insects in the air, the sluggish and insidious
snails along the muddy banks of the river, the 'kissing bugs'
(Chagas disease) burrowed into the mud walls of the huts, the
worms in the pit latrine, the mad dogs roaming the garbage pits
of the Alto, the spoiled milk left out overnight, the salted and
sun-dried meat covered with maggots in a dish under the roof beam,
the tuberculin fruit vendor in the market, the wheezing pneumatic
child next door...Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday
Life in Brazil by Nancy Scheper-Hughes 1992 HV 1448.B72 N677
pg361.
EXCERPT TRAVEL SOCIETY DISILLUSION PRAYER DESCRIPTION
O Nordeste- land of sugar and hunger, thirst and penance, messianism
and madness
EXCERPT SOCIETY POWER DEATH
The baroqueness of funeral processions in the plantation zone
is sweetened by contact with black mothers, mulatto lovers, humid
vegetation, and the heavy odour of sugar (Scheper-Hughes) quoting
Bastide
EXCERPT PHILOSOPHY
"For the mind moves by instincts, associations, and premonitions.
Effects precede causes, reactions before actions." The
Victorian Age in Literature by G. K. Chesterton
METAPHOR DESCRIPTION
(sentences) at their best like steel and at their worst like tin"
G.K.Chesterton The Victorian Age in Literature
QUOTE SOCIETY PRAYER
"O God, that bread should be so dear, and flesh and blood
so cheap"- Thomas Hood
SOCIETY QUOTE RELIGION BELIEF PHILOSOPHY SIN
"No one has more respect for the Christian religion than
I have, but really, when it comes to intruding it into private
life- -" Lord Melbourne
PHILOSOPHY RELIGION TERM BELIEF HISTORICALINSIGHT
Dogma: Chesterton explaining the Oxford Movement's hunger for
dogma. Dogma means the serious satisfaction of the mind.- "Dogma
does not mean the absence of thought, but the end of thought.
It is a revolt against frivolity and inconsistency. Dogma gives
the exalted excitement of consistency"
QUOTE
"La verite consiste dans les nuances" Joseph Ernest
Renan 1823-1892
PHILOSOPHY GOD
Descartes's proof of God is based on four principles. The first
is man's consciousness of Self or 'I think, therefore I am."
Second, each phenomenon must have a cause. Three, No effect can
be greater than its cause. and Four, the ideas of Perfection as
of Time, Space and Motion are innate to the mind.
Since man doubts so much he cannot be the perfect being. Yet he
does have an idea of a Perfect Being. According to axiom 3 he
could not be the source of the idea of perfection. It could only
be obtained from the existence of a perfect being. And since a
perfect being would not deceive us, our intuition can be trusted
to furnish some truths. Math in Western Culture by Klein
pg. 162
EXCERPT SEX
Horace Walpole wrote an 8 stanza obscene poem to the 9th Earl
of Lincoln in 1743. "I'll open like the Mantuan muse/ Prick
and the man I'll sing..." (ref. Notes and Queries 40.4.555
The British Abroad by Black
ANECDOTE EDUCATION
King James I of England placed an infant boy in jail in solitary
isolation to see if at ten the boy would have naturally learned
to speak Hebrew.
SIN MYTH LAW
In Dante's Inferno, Minos, the connoisseur of sin indicates
each sinner's destination in hell by the number of times his tail
turns around his body.
WAR BELIEF
According to Herodotus, the citizens of Ephesus while besieged
by Croesus of the Lydians, sought protection of Artemis by stretching
a rope from the city walls to the deity's temple- a distance of
a mile. They were not successful.
DELUSION HISTORY EXCERPT PHILOSOPHY HISTORICALINSIGHT SOCIETY
There is the moral of all human tales,
'Tis but the same rehearsal of the past,
First Freedom, and then Glory- when that fails,
Wealth - Vice - Corruption - Barbarism at last:-
And History, with all her volumes vast,
Hath but one page.
Byron Childe Harold's Pilgrimage 4:107-108
ANECDOTE TRAVEL
An English traveller described to an Egyptian Pasha that civil
disturbances could be put down by troops in a matter of a few
hours because of railroads. This was translated to the Pasha.
Then the Pasha replied: "I know it- I know it all- the particulars
have been faithfully related to me, and my mind comprehends locomotives.
The armies of the English ride upon the vapors of boiling cauldrons,
and their horses are flaming coals -whirr! Whirr! all by wheels!-
whiz! whiz! all by steam... The ships of the English swarm like
flies; their printed calicoes cover the whole earth, and by the
side of their swords the blades of Damascus are blades of grass.
All India is but an item in the ledger books of the merchants,
whose lumber rooms are filled with ancient thrones! whirr! whirr!
all by wheels- whiz! whiz! all by steam! The translator tells
the English traveller "The Pasha compliments the cutlery
of England, and also the East India Company."
Alexander Kinglake Eothen (1844)
CHARACTER EXCERPT PHILOSOPHY
He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and
seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet
prefer that which is truly better, he is the true wayfaring Christian.
I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised
and unbreathed, that never salies out and sees her adversary,
but slinks out of the race....
Milton Areopatigica
ART SOCIETY DECADENCE HISTORICAL INSIGHT
Open Letter Against A Vast Conspiracy by Jules Romaine
"Modernism is the accentuation of sub-techniques- in effect
the decomposition of the art as well as its constituent techniques"
"Today's public resists nothing because it is interested
in nothing" (88)
REFERENCE
Works on ERI
Susan Bassnetts Elizabeth I ... a feminist perspective 1988
Christopher Haigh Elizabeth I... her use of political power
Syndey Angel Spectacle 1969 rich information
John Guy Tudor England 1988 ... historical precision
Francis Yates Astrea 1975 ... detailed vision
DEATH ANECDOTE
the sentence for treason on both Lords Raleigh and Norfold was,
"to be hanged, cutte doune alive, your membres to be cutte
off and cast into the fyre, your bowels brent before you, your
head smytten off, and your body quartered and devyded at the hynges
wyll" which was changed to decapitation only. Elizabeth had
learnt that cruel executions hurt her popularity. See Christopher
Hilbert's The Virgin Queen
HISTORICALINSIGHT DELUSION EXCERPT
"But why, then," asked Candide, "was this world
formed at all?"
"To drive us mad." answered Martin.
Candide cpt 21
EXCERPT PHILSOPHY RELIGION
The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its
power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature (the
imagination), usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry
criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates,
and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. It is
in fact the great exciter of the "Yes" function in man...
it is part of the deeper mystery and tragedy of life that whiffs
and gleams of something that we immediately recognize as excellent
should it be vouchsafed to so many of us only in the fleeting,
earlier phases of what in its totality is so degrading a poisoning"
William James
METAPHOR
July was brittle with sun Old Jules
METAPHOR
"with cheeks hanging like a gray dish towel from the peg
that was her nose." Old Jules 36
BOOK DESCRIPTION
Old Jules depicts life on the sand hill country of Kansas.
Depicts rawness of life, description of frontier town "Return"
and conflict "A Checkered Suit", selfishness and cruelty
"Rain"
EXCERPT DELUSION
"A deep pessimism held him. There was something loose in
the world that hated joy and happiness as it hated brightness
and color, reducing everything to drab agony and gray." Old
Jules
DESCRIPTION EXCERPT AMERICA
The sand hills "To some the country was aloof, austere,
forbidding; the wind sucking their courage as it sucked the green
from the grass by mid-June. Some saw it as a great sea caught
and held forever in a spell, and were afraid. And here and there
were a few sensitive to the constantly changing tans and mauves
of the strange, rhythmical hills that crowded away into the happy
horizon. They heard the undying wind rattle the seed pods of the
yuccas against the sky, sing its thin flute song over the tall,
sparse grasses of the slopes. They smelled the strange odors of
marsh and mist rising from the wet valleys at dusk, saw spring
run in sudden fire of yellow blossoms over the low knolls and
give way to deep blue. Then, that too was gone as though no flower
had ever been, until August brought the long, graceful, white
phlox blossoms and the reddening bunch grass turned to russet
waves under the stern caress of the chill fall winds." Old
Jules p.354
ART
Blake illustrated Young's Night Thoughts
RELIGION PHILOSOPHY EXCERPT
"There's good in this world...; and it makes a man feel as
there's a good more nor he can see i' spite o' the trouble and
the wickedness. That drawing of the lots is dark; but the child
was sent to me: there's dealings with us - there's dealings"
Silas Marner cpt. 16:206
DEATH EXCERPT
"All I can say is, it's a lovely carkiss- and anybody as
was reasonable, it 'ud bring tears into their eyes to look at
it." Silas Marner cpt 6:62
MYTH RELIGION DEATH
Orpheus, Pan and the Hopi Kakopelli (an ancient figure portrayed
on petroglyph art in Utah) carried seeds and played the flute
to provide warmth for their germination.
BOOK RELIGION CLASSICAL
Hellenistic Ways of Deliverance and the Making of the Christian
Synthesis by John Herman Randall, Columbia University Press
(1970) BR 128 G8 R395
DELUSION SOCIETY CLASSICAL HISTORICALINSIGHT
Gilbert Murray's phrase "the failure of nerve"- The
Hellenistic World became complicated and full of problems that
seemed incapable of solution. People lost their sense of skill,
intelligence, and achievement as sources of power. The Four
Stages of Greek Religion 1912. Revises 1925 as The Five
Stages of Greek Religion.
PHILOSOPHY CLASSICAL DELUSION
Epicureanism. They had no interest in science or math for they
offered nothing to make life more pleasant. Their doctrine was
freedom from pain, tranquility of soul and peace of mind. It was
not the idea of enjoyment. Hedone is the absence of pain- especially
mental pain or dread, angst, anxiety. It is a gospel of quietism
to which pleasure is purely incidental. It is a philosophy of
liberation through renunciation of the world.
Epicurians found pleasure in observing good form; Reducing needs
makes satisfaction more possible. The philosophy is very unproductive
and was attacked by Cicero in his De Finibus. It is reported
that Epicurus suffered from dyspepsia.
POETRY EXCERPT DELUSION
Sleep after Toyle, port after stormy seas,
Ease after war, death after life does greatly please. (F.Q. I
ix 40)
POETRY EXCERPT DELUSION CLASSICAL
Sweet is is when the breakers roar,
To watch the waves in wild commotion;
And from the safety of the shore,
See others struggling in the ocean. (De Rerum Natura II:
1-2) trans by Irwin Edman
POETRY EXCERPT DELUSION
The crown of olive let another wear;
It is my crown to mock the runner's heat,
With gentle wonder, and with laughter sweet. Sonnet 13 Geo. Santayana
CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY DELUSION ANECDOTE
Skepticism. 1) Pyrrho of Ellis (365-275 BCE) influenced by travel
to India and the philosophy of indifference of the Gymnosophists.
He was also influenced by the distrust of the senses taught by
Democritus who said that all sensations are subjective and misleading.
The core of Pyrrho's thought was indifference as a way of life.
Truth cannot be known so everything should be doubted. Indifference
permits tranquility. Don't desire, pursue, analyze.
Anecdote about Pyrrho who said of a pig eating garbage on the
deck of a storm tossed ship, "There is true peace."
See Seneca for the search for release and salvation
See Ambrose (stoic) De Officiis Ministrorum
CLASSICAL DELUSION PHILOSOPHY
(Skepticism)Protagorus taught that every theory can be supported
or denied with equal cogency. All things are hidden from us. We
can only be silent on our relation to the world (Aphasia)
These principles result in tranquility and happiness. That nothing
is knowable is not certain- we should do what seems best based
on hypothesis ie. common sense. The effect of skepticism was to
undermine Reason rather than to establish experimentalism, empiricism,
or positivism. In place of reason came faith ala Arnobius and
Tertullian.
Christian skeptics include Pascal, Kierkegaard, Newman, Karl
Barth. Without scientific method they succumbed to faith.- Rome,
Marxism, social conservatism
Plotinus opposed the replacement of Reason by myth, magic, allegory,
incarnation, ritual, etc. Reason alone can bring salvation. Faith
cannot give knowledge of the universe. See Journal of the History
of Ideas 30 (Jan-Mar 1969, 3-16 There was no need for a savior
to act as an intermediary between man and the divine.
PHILOSOPHY CLASSICAL
Carneades pgs. 64-68 of BOOK Hellenistic Ways of Deliverence.
He was probably the equal of Aristotle although very little of
his work survives. See Cicero De Natura Deorum and Academica
QUOTE
"Remain in ignorance, lest you should know what you ought
not to know" Tertullian showing that salvation depends on
faith and authority and not on reason or knowledge.
BOOK HISTORICALINSIGHT
The Making of the Modern Mind by John Randall 1940
French Civilization by A. L. Guerard
PHILOSOPHY
Truth, for Aquinas, is static and fixed "Blessed is the man
that shall dwell in Wisdom" Eccl:14:22 Nevertheless,
man could find God using natural reason. The Lutheran revolt denied
the efficacy of reason and that man was predestined to salvation
through the gift of faith.
CRITICALINSIGHT
The principle forms of interpretation are explained by Dante:
literal, moral, allegorical, anagogical. See Convivio 2nd
Treatsie cpt. 1-the goal was not description and control but to
know the meaning of life and the purpose of existence.
PHILOSOPHY CRITICALINSIGHT
Peter Ramus began with the thesis that everything taught by Aristotle
was wrong.
ANECDOTE
One objection to the moons of Jupiter went as follows: "these
satellites of Jupiter are invisible to the naked eye, and therefore
can exercise no influence on the earth, and therefore would be
useless, and therefore do not exist..."
BELIEF
Man is the centerpiece of creation and Aristotle had precedence
over observation as did the Platonic hierarchy of immutable perfectibility
of the heavens over the material mutability of earth. Galileo,
Kepler, Copernicus were not removed form the Index until 1835.
SOCIETY
Auguste Comte tried to lay a scientific foundation for a new organization
of society... to build society on a new basis, to bend industry,
as it had been bent during the Middle Ages, to a spiritual end.
"To establish in society something spiritual that is capable
of counterbalancing the influence of the ignoble materialism in
which we are at present submerged." A General View of
Positivism Malthus and Ricardo attempted to justify industrial
labor conditions as part of God's natural order. Malthus advocated,
"the total abolition of all the present forms of public charity
and relief"
SOCIETY PHILOSOPHY HISTORICALINSIGHT BELIEF
1) Buffon Natural History (1749) Nature culminating in
man through a gradual ascent.
2) G. E. Lessing Education of the Human Race (1780) revelation
is unending- the history of the human race exemplifies the growth
of humanity in knowledge and truth under divine guidance"
3) Herder Philosophy of History (1774) the evolution of
civilization from ancient to modern forms
DEATH EXCERPT DESCRIPTION
Irving reflecting on Westminster Abbey in his Sketchbook.
"What then is to insure this pile which now towers above
me from sharing the fate of mightier mausoleums? The time must
come when its gilded vaults which now spring so loftily shall
lie in rubbish beneath the feet; when instead of the sound of
melody and praise, the wind shall whistle through the broken arches
and the owl hoot from the shattered tower- when the garish sunbeam
shall break these gloomy mansions of death, and the ivy twine
round the fallen column; and the foxglove hand its blossoms about
the nameless urn, as if in mockery of the dead. Thus man passes
away; his name perishes form record and recollection; his history
is as a tale that is told, and his very monument becomes a ruin.
DESCRIPTION
The parson was a little, meagre, black-looking man, with a grizzled
wig that was too wide and stood off from each ear; so that his
head seemed to have shrunk away within it, like a dried filbert
in its shell." Irving Sketchbook "Christmas Day"
TRAVEL EXCERPT
I am always of easy faith in such matters, and am ever willing
to be deceived where the deceit is pleasant and costs nothing"
on seeing Shakespeare's bust Irving Sketchbook (Stratford
on Avon)
BOOK MEDIEVAL ART
Image On the Edge: The Margins of Medievial Art Michael
Camille 1992
DESCRIPTION
He sat down on the edge of a chair... wrapped in an expectant,
strange, primeval immobility. And thus sitting, a watch in his
hand, fat, and smooth, and golden, like a flattened globe of butter,
he thought of nothing" The Forsyte Saga cpt 5 description
of Swithin
WRITING
Indian Summer of a Forstyte
ANECDOTE QUOTE
On further negotiations with the Boors, Lord Milner replied that
this was asking for conciliation with "panoplied hatred,
insensate ambition, and invincible ignorance."
EXCERPT WRITING SIN
from Pilgrim's Progress ...and the other took directly
up the way to Destruction, which led him into a wide field, full
of dark Mountains, where he stumbled, and fell, and rose no more.
(46)
ANECDOTE SOCIETY
The ancient Germans debated issues twice. Once while drunk that
their debates not lack in vigor and once sober that they not lack
discretion
DEATH MYTH CLASSICAL
When the river god Imachus recognized his daughter Io in her form
as a heifer, he declared, "It is a dreadful thing to be a
god, for the door of death is shut to me and my grief must go
on without end." Ovid Metamorphoses I 660
TERM RELIGION
Epiphany: the symbolic presentation of the point at which the
undisplayed apocalyptic world and the cyclical world of nature
come into alignment.
EXCERPT SOCIETY DELUSION
"The figures on the chessboard were still the passions and
jealousies and superstitions and stupidities of man, and thus
positioned with regard to each other at any given moment could
be of interest only to the grim invisible fates who played the
game - who sat, through the ages, bow-backed over the table."
Henry James The Princess Casamassima
EXCERPT AMERICA DESCRIPTION
"And then they all woke up and for hours and hours the telephone
poles went by, and towns, frame houses, brick factories with ranks
and ranks of glittering windows, dumping grounds, trainyards,
plowed land, pasture and cows, and Milly got trainsick and Fainy's
legs felt like they would drop off from sitting in the seat so
long; some places it was snowing and some places it was sunny,
and Milly kept getting sick and smelt dismally of vomit and it
got dark and they all slept; and light again, and then the towns
and the frame houses and the factories all started drawing together,
humping into warehouses and elevators, and the trainyards spread
as far as you could see and it was Chicago."
-John Dos Passos U.S.A.
EXCERPT PHILOSOPHY CHARACTER
"A man's first care should be to avoid the reproaches of
his own heart; his next, to escape the censures of the world:
if the last interferes with the former, it ought to be entirely
neglected;..." Addison "Sir Roger At The Assizes"
WAR HISTORY ANECDOTE
The Spartans would not begin a campaign until there was a full
moon. Because of this, they arrived too late to participate at
the battle of Marathon against the Persians.
MYTH DEATH CLASSICAL DELUSION
The story of Cleobis and Bito, whose mother sought for them, from
Hera, the highest blessing to which mortals can attain. The youths
fell asleep and never awoke.
CLASSICAL CRITICALINSIGHT
Fulgentius, (6th) launched an allegorical interpretation of the
Aeneid with his Virgiliana Continentia. The view
of the epic as a story of the pilgrimage of the soul through life
was accepted for many centuries. The judgment of Paris became
a sermon on the 3 modes of life- the contemplative, the active,
and the sensual. The story of Pyramus and Thisbe, in the same
way under the influence of allegorizing classical stories, saw
Pyramus as the Son of God, Thisbe as the soul, the wall as Sin,
the fountain represents Baptism, the lion is the Devil. The story
explains that Thisbe cannot approach the fountain because of the
lion and waits in silence. Pryamus and Thisbe as to come together
under the Mulberry tree which represents the Cross. After Pryamus
dies, Thisbe imitates his sacrifice.
EXCERPT CHARACTER DISILLUSION EDUCATION
Training- training is everything: training is all there is to
a person. We speak of nature; it is folly; there is no such thing
as nature; what we call by that misleading name is merely heredity
and training. We have no thoughts of our own, no opinions of our
own: they are transmitted to us, trained into us. All that is
original in us, and therefore fairly creditable or discreditable
to us, can be covered up and hidden by the point of a cambric
needle, all the rest being atoms contributed by, and inherited
from, a precession of ancestors that stretches back a billion
years to the Adam-clan or grasshopper or monkey from whom our
race has been so tediously and ostentatiously and unprofitably
developed. And as for me, all that I think about in this plodding
sad pilgrimage, this pathetic drift between the eternities, is
to look out and humbly live a pure and high and blameless life,
and save that one microscopic atom in me that is truly me: the
rest may land in Sheol (hell) and welcome for all I care"
Mark Twain A Connecticut Yankee cpt. 18
SOCIETY EXCERPT
(Description of a crowded Victorian London street) Nor were there
wanting objects in the crowd itself to give new point and purpose
to the shifting scene. The rags of the squalid ballad-singer fluttered
in the rich light that showed the goldsmith's treasures; pale
and pinched-up faces hovered about the windows where was tempting
food; hungry eyes wandered over the profusion guarded by one thin
sheet of brittle glass an iron wall to them; half-naked shivering
figures stopped to gaze at Chinese shawls and golden stuffs of
India. There was a christening party at the largest coffin-maker's,
and a funeral hatchment had stopped some great improvements in
the bravest mansion. Life and death went hand in hand; wealth
and poverty stood side by side; repletion and starvation laid
them down together. Dickens Nickolas Nickleby cpt. 32 p
409
PHILOSOPHY GOD QUOTE
"He who truly loves God cannot wish that God should love
him in return."
QUOTE BEHAVIOR POWER HISTORICALINSIGHT
"When the pot boils, the scum will rise" - said of a
spurt in social mobility following the American revolution
RELIGION QUOTE
Extra ecclesiam nulla salus - "Outside of the Church, there
is no salvation"
Quoted in Felini's 81/2.
PHILOSOPHY CRITICALINSIGHT
Laughter, Sidney says, is indicative of the downward or baser
motion of man's existence and attitudes, whereas delight moves
upward, reflecting the instructive, morally uplifting effects
of comedy. The Defense of Poesie
POETRY ANECDOTE CRITICALINSIGHT
I put a hat upon my head
And walked into the Strand,
And there I met another man
Whose hat was in his hand.
Sam Johnson's parody of simpleminded poets. The poem is iambic
in rhythm, alternating tetrameter and trimeter verse length. The
fact that it scans so nicely is, however, no proof that it is
good poetry. Quite the contrary. Many of poetry's most subtle
effects are achieved by establishing an underlying rhythm and
then varying it by means of a whole series of devices, some dramatic
and expressive, others designed simply to lend variety and interest
to the verse.
Norton Anthology of English Literature Vol.1 "Note
of Poetic Forms and Terminology" 1969 ff
SCIENCE
The astronomer Halley in 1717 had demonstrated our solar system
to be adrift in some great star-swirl. Darwin reveals that the
whole world of life was similarly unfixed in position. Eiseley;
Darwin's Century p.99
SCIENCE PHILOSOPHY QUOTE BELIEF
Hawking on physics and reality:
These lectures have shown very clearly the difference between
Roger and me. He's a Platonist and I'm a positivist. He's worried
that Schrodinger's cat is in a quantum state, where it is half
alive and half dead. He feels that can't correspond to reality.
But that doesn't bother me. I don't demand that a theory correspond
to reality because I don't know what it is. Reality is not a quality
you can test with litmus paper. All I'm concerned with is that
the theory should predict the results of measurements. Quantum
theory does this very successfully....
SCIENCE PHILOSOPHY EXCERPT
"Because the partial theories that we already have are sufficient
to make accurate predictions in all but the most extreme situations,
the search for the ultimate theory of the universe seems difficult
to justify on practical grounds. . . The discovery of a complete
unified theory, therefore, may not aid the survival of our species.
If may not even affect our life-style. But ever since the dawn
of civilization, people have not been content to see events as
unconnected and inexplicable. They have craved an understanding
of the underlying order of the world. Today we still yearn to
know why we are here and where we came from. Humanity's deepest
desire for knowledge is justification enough for our continuing
quest. And our goal is nothing less than a complete description
of the universe we live in. Steven Hawkings. A Brief History
of Time. 13
EXCERPT PHILOSOPHY
Unless you feel it, you cannot gallop it down,
Unless it thrust up from your soul
Forcing the hearts of all your audience
With a primal joy beyond control.
Sit there for ever with scissors and paste!
Gather men's leavings for a rehash
And blow up a little paltry flicker
Out of your own little heap of ash!
It will win you claps from apes and toddlers
Supposing your palate welcome such-
But heart can never awaken a spark in heart
Unless your own heart keep in touch.
Faust: Part 1 (Goethe) lines 184-193
RELIGION
Wagner: A preacher can learn something from an actor.
Faust: Yes, when the preacher is an actor too; 177-178
PHILOSOPHY EXCERPT RELIGION SOCIETY EXCERPT
We see then that the two cities were created by two kinds of love:
the earthly city was created by self-love reading the point of
contempt for God, the Heavenly City by the love of God carried
as far as contempt of self. In fact, the earthly city glories
in itself, the Heavenly City glories in the lord. ref. 2 Corr.
10, 17. Augustine, The City of God. Book XIV, 28 (593)
POWER EXCERPT LAW HISTORICALINSIGHT SOCIETY EXCERPT
Remove justice, and what are kingdoms but gangs of criminals on
a large scale? What are criminal gangs but petty kingdoms? A gang
is a group of men under the command of a leader, bound by a compact
of association, in which the plunder is divided according to an
agreed convention.
Augustine, The City of God. Book IV: 4 (139)
PHILOSOPHY GOD EDUCATION EXCERPT
God speaks by the direct impact of the truth, to anyone who is
capable of hearing with the mind...He speaks to the highest of
man's constituent elements, the element to which only God himself
is superior.
Augustine. The City of God. Book XI, 2 (430).
ART MYTH TERM
"wyvern" or wivern, a heraldic monster with the forepart
of a winged dragon and the hind part of a serpent or lizard.
RELIGION EXCERPT GOD DESCRIPTION
On Hell from "Octavius" by Minucius Felix. xxxv. 1-3
And yet writings of the learned, and verses of the poets, warn
men of that river of fire, and the flaming circles of the Stygian
mere, prepared for eternal tortures, to which the declarations
of demons and the oracles of prophets have borne witness...And
to these torments there is neither bound nor end. The fire has
skill to burn and to remake, to riddle and yet nourish, the limbs
committed to it. As lightnings strike without consuming, and as
the fires of Etna and Vesuvius, and volcanoes in other lands,
burn on without exhaustion, so the penal fire does not undo those
whom it burns, but feeds on the mangled fuel of bodies unconsumed."
trans. by Gerald H. Rendall. 1966.
QUOTE SOCIETY PHILOSOPHY
I was a Socialist, detesting our anarchical scramble for money,
and believing in equality as the only possible permanent basis
of social organization, discipline, subordination, good manners,
and selection of fit persons for high functions. George Bernard
Shaw. "Mainly About Myself" (1898).
RELIGION SOCIETY PRAYER
The medieval day composed of Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext,
None, Vespers, and Compline. Liturgical day.
PHILOSOPHY CLASSICAL
See Scholasticism from the EB. What the early Schoolman knew of
classical philosophy. Boethius gave them his translations of the
Categories and the De interpretatione of Aristotle. Chalcidius
gave Plato's Timaeus and Boethius translation of Porphyry's Isagoge.
Also Chalcidius (6th c) commentary on his translation of Apuleius
(2nd c) De dogmate Platonis. More Plato indirectly from Macrobius
Somnium Scipionis of Cicero and some writings from Augustine.
Also add the Satyricon of Martianus Capella and Cassiodorus De
artibus ac disciplinis liberlium liberarum (liberal arts and logic),
the Origines of Isidore of Seville which is little more than a
copy of Cassiodorus.
RELIGION SIN HISTORICALINSIGHT DELUSION GOD
from THE CRUCIBLE by Arthur Miller. 1953, First published as Those
Familiar Spirits.: Like Reverend Hale and the others on this
stage, we conceive the Devil as a necessary part of a respectable
view of cosmology. Our is a divided empire in which certain ideas
and emotions and actions are of God, and their opposites are of
Lucifer. It is as impossible for most men to conceive of a morality
without sin as of an earth without "sky." Since 1692
a great but superficial change has wiped out God's beard and the
Devil's horns, but the world is still gripped between two diametrically
opposed absolutes. The concept of unity, in which positive and
negative are attributes of the same force, in which good and evil
are relative, ever-changing, and always joined to the same phenomenon-
such a concept is still reserved to the physical sciences and
to the few who have grasped the history of ideas. When it is recalled
that until the Christian era the underworld was never regarded
as a hostile area, that all gods were useful and essentially friendly
to man despite occasional lapses; when we see the steady and methodical
inculcation into humanity of the idea of man's worthlessness-
until redeemed- the necessity of the Devil may become evident
as a weapon, a weapon designed and used time and time again in
every age to whip men into a surrender to a particular church
or church-state. 34
BOOK HISTORY MEDIEVAL
From EB "TROY" p.318. About the year 1184 Benoit de
Sainte-More (qv) composed a poem of 30,000 lines entitled Roman
de Troie. Benoit reproduces the manners of his own times, and
builds up a complete museum of the 12th century- its arts, costumes,
manufactures, architecture, arms, and even religious terms.
AMERICA QUOTE CHARACTER
President Eisenhower on Senate Majority Leader William Knowland,
"There seems to be no final answer to the question, 'How
stupid can you get?"
TERM SCIENCE
Trigometric functions describe cyclic repetitive activity. Exponential
and logarithmic functions describe growth and decay.
TERM SCIENCE PHILOSOPHY
Quantum waves are oscillations of possibility. (Quantum waves
do not contain energy)
HISTORY HISTORICALINSIGHT CRITICALINSIGHT AMERICA
The modernists constructed their works out of fragments, omitting
the expositions, transitions, resolutions and explanations used
in traditional literature...they abandoned traditional forms...themes
were usually implied ...creating a sense of uncertainty... Literature:
the American Experience 561
CRITICALINSIGHT
One of the traditional marks of comedy is a final scene in which
all the characters come together in a renewed community.
SOCIETY AMERICA DESCRIPTION DELUSION
The Humboldt Murder Teena Brandon was the raw stuff distilled
to its very essence, a young woman from that vast constituency
living at or below society's safety net. The tyranny from which
she could not escape was less that of gender than of class, a
prison more tyrannical than Willa Cather's prairie town, especially
in white America, where class distinctions are not supposed to
exist. Hers was the marginalized world of mobile homes, grungy
rentals, public housing, unemployment, welfare, service jobs,
minimum wage, social workers, domestic abuse, sexual molestation,
absent fathers, paternity tests, teen-age pregnancies, foster
homes, court-ordered psychological counseling, learning centers
rather than high schools, Job Corps, petty crime, felony convictions,
and penitentiary hard time. (49) John Gregory Dunne. The New
Yorker. Jan 13, 1997.
BEHAVIOR PSYCHOLOGY SOCIETY CHARACTER
"Malcolm Gladwell (in his Dept. of Disputation, June 3) points
out the existence of "tipping points" that affect the
prevalence of epidemics and of violence. In my research as a professor
of population dynamics, I have argued that individuals as well
as societies have tipping points and than an individual's tipping
point, called a threshold, depends in part, on how many people
he sees engaging in any given behavior before he is willing to
do so himself. It is the distribution of thresholds within a population
which determines where and when tipping points are reached."
Thomas W. Valente. The John Hopkins University. Letter to the
editor of The New Yorker. Date unknown. (1996/1995)
QUOTE PHILOSOPHY CHARACTER BEHAVIOR
No rational argument will have a rational effect on a man who
does not want to adopt a rational attitude--Karl Popper
EXCERPT HISTORICALINSIGHT BEHAVIOR PHILOSOPHY
The scientific pretensions of recovered memory, I wrote, derive
from a number of unwarranted beliefs that were directly propagated
by Freud: that repression is the normal human response to trauma;
that experiences in infancy produce long-term memories that can
be accurately retrieved decades later; that adult psychological
difficulties can be reliably ascribed to certain forgotten events
in early childhood and not to others; that sexual traumas are
incomparably more susceptible to repression and to the formation
of neurosis than any other kind; that symptoms are themselves
"memories" that can yield up the story of their origin;
that dream interpretation, too, can disclose the repressed past;
that memory retrieval is necessary for symptom removal; and that
psychotherapists can confidently trace their clinical findings
to the patient's unconscious without allowing for the contaminating
influence of their own diagnostic system, imparted directly or
through suggestion. Could Lear be unaware of this passage? Hardly;
I read it aloud to him in a live debate about The Memory Wars
in New York City on November 13, 1995.
"Psychoanalysis Refuted"
PHILOSOPHY MEDIEVAL DESCRIPTION
Primordial matter is said to be nec quanta nec qualis nec quid:
it has neither quantity nor quality, still less is it substance.
So Aristotle, Metaphysics, VI. iii. 5 (Bekker). See Scholasticism
by Ridley. On disk.
AMERICA PHILOSOPHY HISTORICALINSIGHT
Here lies, in my opinion, a distinctive privilege of this country,
and a deep human mystery concealed behind its power and prosperity.
The tears and sufferings of the persecuted and unfortunate are
transmuted into a perpetual effort to improve human destiny and
to make life bearable; they are transfigured into optimism and
creativity. Jacque Maritain. Reflections on America. Text on disc.
See Documents: Jacque Maritain
CRITICAL INSIGHT
"Before criticizing any doctrine (idea) it must be seen in
historical perspective" Jacque Barzun. Classic, Romantic,
and Modern. (28)
HISTORICALINSIGHT HISTORY CRITICALINSIGHT
The characteristics of romanticism which the textbooks list as
if they were arbitrary choices by eccentric artists are merely
the embodiment of what I have just said (romanticisms could do
nothing more with the conventional abstractions, cliches, poetic
diction, and classical rules- so they turned to the world about
and within them; of every existing reality). As against poetic
diction and "noble" words, the romanticists admitted
all words; as against the exclusive use of a selected Graeco-Roman
mythology, they took in the Celtic and Germanic; as against the
uniform setting and tone of classical tragedy, they studies and
reproduced the observable diversities known as "local color."
As against the antique subjects and the set scale of pictorial
merits prescribed by the Academy, they took in the whole world,
seen and unseen, and the whole range of colors. As against the
academic rules prohibiting the use of certain chords, tonalities,
and modulations, they sought to use and give shape to all manageable
combinations of sound. As against the assumption that no civilization
had existed since the fall of Rome, they rediscovered the Middle
Ages and the sixteenth century and made history their dominant
avocation. As against the provincial belief that Paris and London
were the sole centers of human culture, they traveled to such
remote places as America and the Near East and earned the name
of "exotic" for their pains. As against the idea that
the products of cosmopolitan sophistication afford the only subjects
worth treating, they began to treasure folk literature and folk
music and to draw the matter of their art form every class and
condition of men. As against the materialistic view that only
the tangible exists, they made room in their notion of reality
for the world of dreams, the ineffable in man and nature, and
the supernatural.
Jacques Barzun. Classic, Romantic and Modern 59-60
TERM PHILOSOPHY CRITICALINSIGHT
Tragedy. Hegel describes it as the conflict of two rights. Eg.
the family and the state, the bond of parent and child, of brother
and sister, of husband and wife, of citizen and ruler, or citizen
and citizens (Antigone). There is a divine ethical substance that
in human will can conflict. "The competing forces are both
in themselves rightful, and so far the claim of each is equally
justified; but the right of each is pushed into a wrong because
it ignores the right of the other, and demands that absolute sway
which belongs to neither alone, but to the whole of which each
is but a partThe end of the tragic conflict is the denial of both
the exclusive claims. It is not the work of chance or blank fate;
it is the act of the ethical substance itself, asserting its absoluteness
against the excessive pretensions of its particular powers.(72).
The tragic effect depends uponour feeling that the elements in
the man's nature are so inextricably blended that the good in
him, that which we admire, instead of simply opposing the evil,
reinforces it. Macbeth's imagination deters him from murder, but
it also makes the vision of a crown irresistibly bright. If he
had been less determined, nay, if his conscience had been less
maddening in its insistence that he had thrown the precious jewel
of his soul irretrievably away, he might have paused after his
first deed, might even have repented. Yet his imagination, his
determination, and his conscience were things good" (88-9).
HISTORICALINSIGHT CRITICALINSIGHT
By 1850 the greatest names in romanticism belong to the dead:
Burke, Burns, Byron, Shelley, Blake, Keats, Scott, Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Hazlitt, Lamp, Pushkin, Lermontov, Espronceda, Goya,
Buchner, Beddoes, Chateaubriand; Leopardi, Beethoven, Chopin,
Menndelssohn, Schubert, Schumann, Bellini; Bonington, Gericault,
Balzac, Stendhal, Gerard de Nerval, Goethe, Schiller, Hegel, Schelling,
Schleiermacher, Hoffman, Kleist, Holderlin, Novalis, Wackenroder,
and the brothers Schlegel.
Jacques Barzun. Classic, Romantic and Modern . 98
GOD RELIGION REVOLUTION PHILOSOPHY
"Every idea of God is unutterable vileness" Lenin
PHILOSOPHY CRITICALINSIGHT
Dialectics cannot be stood on its head, for we have no evidence
that things other than thought behave dialectically.
CRITICALINSIGHT
Words constitute a language by being endowed with agreed meanings
in definite contexts used for the purposes of communication upon
an abstract level.
EDUCATION CHARACTER
The end of education is the promotion of virtue
PHILOSOPHY
A passage from Bronowski's The Ascent of Man: "There is
no absolute knowledge. And those who claim it, whether they are
scientists or dogmatists, open the door to tragedy. All information
is imperfect. We have to treat it with humility. That is the human
condition; and that is what quantum physics says. I mean that
literally."
The first sentence is autophagic. The second certainly sounds
absolute, and appears to be meant to be "scientific."
The third sentence not only self-destructs but obliterates the
entire context in which it is embedded. The fourth proposes the
practice of virtue which can hardly be said to be observed in
the next sentence. The fifth sentence introduces two more pontifications,
which, to have their intended impact, presume a species of infallibility
on the part of the speaker. The last sentence simply leaves one
flabbergasted.
The whole thing can be reduced to these primitive and autophagic
syllogisms: (1) There is no absolute knowledge. This is absolutely
true. Therefore this is (absolutely) false; and: (2) There is
no truth to be grasped. This is a truth. Therefore, this cannot
be grasped. Dr. John Lyon. Book Review. University Bookman. 29
(2), 1989.
CRITICALINSIGHT POETRY METAPHOR CLASSICAL ANECDOTE PHILOSOPHY
"...it is a matter of curious interest that a warning against
literal reading occurs at an early stage of the Phaedrus. Here
in the opening pages, appearing as if to set the key of the theme,
comes an allusion to the myth of Boreas and Oreithyia. On the
very spot where the dialogue begins, Boreas is said to have carried
off the maiden. Does Socrates believe that this tale is really
true? Or is he in favor of a scientific explanation of what the
myth alleges? Athens had scientific experts, and the scientific
explanation was that the north wind had pushed her off some rocks
where she was playing with a companion. In this way the poetical
story is provided with a factual basis. The answer of Socrates
is that many tales are open to this kind of rationalization, but
that the result is tedious and actually irrelevant. It is irrelevant
because our chief concern is with the nature of the man, and it
is beside the point to probe into such matters while we are yet
ignorant of ourselves. The scientific criticism of Greek mythology,
which may be likened to the scientific criticism of the myths
of the Bible in our own day, produces at best "a boorish
sort of wisdom." It is a limitation to suppose that the truth
of the story lies in its historicity. the "boorish sort of
wisdom" seeks to supplant poetic allegation with fact, just
as an archaeologist might look for the foundations of the Garden
of Eden. But while this sort of search goes on the truth flies
off, on wings of imagination, and is not recoverable until the
searcher attains a higher level of pursuit... Socrates believes
that some things are best told by parable and some perhaps discoverable
only by parable. From The Ethics of Rhetoric by Richard
M Weaver, 4 (1953) PN 4061.W4.
PHILOSOPHY HISTORICALINSIGHT ART
After the Enlightenment "Since the nature of reality was
no longer decreed by Christian dogma, but since man had to develop
some notion of the nature of things in order to act, the role
of the imagination was elevated to fill the need to interpret
experience. The imagination is related to the concept of the self
in this regard because it is an individual means of knowledge.
Thus, along with the personal, it was one of the qualities that
readers of the early nineteen hundreds found exciting in poetry"
From a book of essays on Keats.
HISTORICALINSIGHT SOCIETY
The death of Giangaleazzo Visconti, duke of Milan, in 1402 removed
a major threat to Florence which was surrounded by his conquests.
The astonishing turnaround of 1402 was a central moment of release
in Florentine history. The burst of creativity that followed this
sudden removal of grave danger has been compared to the aftermath
of the Athenian victory at Salamis or the Elizabethan defeat of
the Spanish Armada. In all three cases, there has seemed a connection
between the flourishing of the arts and the sense of relief that
followed the securing of political and military independence.
QUOTE
In the opening paragraphs of Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
says, "It is now the fall of my second year in Paris. I was
sent here for a reason I have not yet been able to fathom. I have
no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive."
QUOTE PHILOSOPHY EDUCATION EXCERPT
In Rabelais' Gargantua, the Abbey of Theleme has the motto
"Fay ce que vouldras," or "Do as you will."
The implication is: Don't go seeking after some ideal far removed
from your own needs. Don't get involved in some crusade to save
the human race because you falsely think that is the noble thing
to do, when what you may really want to do, if you are honest
with yourself, is to stay home, grow vegetables, and sell them
in a roadside market. (Growing vegetables is, after all, real
growth--more so than some New Age conceptions.) You have no obligation
under the sun other than to discover your real needs, to fulfill
them, and to rejoice in doing so.
Modern political correctness and prostituted religion have tried to turn all of what used to be considered virtues into social obligations. Not that anyone is expected to really practice what they preach; rather it is intended they feel guilty for not doing so, and once the guilt trip is underway, their behavior can be manipulated for political purposes.
EXCERPT PHILOSOPHY ART CRITICALINSIGHT EDUCATION QUOTE
"the Canon is about the search for wisdom....It is for the
highest mode of aesthetic experience. It is for cognition at the
most profound level. But most of all, I think, it is for training
memory in the deep sense, because you cannot think, you cannot
read, you cannot write without memory. And I suppose that's the
function of the great canonical works, to teach you what is worth
remembering and how to remember it." FROM Bloom. Philosophy
of Literature Bloom & Canon.
EDUCATION RELIGION
Rodriguez: Catholicism is a religion that stresses to you constantly
that you can't make it on your own, that you need the intercession
of the Virgin Mary, and the saints, St. Jude, and your grandmother--candles
and rosaries and indulgences and the pope. There are all these
intermediaries, because you facing God would be hopeless.
Title : The New, New World: Richard Rodriquez on Culture and
Assimilation
Author : Postrel and Nick Gillespie/Virginia I
Publication Date: Aug./Sept. 1994
Page Number(s) : 35-41
Source : Reason
EXCERPT
"Could you oblige me with a little tincture of cardamons,
mixed with rhubarb with seven drops of essence of clove- it's
to settle me stomach. If you've not such a thing by you, a little
brandy is the next best thing. It's not so palatable to me but
it's the next best thing."
Mrs. _______ David Copperfield
SEX HUMOR POETRY
On the bosom of dear Abigail
Was written the price of her tail
And upon her behind
For the use of the blind
Was the same information in braille.
DEATH PHILOSOPHY EXCERPT
There is no whole that all the parts of life serve. The ultimate
story is that the parts interact mostly to take advantage of each
other. Rarely do they interact to their mutual advantage. The
result is not just the dying but the mindless rapacity, the enormity,
of it all.
Nature makes everything in vain. After all, what is evolution?
A mindless process built on evil; that's what it is. Natural selection,
acting on some lineage of organisms, cannot look ahead along the
path of adaptation it is following. It cannot predict and evaluate
ahead of time the outcome of its shaping; it cannot weigh the
balance of prospective good and evil, undo its false steps, or
backtrack and strike off on an alternate path. Thus it bungles
and it botches and it makes do. But the rare things it gets almost
right do accumulate, and by now they have become quite prevalent.
So natural selection seems smart to those who see only the surviving
products, but as a design process it is idiotic. And the raw brutality
of the process is offensive. Title : Reflections on Huxley's
"Evolution and Ethics" Author : Falk/Arthur
Publication Date: Nov./Dec. 1995
Page Number(s) : 23-25
Source : Humanist
QUOTE SCIENCE
the Royal Society has as its motto: Nullius in Verba (On no man's
word)
ART DELUSION QUOTE PHILOSOPHY
Grosz's anti-militarism got him into trouble with the law. But
his character was gradually changing. "Today I no longer
hate human beings indiscriminately," he wrote in 1924. "What
I hate are their evil institutions and the men in power who defend
them." SEE Documents: Art: Artists: Grosz & Pessimism
RELIGION SOCIETY HISTORICALINSIGHT BEHAVIOR BELIEF HISTORY
"After the expulsion from Spain, many of the Jewish refugees
(under the influence of Isaac Luria) developed a new type of mysticism
that focused on the experience of exile. The myths of Lurianic
Kabbalah suggested that at the very beginning God had, as it were,
gone into exile from a part of himself to make room for the created
world. There had also been a primal catastrophe, during which
the Shekhinah, the bride of God, had been separated from the Godhead;
divine sparks were now scattered abroad and imprisoned in base
matter. There was thus a displacement at the heart of Being itself.
Nothing could be in its right place, and the exile of the Jews
symbolized the cosmic homelessness suffered alike by God and humanity.
But Jews could end the exile of the Shekhinah by the careful observance
of Torah and mystical prayer...Cut loose from their roots, Jews
experienced the world as a demonic realm and their life as a struggle
with evil powers. Luria's imagery helped them to transcend their
own misery by imagining a final return to the primal unity that
had characterized existence before the beginning of time (336-337).
See Jerusalem by Karen Armstrong.
SCIENCE BEHAVIOR
The most recent theories see human identity and the human ego
as a network of cooperative subsystems, rather than a single entity.
(Examples of this viewpoint can be found in Robert Ornstein's
MULTIMIND and Michael Gazzanaga's THE SOCIAL BRAIN).
If, as Carl Jung claimed, "our true religion is a monotheism
of consciousness, a possession by it, coupled with a fanatical
denial of the existence of fragmentary autonomous systems,"
then it can be said that psychological polytheism is on the rise.
Or, as some would say, mental chaos. Is this reassuring or alarming?
EDUCATION SOCIETY AMERICA
In general, those who most need education desire it least, or
rather, manifest the strongest aversion to it...Those who have
most-need least, and those who have least-need most, but those
who have most want most, and those who have least want least....Those
who desire it least will have least...
Lester F. Ward. Dynamic Society. Vol. 2. 1883. pp.584-9.
Extracted from Children and Youth in America. Vol. 2, 1105.
See the above reference for Children etc. (pp. 1119-1121) for
"In a Schoolroom" from New Republic, I (1914-15)
p. 23-24.
ART HISTORICALINSIGHT AMERICA CLASSICAL
See Bernard Knox article on ancient Greece and state support
of the arts. GOTO Documents: History: Ancient History: Greco-Roman:
Greek Theatre: Knox on art
ART ANECDOTE CLASSICAL SOCIETY
In Athens, a patron of the theater was called a choregos. If
he felt unfairly treated, he could name a wealthier citizen who
might more justly be appointed, and offer, to prove his contention,
to exchange property with him. But few tried to evade the assignment.
For one thing, such service could always be cited in a law court,
where wealthy men were liable to appear, as proof of democratic
loyalty. From Knox "Art and Duty"
ART HISTORICALINSIGHT CRITICALINSIGHT CLASSICAL WAR ANECDOTE
if we are to believe Plutarch, it was its subsidized theater
that saved Athens and its temples from destruction after the unconditional
surrender to the Spartans in 404 B.C. "Some say," he
reports, "that a proposition to sell the Athenians into slavery
was actually made in the assembly of the allies and that, at this
time, Erianthus the Theban made a motion that the city be razed
to the ground and the country round about it left for sheep to
graze. Afterwards however, when the leaders were gathered at a
banquet, and a man from Phocis sang the first choral ode in the
`Electra' of Euripides, the one that begins Agamemnonos o kora--`Daughter
of Agamemnon/Electra, I've run all the way/to your home in the
wild hills'--all present were moved to compassion and felt it
would be an atrocity to destroy a city that was so famous and
was the mother of such poets." SEE Knox in Documents: History:
Ancient History: Greco-Roman: Greek Art & Theatre: Knox on
art
QUOTE HUMOR
"My report was accurate. It just wasn't complete"
RELIGION BELIEF GOD
Aikenhead, Thomas (1678-1697)
A Scottish undergraduate of Edinburgh University who merits inclusion
here as a martyr of free thought. Brooding over his Bible he came
to the conclusion that it was "a rhapsody of ill contrived
nonsense" and said so. After a travesty of a trial he was
condemned and hanged. Dictionary of Freethinkers.
GOD PHILOSOPHY
Allingham, William (1824-1889)
Irish poet and close friend of Froude, Tennyson, Rossetti and
other famous writers whose conversations with him on religion
are recorded in his Diary (1907). They were all skeptics, he shows.
He professed to be an atheist but said that "we can not in
the least comprehend or even think Deity."
CRITICALINSIGHT
Anne Radcliff's insistence on the usefulness and necessity of
the irrational in her Gothic novel The Mysteries of Udolpho,
volume 4 chapter 12 and the adventure that befalls Count De Villefort,
his daughter, and her fiance. The 18th c vision of the family.
CRITICALINSIGHT
The Virgin Soil Upturned (1932-33 and 1960; Eng. trans.,
1935 and 1960)--a novel by M. A. SHOLOKHOV--is often named as
a prime example of socialist realism. Louis ARAGON, Bertolt BRECHT,
and Howard FAST are among non-Soviet authors who sometimes used
socialist realist techniques. The doctrine was also applied in
other Eastern bloc nations.
RELIGION SOCIETY MEDIEVAL
In 1227, Gregory IX introduced as an experiment something he
called the Inquisition. The inquisitor's primary concern was to
reconcile heretics to the church. If he succeeded, the heretic
was dismissed with penance, such as making a pilgrimage or fasting
on bread and water for so many days. This was the result for 90
percent of the people examined by the Inquisition.
However, there was a darker side to the tribunal's activities.
Cathar believers who refused to recant, for example, were normally
sent to prison until they changed their minds. Then, in 1252,
Pope Innocent IV licensed the use of torture in the case of obdurate
suspects. It wasn't to be used to force a heretic to recant (this
must be a free act) but only to make him divulge information about
the heretical group.
Convicted heretics who refused to recant were handed over to
the secular authorities for punishment because it was believed
unchecked heretical ideas posed a danger to society. SEE Documents:
History: Medieval: Cathars & Waldensians.
QUOTE SOCIETY BEHAVIOR
"The people of the Nordestino understand human nature to
be flawed and inclined toward treachery" (507). Death
Without Weeping -HV 1448 B72-
CLASSICAL
Greek recitals of man's accomplishments:
Prometheus by Aeschylus. LL:436ff.
Antigone by Sophocles. LL: 332ff.
Suppliants by Euripides. Theseus LL: 196ff.
CHARACTER
Persons of extraordinary spiritual energy, such as explorers,
travelers, statesmen, industrialists, businessmen, adventurers,
conquerors, criminals and so on, have the same physiological signs
of willpower (facial tension, large prominent chin, firmly
closed mouth).
From The Art of Make-Up by Serge Strenkovsky. 1937.
Man's face is really a microcosm, or miniature world. It proves the order of his development, and the cause of his embryonic life. Every face proclaims its possessor as to his race, sex, age, temperament, moral character, health, and position in intellectual rank. It reveals also his mental aptitudes, often his habitual behavior, his vices and virtues (47).
ANECDOTE
The ugliest woman in history was Margaret of Carinthia. See above
from Strenkovsky.
HISTORICALINSIGHT BEHAVIOR SCIENCE
Both Freud, the secularized Jew, and Jung, the discontented son
of a Swiss Protestant pastor, developed a deep antipathy towards
the Judeo-Christian tradition, especially its standards of sexual
morality. As E. Michael Jones showed in his recent book DEGENERATE
MODERNS, their theories on human sexuality reflected the most
pressing sexual concerns in their own private lives.(1)
Part of Freud's fame rose from his idea that incestuous desires
are universal in children; by the time he published this theory,
he already had been passionately involved with his own sister-in-law,
Minna Bernays. Jung, by the same token, undertook a sustained
investigation of human inclinations towards polygamy, and launched
a long series of extramarital affairs with patients and colleagues;
he went so far as to claim that "the prerequisite for a good
marriage...is the license to be unfaithful."(2) In both cases,
as Jones showed, the personal temptation preceded the formulation
of a general, exonerating theory.
PHILOSOPHY SCIENCE RELIGION
The old "vitalistic" approach, best represented by Ernst
Haeckel, maintained that evolution was guided by a sort of spiritual
life-force that existed within all things. The newer theories,
like those which are now dominant, were entirely materialistic
and held that inheritance and evolution happened in a physical
way, traceable through studies like genetics. Interestingly, Jung
clung throughout his life to the older view, espousing a sort
of pantheism that sought the life-energy itself within the processes
of the natural world and the depths of the human soul. THE
SWISS MAHARISHI Discovering the Real Carl Jung & His Legacy
Today by Philip G. Davis
CRITICALINSIGHT LITERATURE
If Foster is right, Shakespeare played Theseus in A Midsummer
Nights Dream and "Chorus" in Henry V and
Romeo and Juliet. In play after play the first character
to come on stage and speak is the one that Foster's test identifies
as Shakespeare: John Gower in Pericles, Bedford in Henry
VI, Part I, Suffolk in Henry VI Part II, and Warwick
in Henry VI Part III. And Foster's test picks out as Shakespeare's
the two roles that we have seventeenth-century evidence he played:
the ghost in Hamlet and Adam in As You Like It.
See Documents: Literature: Renaissance: Shakespeare: Computers
id Shakespeare.
CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY DEATH QUOTE
"There await men after they are dead things which they do
not expect or imagine." Heraclitus Fragments
HISTORY WAR MEDIEVAL
Finally, there is the myth about how war-horses were ridden and
the impact this had on their use as cavalry. Thirty years ago,
in Medieval Technology And Social Change, Lynn White, Jr., claimed
that the Carolingian conquests were based on the "new cavalry"
made possible by the introduction of stirrups to the West around
750. This riding aid, which had been developed on the steppes
of Asia, probably centuries earlier, gives the rider a secure
seat. The implication of this, said White, is that it made possible
the attack with couched lance--hence, for example, Charlemagne's
victories. (In fact, his success depended most on his mastery
of logistics and siege warfare.) This attempt at technological
determinism, as well as being too narrow, was chronologically
wrong. Stirrups are more likely to have appeared at least a century
later, and the couched lance does not seem to have been used until
the mid-eleventh century. Certainly the Franks perfected the technique,
with the Normans notable in its execution. The Bayeux Tapestry
(c. 1080) shows some knights with heavier lances decked with gonfanons.
These large banners would have made throwing the lance impossible
and impeded an over-arm
thrust. Their appearance coincides with the use of the couched
lance, held tightly under the right armpit and often rested on
the cantle, uniting man and horse into one projectile.
SEE DOCUMENTS: History: Medieval: Battles: Knights...history of.
PHILOSOPHY QUOTE CLASSICAL
"time is the moving image of eternity." Plato. Timaeus
Essence is indeed found in changing things, but in a vague and
imperfect way. Essence in the unchanging world is immanent in
the changing one in time. See Historical Introduction to Philosophy.
Albert B. Hakim. page 57.
BEHAVIOR CRITICALINSIGHT
Benjamin Whorf (1897-1941), the linguist, shares credit for the
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis that language shapes thought
RELIGION POETRY
"grisly saints and martyrs hairy" Don Juan Canto
II:149:1191 (Lord Byron)
DEATH POETRY EXCERPT
There, breathless, with his digging nails he clung
Fast to the sand, lest the returning wave,
From whose reluctant roar his life he wrung,
Should suck him back to her insatiate grave:
Don Juan Canto II:108:860
QUOTE DISILLUSION
With the assassination of John F. Kennedy in November, 1963, Thompson's
dark tendencies crystallized into an outlook. Writing to his friend,
the novelist William Kennedy, on the very day of the calamity,
he first makes use of the noun combination that will eventually
serve as his tag line: "There is no human being within 500
miles to whom I can communicate anything -- much less the
fear and loathing that is on me after today's murder." And,
"We now enter the era of the shitrain, President Johnson
and the hardening of the arteries." And, "This is the
end of reason, the dirtiest hour in our time."
WRITING
the Greek phrix, which means ''the stiffening of water in the
wind, or the skin in fear'';
MEDIEVAL RELIGION PHILOSOPHY
To the Lord Bishop Patiens (474) from Apollinaris Sidonius
One man deems happiness to consist in one thing, a second in
another; my own belief is that he lives most to his own advantage
who lives for others, and does heaven's work on earth by pitying
the poverty and misfortune of the faithful. Full text in The
Western Tradition by Eugen Weber (209)
CRITICALINSIGHT TERM CLASSICAL EXCERPT DEFINITION
Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of
whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites
it with the human sufferer. Terror is the feeling which arrests
the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in
human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause. SEE James
Joyce A Portrait of the Artist (409) Levin edition.
EXCERPT POETRY WRITING DESCRIPTION
"It was that windless hour of dawn when madness wakes and
strange plants open to the light and the moth flies forth silently"
A Portrait of the Artist (484)
"In the virgin womb of the imagination the word was made flesh" (484)
PHILOSOPHY CRITICALINSIGHT
But Russell's methodological approach is the latest installment
of Descartes' empiricist side, which constitutes a type of philosophy
that has been instrumental in sweeping away the absolute power
of the monarchists, undercutting the powers of the churches, humanizing
law and society, extending education to all citizens, reinforcing
the dignity of man and democratizing Western political systems.
The use of scientific method, logic, and artful conjecture has
been one of the great accomplishments of W