Here are some things that I've run across in my readings,
things that I've found amusing, enlightening or otherwise interesting.
"Be it handicraft, science, or art, the chief aim of the school is not to make a specialist from a beginner, but to teach him the elements of knowledge and the good methods of work, and, above all, to give him that general inspiration which will induce him, later on, to put in whatever he does a sincere longing for truth, to like what is beaiftiful both as to form and contents, to feel the necessity of being a useful unit amidst other human units, and thus to feel his heart at unison with the rest of humanity." -- page 199-200.
"When I look at myself before a glass I am not pleased ; I fear I cannot look into the glass and say to myself, " What a fine fellow ! " I wish I could. All the same I am willing to put up with myself ; I am not yet tired of the sun ; I like still to feel the movement of being, and to know that another spring has come ; I love myself enough to love the world." -- page 13
Art...must draw towards a total exaltation in which the individual mingles, losing his consciousness in a truth immediate, rare, enormous and perfect. If a work of art succeeds in this undertaking even for a single moment, it attains its goal. (page 1)
That is to say, that the final symbolic result, at least in France, may be realized only by an orchestra or by manipulations of electroacoustic music on tape recorders, emitted by the existing electroacoustic channels; and not, as would be desirable in the very near future, by an elaborate mechanization which would omit orchestral or tape interpreters, and which would assume the computerized fabrication of the sonic entities and of their transformations.(page 22)
Aquinas writes: "Therefore, unmitigated seriousness betokens a lack of virtue because it wholly despises play, which is as necessary for a good human life as rest is." (page 2)
For instance, we hear the voice of Augustine who, in his De Musica, says that the truly wise man will now and then relax the tension of this mind and let its sharp edge be dulled, and Aquinas adds that it is just this that is achieved by playful action and speed. (page 3)
All play - just as much as every task which we set ourselves to master with real earnestness of purpose - is an attempt to approximate to the Creator, who performs his work with the divine seriousness which its meaning and purpose demand, and yet with the spontaneity and effortless skill of the great artist he is, creating because he wills to create and not because he must. (page 28)
A smile is a sign of wisdom - so thought the Greek Fathers. Indeed Origen, exaggerating the easy and relaxed quality of mind that should always mark the Christian, goes so far as to say that the truly wise man is like a child that smiles and playes by the bier of its parents. (page 37)
"To shorten one's sleep at night, to exploit to the full every hour of the day, to use oneself to the bone and then understand that it is all a jest - that is to be serious indeed." (page 58)
The essence of the doctrine of the Tao seems to be that it is through withdrawing ourselves rather than asserting ourselves, through retreating rather than advancing, through yielding rather than pursuing, through inaction rather than through action, through becoming quiet rather than through making a stir, that we attain wisdom and spiritual power.
Laotze teaches that we should cultivate the art of reducing our self-assertion to the supreme limit. He insists that we should un-learn our superficial cleverness and not only cease competing with others, but flow with them and into them, and through them, and lose our identity in their presence, deliberately becoming undistinguished, unimportant, insignificant — but thus becoming the most magical of magicians! (page 16)To strip oneself of superfluities is the great secret of happiness; and chief among superfluities are all those thousand and one appearances of things that can be forgotten if we make an effort of the will. The important thing is to lay all the stress upon the mind and the will; and thus, fay the elimination of “appearances,” live entirely in those larger, simpler, more permanent elements of our perception that are unaffected by chance or change. (page 18)
Reduce your own possessiveness to the limit, simplify your own life to the limit, and concentrate upon the power of your own mind, which is itself a portion of that Divine Fire that creates and destroys all things.(page 20)
An artless and childish candour is one of its most effective weapons. Once liberated from ambition, a person has nothing to lose by being taken for a fool. There is even an advantage in being actually accepted as worse than a fool; as a nit-wit, an idiot, a harmless ass. Too self-centred to desire to score off or overcome or humiliate another self, such a person only seeks the immediate interest of watching this other ego expand and assert itself after its own fashion. (page 57)
Ask a man what he believes - what his views are about God and Immortality, Good and Evil, all the First and Last Things - and you will see him pause for a second, drop his contact with the real caress and the real stab of his immediate sensations, turn from the hurt and the balm of his passing thoughts, and proceed to fling his consciousness upon some vague, remote, hypohetical theory, a theory or a dogma, drawn from custom, with hardly a tincture or twist given it by his own desire or by his own proud denial of his desire. (page 66)
Humanity has reached a point in the evolution of our race when we know for certain that it is a simple life and a simple life alone that brings human beings to that desirable condition known as happiness. We have reached a point where the fallacy has been exposed that the increase of social intercourse and the apparatus of social pleasure does anything but murder real happiness. (page 77)
A well-managed solitary life, whether surrounded by people or protected from people, is a very delicate and a very difficult work of art. Routine plays the leading part. Men and women who do not insist on routine in their lives are sick or mad. Without routine all is lost. Just as without some kind of rhythm all is lost in poetry. For routine is man's art of copying the art of Nature. In Nature all is routine. The seasons follow one another in sacred order; the seed ripens, the leaf expands, the blossom and the fruit follow, and then comes the fall. (page 78)
"Sink into your soul. Say to yourself: -- "Here am I, a living, conscious self, surrounded by walls, streets, pavements, houses and roofs. Above me is the boundless sky, beneath me the solid earth. All around me are people of my own kind with their fixed ideas and their fixed habits. Out of my loneliness I stretch forth my spirit towards these inanimate things which the others are passing carelessly by, and taking casually for granted, toward these stones, towards this dust, towards this brick-work and iron-work and woodwork, on which the sun or the moon is shining, upon which the rain is falling, or the clouds rolling, or the mist sinking down. I am in a hospital, in a prison, in a mad-house and it is the same thing! I stretch our my spirit to these walls, to that window, to that square of blueness, yellowness, or greyness, or blackness, which is the window of this place. These inanimate substances, this inanimate space, this air, this light, this darkness is my universe, the world into which I - this living self - have been flung by an inscutable destiny. It is in my power to gather up my forces and embrace this universe, represented by these material elements about me. It is in my power to assert my nature, my in most being, against these things, upon these things. It is in my power to satisfy my senses upen them and to feel, as I stretch out my spirit towards them, that I am embracing, and yet defying, the whole material world! As I do this, it matters nothing how ignorant I am of the great religions, the great philosophies, the great prophets and sages of my race. Here am I - the "I am I" within this weak, feeble, wretched, discomforted body - stretching out my spirit to the great mystery of the universe as represented by these queer objects, these stones, this wood-work, this dark night, these gusts of rainy wind". Whether these simple words convey or do not convey...the sort of attitude I have in mind, what I would like to add to them would be a renewed emphasis upon the importance of loneliness. Only in loneliness does the essential mystery of the substance of matter reveal itself.(page 90)
But I have seen Negroes— those most religious characters of our race— who obviously were enjoying precisely and exactly the mystical rapture I am speaking of, whose business kept them all day in the gloomy purlieus of a station latrine. Something they had— some little personal possession upon a chair down there— the cover of a magazine, an old painted cigarbox With silver paper inside it, which served, when they fixed their attention upon it, the same purpose as was served by my northerly window in the madhouse, and the flying leaves that were blown upon that melancholy wind. (page 100)
The real difficulties of our days have to do with bearing patiently, or defying heroically, or driving away by magic, the innumerable bodily and mental ills which persecute us and harass us and prevent the breath of life from flowing through us.(page 102)
Yes; even in the most cataclysmic times the majority of people have plenty of moments when they can think this way or that way about the secret of the universe. And never in history has it been more important for the individual to think deep and long, when the whole tendency of collective life is doing what it can to take the glamour of existence and kill it.
But a man’s life, a woman’s life can be lived like a thing of magic still, if we will only be obstinate, crafty and lonely.(page 121)
The hour is at hand, yea! has now come, when a vast number of individuals in our Western Nations will decide to detach themselves, not aggressively, or with any theatrical fuss, but obstinately, craftily and constantly, from such aspects of modem life — like our insane mania for automobiles — which tend to destroy that basic poetry upon which a calmly happy human life depends. These life-escapers on wheels have no very happy expression. The speed of their cars is an index of their miserable distraction. They are fleeing at this frantic pace from the Demon of Boredom.
Albert Durer, if we resurrected him, could engrave this Demon, and set him at the side of all these callous, reckless, feather-brained drivers, spurring them to go yet faster! The look that Albert Diirer would put into this Arch-Devil’s face would be a fine symbol of our civilization. Can you not see him there, wild with the lust of speed and destruction? A mania for automobiles may, of course, be as harmless a “penchant” in a person’s life as a mania for postage stamps. But it is hard not to detect something sinister in it when it ceases to be the natural satisfaction of the innate explorer and wanderer in us and becomes either a vulgar barometer of our success in life or a baseless enlarging of our personal importance while we remain perfectly insignificant. (page 144)
Nietzsche maintained the admirable opinion that all exciting and enlarging human thoughts come to their originators’ heads in the process of walking. Philosophy that is worthy of the name is a walking philosophy. Now there are many subtle reasons for this. In the first place the “humours” of the body, as Burton explains them in his “Anatomy of Melancholy,” are stirred up, shaken off, dissipated, dispersed, by the movement of walking. (page 149)
A life spent between the seat of a chair and the seat of a car is a monkey’s life, not a man’s. When you think in a seated posture you think with your rump, not with your soul. The reason why women are more profoundly life-conscious than men is because they are more often on their legs. (page 150)
The mere physical process of walking; this putting of one leg in front of the other, this treading on the pavement, on the road, on the grass, is itself an engenderer of wise and gentle thoughts. A person cannot be too conscious of his body as he walks; of the actual sensation of movement as he stretches his legs.
By treading upon her with alternate feet you enter into a subtle and intimate relation with your mother, the earth. It is as if the earth in her deep planetary masochism got pleasure from being trodden upon, just as she does from being ploughed up.
You should feel, as you walk, something of the exultant pride with which our remote
ancestors first stumbled across the astonished earth. You should revert to the old childish glory in being able to move at all in this upright manner. And in the mere process of walking a thousand mysterious understandings spring up between you and the earth which cannot reach you, though you steer your car ever so cleverly, while you are sitting above wheels.
In the process of actually touching the earth you realize what an escape from everything that hurts you worst in the world the Inanimate is. (page 151)
“Is it better to give myself up, then,” you will say, “to lonely broodings and solitary tragic feelings than to enjoy intelligent conversation with congenial people?” Certainly it is! For while you are jesting with your friends there comes an expression of indescribable futility and ghastly misery into your eyes whereas, while you are walking alone, and responding with a full heart to the wild sky above your head, your eyes, under the street-lamp, have a look of rapturous exultation.
The whole trend of our present-day ideas is pitifully wrong. It is all heading in the direction of more and more unhappiness. To tell us “to keep on smiling” as the preachers do, is enough to make us howl like the damned.(page 177)
The only thing to do is to detach yourself at one stroke from all these agitating too-human interests. Earn your living. Stop competing and self-pitying; and live — even in the midst of all your friends — as if the streets were the Desert and you were alone with the over-arching sky. (page 178)
Simplify your individual life, until it becomes a microcosmic epitome of that far-off Golden Age! Simplify your desires till you enjoy with sacramental ecstasy every single physical sensation you have. Simplify your exactions from other personalities till you enjoy your loves without making all these self-pitying, whimpering, scolding, aggravating claims upon them. It is not only your own happiness that will come to you from this solitary, stoical, detached attitude to the alien lives linked so closely with your own.
This whole secret movement, in favour of a contemplative, spiritual anarchism, is no mere return to a life of sensation against a life of action. It is a sinking back upon the one thing, in this brief moment of Being between two impenetrable Silences, which possesses an authentic and majestic grandeur worthy of the noblest traditions of our race. (page 191)
There is too much expression. On all sides we are aware of too many things — and nearly all of them moving too fast! All this modern hubbub about selfexpression is a sign of the disease. What we want is not more self-expression but less self-expression! The self is most deeply itself — as the Taoists taught — when it liberates itself from the necessity of all this “expressiveness” and just flows like water, floats like air, melts imperceptibly into the immemorial strata o£ aeons-old rocks. (page 225)
Leisure is a form of silence, of that silence which is the prerequisite of the apprehension of reality: only the silent hear and those who do not remain silent do not hear. Silence, as it is used in this context, does not mean 'dumbness' or 'noiselessness'; it means more nearly that the soul's power to 'answer' to the reality of the world is left undisturbed. For leisure is a receptive attitude of mind, a contemplative attitude, and it is not only the occasion but also the capacity for steeping oneself in the whole of creation. (page 52)
When we really let our minds rest contemplatively on a rose in bud, on a child at play, on a divine mystery, we are rested and quickened as though by a dreamless sleep. (page 53)
You know what happens when you get angry? First, your face gets just like a fist and then your heart gets like a bunch of bees that flies up and stings your brain in the front and then your two eyes is like dark clouds looking for trouble and your blood is like a tornado and then you have bad weather inside your body.
Moore goes a bit eugenics on us in this book, but this quote is nice/amusing.
"It is an injury for a child ever under any circumstances to participate in any game, or contest. It fires the very instinct it is the duty of culture to curb. Childhood pastimes should be scrupulously those which afford divertisement without degradation: dancing, dumb-bells, see-saw, sailing, stilts, kites, tree-planting, strolling, exploring, sleighing, swimming, swinging, outing, and the like. Or, better than pastimes which do not stimulate egoism, are those which actuate altruism. The cooperative construction of a mimic dam or domicile is better than bicycling, in so far as character culture is concerned, because in the one there is actual cultivation of helpfulness, while the other contains only the negative virtue of neglecting the cultivation of egoism. All school-room competition should be abolished."
Homo's hair was black, that of Ursus, gray; Ursus was fifty, unless, indeed, he was sixty. He accepted his destiny, to such an extent that, as we have just seen, he ate potatoes, the trash on which at that time they fed pigs and convicts. He ate them indignant, but resigned. He was not tall—he was long. He was bent and melancholy. The bowed frame of an old man is the settlement in the architecture of life. Nature had formed him for sadness. He found it difficult to smile, and he had never been able to weep, so that he was deprived of the consolation of tears as well as of the palliative of joy. An old man is a thinking ruin; and such a ruin was Ursus. He had the loquacity of a charlatan, the leanness of a prophet, the irascibility of a charged mine: such was Ursus. In his youth he had been a philosopher in the house of a lord.
"We may congratulate ourselves that this cruel war is nearing its end. It has cost a vast amount of treasure and blood. . . . It has indeed been a trying hour for the Republic; but I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless."
p. 239 "Were not the millions of Rockefeller, the Standard Oil magnate, as much created by nature and society as the millions of Astor, the New York landlord? Is not machinery a social product, the result of centuries of experiment and invention? In short, is not our whole civilization essentially a social product? Back of every inventor stands a thousand others who made his invention possible. Back of every enterprising capitalist stands the entire nation, without which not one of his schemes could succeed. The day of Robinson Crusoes and Daniel Boones has gone by. No man can point to his pile of gold and say: '' Alone I earned it." What is called Socialism is not a visionary plan for remodelling society; it is a present fact, which is not yet recognized in the distribution of wealth."
p. 29 "At one time five of us tried to understand De Quincey's marvelous "Dreams" more sympathetically, by drugging ourselves with opium. We solemnly consumed small white powders at intervals during an entire long holiday, but no mental reorientation took place, and the suspense and excitement did not even permit us to grow sleepy. About four o'clock on the weird afternoon, the young teacher whom we had been obliged to take into our confidence, grew alarmed over the whole performance, took away our De Quincey and all the remaining powders, administrated an emetic to each of the five aspirants for sympathetic understanding of all human experience, and sent us to our separate rooms with a stern command to appear at family worship after supper "whether we were able to or not." "
p.71 "We have in America a fast-growing number of cultivated young people who have no recognized outlet for their active faculties. They hear constantly of the great social maladjustment, but no way is provided for them to change it, and their uselessness hangs about them heavily. Huxley declares that the sense of uselessness is the severest shock which the human system can sustain, and that if persistently sustained, it results in atrophy of function. These young people have had advantages of college, of European travel, and of economic study, but they are sustaining this shock of inaction. They have pet phrases, and they tell you that the things that make us all alike are stronger than the things that make us different. They say that all men are united by needs and sympathies far more permanent and radical than anything that temporarily divides them and sets them in opposition to each other. If they affect art, they say that the decay in artistic expression is due to the decay in ethics, that art when shut away from the human interests and from the great mass of humanity is self-destructive. They tell their elders with all the bitterness of youth that if they expect success from them in business or politics or in whatever lines their ambition for them has run, they must let them consult all of humanity; that they must let them find out what the people want and how they want it. It is only the stronger young people, however, who formulate this. Many of them dissipate their energies in so-called enjoyment. Others not content with that, go on studying and go back to college for their second degrees; not that they are especially fond of study, but because they want something definite to do, and their powers have been trained in the direction of mental accumulation. Many are buried beneath this mental accumulation with lowered vitality and discontent. Walter Besant says they have had the vision that Peter had when he saw the great sheet let down from heaven, wherein was neither clean nor unclean. He calls it the sense of humanity. It is not philanthropy nor benevolence, but a thing fuller and wider than either of these."
p. 56 "I know of a woman who had six children; she had rheumatism and St. Vitus dance at the same time; she had no money, no friends. But somehow or other she had Pep and grit and she came out all right, and I understand occasionally she has pie for breakfast, so I guess you needn't worry."
p. 56 "The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare."
p.16 "If you've been redeemed," he said, "I wouldn't want to be."
p.32 "Listen," he said, "get this: I don't believe in anything."
p.46 "... She had a brick house, but it was Jesus all day long."
p.58 "People aren't friendly here. You ain't from here but you ain't friendly neither."
p.60 "It was plain that she was so well-adjusted that she didn't have to think anymore."
p.76 "I don't have to run from anything because I don't believe in anything", Haze said.
(p. 31) ... Years after his beloved teacher died, he was back in India staying at the home of his guru's most devoted Indian disciple.
"I must show you something," the disciple said to my friend one day. "This is what he left for me." My friend was excited, of course. Any trace of his teacher was nectar to him. He watched as the elderly man opened the creaking door of an ancient wooden wardrobe and took something from the back of the bottom shelf. It was wrapped in an old, dirty cloth.
"Do you see?" he asked my friend.
"No. See what?"
The disciple unwrapped the object, revealing an old, beat-up aluminum pot, the kind of ordinary pot one sees in every Indian kitchen. Looking deeply into my friend's eyes, he told him, "He left this for me when he went away. Do you see? Do you see?"
"No, Dada," he replied. "I don't see."
According to my friend, Dada looked at him even more intensely, this time with a mad glint in his eyes.
"You don't have to shine," he said. "You don't have to shine." He rewrapped the pot and put it back on the bottom shelf of the wardrobe.
My friend had received the most important teaching, one that had its origins in the Buddha's revolutionary approach. He did not have to transform himself in the way he imagined: He just had to learn to be kind to himself. If he could hold himself with the care Dada showed while clutching the old pot, it would be enough. His ordinary self, wrapped in all of its primitive agony, was precious too.
Elizabeth, playing Charades, at CZNY 2016: "It sounds like time, and it looks like stabbing."
If civilization has an opposite, it is war.
(p. 459) I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
(p.133) There is not a chapter in any book in economics anywhere about doing more with less. Economists traditionally try to maximize what you have, but the idea that you could go from wire to wireless or from visible structuring to invisible alloy structuring did not occur to them at all. It was outside their point of view - beyond their range of vision. Economists are specialists trained to look only at one particular thing.
(p.251) We are being taught by all the foregoing to assume as closely as possible the viewpoint, the patience, and the competence of God.
`Doc would listen to any kind of nonsense and change it for you to a kind of wisdom. His mind had no horizon - and his sympathy had no warp. He could talk to children, telling them very profound things so that they understood. He lived in a world of wonders, of excitement. He was concupiscent as a rabbit and gentle as hell. Everyone who knew him was indebted to him. And everyone who thought of him thought next, "I really must do something nice for Doc." '
(#5) " Even the tree which blooms, lies, the moment that one perceives its bloom without the shadow of horror; even the innocent “How beautiful” becomes an excuse for the ignominy of existence, which is otherwise, and there is no longer any beauty or any consolation, except in the gaze which goes straight to the horror, withstands it, and in the undiminished consciousness of negativity, holds fast to the possibility of that which is better. Mistrust is advisable towards everything which is unselfconscious, casual, towards everything which involves letting go, implying indulgence towards the supremacy of the existent [Existierende]."
(#74) "[Slippers] are a monument to our hatred of bending over." <\p>
(#74) "Every work of art is an uncommitted crime."
(#83) "It is a miserable ideology, to claim that under present conditions the administration of a trust requires any more intelligence, experience, and even training than reading a pressure-gauge."
(#128) "For as long as I can think, I've derived happiness from the song, “Between mountain and deep, deep valley”: by the two rabbits who were stuffing themselves with grass, who were shot at by hunters, and upon realizing they were still alive, ran off. But I only understood the lesson quite late: reason can endure only in despair and crisis; it requires the absurd, in order to not be overcome by objective madness. One should act exactly like the rabbits; when the shot rings out, fall foolishly to the ground as if dead, collect oneself and one’s senses, and if one still has any breath, run like blazes. The energy to fear and that for happiness are the same, the limitless state of open-mindedness for experience, raised to self-sacrifice, in which the one who is overcome can find themselves again. What would any happiness be, which did not measure itself according to the immeasurable sorrow of what is? For the course of the world is deeply unsettled. Whoever cautiously adapts to it, partakes of its madness, while only the eccentric holds fast and commands the absurdity to halt. Only the latter may navigate the appearance [Schein] of calamity, the “unreality of despair,” and innervate from this, not merely that one still lives, but that there is still life. The cunning of the powerless hares redeems, along with themselves, even the hunters, whose guilt they pilfer. "
A White Bear! Very well. Have I ever seen one? Might I ever have seen one? Am I ever to see one? Ought I ever to have seen one? Or can I ever see one?
Would I had seen a white bear! (for how can I imagine it?)
If I should see a white bear, what should I say? If I should never see a white bear, what then?
If I never have, can, must, or shall see a white bear alive; have I ever seen the skin of one? Did I ever see one painted? described? Have I never dreamed of one?
Did my father, mother, uncle, aunt, brothers or sisters, ever see a white bear? What would they give? How would they behave? How would the white bear have behaved? Is he wild? Tame? Terrible? Rough? Smooth?
Is the white bear worth seeing?
Is there no sin in it?
Is it better than a Black One?
Barnaby's enjoyments were, to walk, and run, and leap, till he was tired; then to lie down in the long grass, or by the growing corn, or in the shade of some tall tree, looking upward at the light clouds as they floated over the blue surface of the sky, and listening to the lark as she poured out her brilliant song. There were wild-flowers to pluck - the bright red poppy, the gentle harebell, the cowslip, and the rose. There were birds to watch; fish; ants; worms; hares or rabbits, as they darted across the distant pathway in the wood and so were gone: millions of living things to have an interest in, and lie in wait for, and clap hands and shout in memory of, when they had disappeared.
One could not stand and watch very long without becoming philosophical, without beginning to deal in symbols and similes, and to hear the hog squeal of the universe. Was it permitted to believe that there was nowhere upon the earth, or above the earth, a heaven for hogs, where they were requited for all this suffering? Each one of these hogs was a separate creature. Some were white hogs, some were black; some were brown, some were spotted; some were old, some young; some were long and lean, some were monstrous. And each of them had an individuality of his own, a will of his own, a hope and a heart's desire; each was full of self-confidence, of self-importance, and a sense of dignity. And trusting and strong in faith he had gone about his business, the while a black shadow hung over him and a horrid Fate waited in his pathway. Now suddenly it had swooped upon him, and had seized him by the leg. Relentless, remorseless, it was; all his protests, his screams, were nothing to it—it did its cruel will with him, as if his wishes, his feelings, had simply no existence at all; it cut his throat and watched him gasp out his life. And now was one to believe that there was nowhere a god of hogs, to whom this hog personality was precious, to whom these hog squeals and agonies had a meaning? Who would take this hog into his arms and comfort him, reward him for his work well done, and show him the meaning of his sacrifice? Perhaps some glimpse of all this was in the thoughts of our humble-minded Jurgis, as he turned to go on with the rest of the party, and muttered: "Dieve—but I'm glad I'm not a hog!"
p.69 - Trotsky has recorded that Lenin, after his one conversation with me, said that I was incurably middle-class. So far Lenin was a sound observer. He, and Trotsky also, were of the same vital social stratum; they had indeed both started life from a far more advantageous level than I had; but the discolouration of their stream of thought by Marxist pretences and sentimentalities, had blinded them to their own essential quality. My conversation with Lenin turned entirely on the "liquidation" of the peasant and the urban toiler - by large-scale agriculture and power machinery. Lenin was just as much for that as I was, we were talking about the same thing in the same spirit; but we said the same thing as though it was a different thing because our minds were tuned in different keys.
p.145 - On one occasion, however, I reached a stage nearer the
desired reality.
It was at Christmas at Up Park and there was a dance in the Servants Hall
and the upper and lower servants mingled together.
There was a kitchen maid whom I suddenly discovered was pretty beyond
words and I danced and danced again with her, until my mother was moved
to find other partners for me.
She was a warm-coloured girl with liquid brown eyes and a quick pretty
flush of excitement.
Her name was Mary and that is all the name I ever had for her.
And afterwards in one of the underground passages towards the kitchen,
where perhaps I was looking for her, she darted out of a recess and kissed
and embraced me. No lovelier thing had ever happened to me.
Somebody became audible down the passage and she made a last dash at me,
pressed her lips to mine and fled.
And that is all.
Next morning I trundled off in the dog-cart on the frosty road to
Rowlands Castle station for Portsmouth, before sunrise, and when next I
went to Up Park for a holiday, Mary had gone.
I never saw her again, and I could not find her name nor where she had gone.
My mother who knew would not tell me. But I can feel her heart beat
against mine now, I can recall the lithe body in her flimsy yellow dress,
for all I know I have driven my automobile past Mary - an alert old lady I
am certain - on some Hampshire road within the last few weeks.
But after that I knew that love was neither filth nor flirtation and I
began to want more of it.
p.243 - The lean shock-headed intellectual doing his desperate tactless best in open-air games is never an attractive spectacle.
p.326 [being tongue-in-cheek in a letter to Miss Robbins] This choice of degree subjects is a very serious one, and one you ought to make now. For mental greatness - such as mine - you must attack the biological group. I sincerely regard mathematics as on a lower level intellectually than biology.
p.402 - Turning from my novels to the various papers, pamphlets and letters I was putting through this same period, I discover a much less candid display of view and attitude. I began well, but I found I was speedily entangled and bemused by various political and propagandist issues. I find a quite straightforward statement of my ideas in a paper I read to the Fabian society in October 1906, under the title of Socialism and the Middle Classes. Therein I say plainly that I "no more regard the institution of marriage as a permanent thing than I regard a state of competitive industrialism as a permanent thing" and the whole paper sustains this attitude.
p.404 - Socialism, if it is anything more than a petty tinkering with economic relationships is a renucleation of society. The family can remain only as a biological fact. Its economic and educational autonomy are inevitably doomed. The modern state is bound to be the ultimate guardian of all children and it must assist, place, or subordinate the parent as supported, guardian and educator; it must release all human beings from the obligation of mutual proprietorship, and it must refuse absolutely to recognize or enforce any kind of sexual ownership. It cannot therefore remain neutral when such claims come before it. It must disallow them.
p. 586 - I rememver vividly a conference we had in a shed upon the Thames embankment. The soldiers came "well groomed" as the phrase goes, in peculiarly beautiful red-banded peaked caps, heavy with gold braid. Crowns and stars, ribbons, epaulettes, belts and band of the utmost significance, adorned their persons. War was the most important function in life for them and they dressed for it. They sat down, like men who had given some thought to sitting down in the best possible manner. They produced their voices; they did not merely emit audible turbid thoughts as we did. If you had listened only to the sounds they made, you would have felt they were simple clear-headed men, speaking with a sane determination, and yet the things they said were by my standards almost inconceivably silly. Over against them sat my civilian colleagues, and only David Low could convey to you how comparatively ignoble we looked in our untidy every-day costumes, out bowler hats, our wilted collars, our carelessly chosen and carelessly tied war-time cravats. Judged by the way we carried ourselves we might almost as well have had no chests at all. And though our vocabulary was much more extensive there was no click about it. The noises we made came in shambling loose formation - from Scotland and Lancashire and Cockney London.
This is a book I recently aquired from my grandfather. It's huge, old, and full of interesting passages like the following, some wise, some...
p. 90 - Yet, as I have said, there is no doubt the Americans eat too much meat. Sedentary persons require but very little. Less is wanted in summer than in winter, in warm climates than in cold. People of wealth, whose circumstances impose no bodily hardships, need less than the poor, who are much exposed, and work hard; whereas, they consume more. Those who do not labor with their hands should never taste meat more than once a day.
p.99 - The Game of Base-Ball requires very active running, and for the young, it is an exceedingly healthful amusement. It fills the whole frame with a bound spirit, and sets the currents of life running like swollen brooks after heavy rains.
p.109 - The defective way in which American females protect their feet
from cold and wet is a sore evil; and he who persuades them to adopt a
wiser fashion, and cover their feet with better guards against colds and
consumption, will deserve the gratitude of the nation. We are in many ways
too fond of copying foreign fashions: but if our ladies would, in this
matter, follow the excellent example of English women, they would live
longer, and leave a hardier posterity behind them.
The shoes worn by our females, high and low, rich and poor, are not
thick enough to walk with safety upon a painted floor, hardly upon a carpet
in an unwarmed room; and yet they walk with them upon cold brick sidewalks,
upon damp and frozen ground, and even in mud.
The result is that they suffer from colds, sore throats, pleurisies,
lung-fevers, suppressions, inflammations of the womb, and many other ailments,
which in early life rob them of their freshness and beauty, of their health
and comfort, of their usefulness to their houshold and the world, and leave
them helpless in the arms of friends, with a patrimony of suffering for
themselves while they live and a legacy of disease handed down to their
children.
p. 479 - Sex of Child - How to Regulate Before Birth
When a Male Child is Desired. - Before cohabitation the husband
should eat nothing but good, substantial food, take long, hard exercise
in the open air, read light literature, abstain from indulgence for some
time before the procreative period. The wife should abstain from animal
food but should eat vegetables and farinaceous articles of diet, exercise
daily until almost fatigued and pass the time with older females than
herself.
After pregnancy the wife should eat a great deal of meat, eggs, and vegetables,
but little or no pastry or sweets, and should take walks and exercise in the open
air every day.
When a Female Child is Desired. - Exactly the opposite course should
be taken. The wife should eat the most stimulating food, should not indulge
the passions and should reserve her whole vigor and strength for the desired
time. The husband should take violent exercise until fatigued and a hot bath
every night.
After pregnancy the wife should eat little meat but should live mostly on
farinaceous food and take short walks in the open air, but not enough to get
tired, and should sleep as much as possible.
The entry for LUNATICS:
LUNATICS: Insanity, in a thousand male patients, has been traced to:
| Drunkenness | 110 | Consequences of disease | 100 |
| Epilepsy | 78 | Ambition | 73 |
| Excessive labor | 73 | Born Idiots | 71 |
| Misfortunes | 69 | Old age | 69 |
| Chagrin | 54 | Love | 47 |
| Accidents | 39 | Religious enthusiasm | 29 |
| Unnatural practices | 27 | Political events | 26 |
| Poisonous effluvia | 17 | Ill-usage | 12 |
| Crimes, remorse, and despair | 9 | Malformation of the skull | 4 |
| Other and unknown causes | 88 | Pretended insanity | 5 |
And the ferret, and the chameleon, and the lizard, and the snail, and the mole.
I am weary with my groaning; all the night make I my bed to swim; I water my couch with my tears.
And he left them, and went out of the city into Bethany; and he lodged there.
The blueness of a wound cleanseth away evil: so do stripes the inward parts of t he belly.
My bones are pierced in me in the night season: and my sinews take no rest.
We remember the fish, which we did eat in Egypt freely; the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlick:
Picasso said once that he who created a thing is forced to make it ugly. In the effort to create the intensity and the struggle to create this intensity, the result always produces a certain ugliness, those who follow can make of this thing a beautiful thing because they know what they are doing, the thing having already been invented, but the inventor because he does not know what he is going to invent inevitably the thing he makes must have its ugliness.
p. 68, from Jan Romein's article in Het Parool of April 3,1946 - That this girl could have been abducted and murdered proves to me that we have lost the fight against human bestiality. And for the same reason we shall lose it again, in whatever form inhumanity may reach out to us, if we are unable to put something positive in its place. The promise that we shall never forget or forgive is not enough. It is not even enough to keep that promise. Passive and negative rejection is too little, it is as nothing. Active and positive "total" democracy - politically, socially, economically and culturally - is the only solution; the building of a society in which talent is no longer destroyed, repressed or oppressed, but discovered, nurtured and assisted, wherever it may appear. And with all our good intentions, we are still as far from that democracy as we were before the war.
p. 110 - In its social aspects bicycling is, to a great extent, affected by local circumstances, but a neat and well-behaved rider always eventually gains the respect of all. Every wheelman should bear in mind that the public are tacitly hostile to the silent steed, and should invariably bear himself in an orderly and gentlemanly manner.
p. 61 - Exposition, criticism, appreciation is work for second-rate minds.
p.43 - Nothing has less to do with the real merit of a work of imagination than the capacity of all men to appreciate it; the true test is the degree and kind of satisfaction it can give to him who appreciates it most.
p. 27 - After our first roughneck routine my mother, as usual, played a saxophone solo. This day the Yale students applauded her modest effort vigorously enough to rock the theatre. After she took about six bows Pop stepped to the footlights and told them with a wink, "Don't spoil her boys. She's hard enough to handle now." Whereupon one of the Old Eli cutups, sitting in the front row, yelled, "I agree with you friend. She stinks!" My infuriated father promptly picked me up and threw me at the young man with unerring accuracy, hitting him in the stomach and breaking three of his ribs. My slap shoe socked the Yale man next to him in the face, breaking two of his front teeth. I was uninjured, which surprised neither Pop nor me. It never occurred to either of us that I could get hurt no matter where he threw me.
p.43 - Painters, sculptors, musicians, mathematicians, poets, and men of letters generally, not infrequently exhibit eccentricities of dress, conduct, manner, or ideas, which not only merely add to their notoriety, but often make them either the laughing stocks of their fellow-men or objects of fear or disgust to all who are brought into contact with them.
p.133 - When it was finally removed and examined, Ted Bundy's brain looked like anyone else's.