Why read old books?

"Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books."

— C.S. Lewis

More context from Lewis here (via Justin Taylor)...

Chesterton: ATC2

G.K. Chesterton's All Things Considered is proving to be so quotable that I'll need 3 posts to hit the highlights. Here's #2:

• It is cheap to own a slave. And it is cheaper still to be a slave.
• I heard Mr. Will Crooks put it perfectly the other day: "The most sacred thing is to be able to shut your own door."
• The woman's world is a small one, perhaps, but she can alter it.
• [T]here are some things that a man or a woman, as the case may be, wishes to do for himself or herself. He or she must do it inventively, creatively, artistically, individually—in a word, badly.
• It is the thing most common to humanity that is most veiled by humanity. It is exactly because we all know that it is there that we need not say that it is there.
• All persons, as far as I know, on this earth receive money for what they do; the only difference is that some people, like the Irish members, do it.
• The saints, the most exalted of human figures, were also the most local. It was exactly the men whom we most easily connected with heaven whom we also most easily connected with earth.
• I certainly should not know if a soldier's sash were on inside out or his cap on behind before. But I should know uncommonly well that genuine professional soldiers do not talk like Adelphi villains and utter theatrical epigrams in praise of abstract violence.
• But I do think that I am not exaggerating my own sagacity if I say that I should begin to suspect the doctor if on entering my room he flung his legs and arms about, crying wildly, "Health! Health! priceless gift of Nature! I possess it! I overflow with it! I yearn to impart it! Oh, the sacred rapture of imparting health!" In that case I should suspect him of being rather in a position to receive than to offer medical superintendence.
• And as long as one is loyal to something one can never be a worshipper of mere force. For mere force, violence in the abstract, is the enemy of anything we love. To love anything is to see it at once under lowering skies of danger.
• It would be the end of German soldiers to be affected by German philosophy.
• [I]nvalids (alone of all human beings) desire strength.
• Journalists do control public opinion; but it is not controlled by the arguments they publish—it is controlled by the arguments between the editor and sub-editor, which they do not publish.
• No educated man born of woman will be quite so absurd as the system that he has to administer. In short, we do not get good laws to restrain bad people. We get good people to restrain bad laws.
• Men always attempt to avoid condemning a thing upon merely moral grounds. If I beat my grandmother to death to-morrow in the middle of Battersea Park, you may be perfectly certain that people will say everything about it except the simple and fairly obvious fact that it is wrong.
• [T]he modern world will not insist on having some sharp and definite moral law, capable of resisting the counter-attractions of art and humour, the modern world will simply be given over as a spoil to anybody who can manage to do a nasty thing in a nice way.
• [T]he vulgar man is always the most distinguished, for the very desire to be distinguished is vulgar.
• At no English public school is it even suggested, except by accident, that it is a man's duty to tell the truth. What is suggested is something entirely different: that it is a man's duty not to tell lies. So completely does this mistake soak through all civilisation that we hardly ever think even of the difference between the two things. When we say to a child, "You must tell the truth," we do merely mean that he must refrain from verbal inaccuracies. But the thing we never teach at all is the general duty of telling the truth, of giving a complete and fair picture of anything we are talking about, of not misrepresenting, not evading, not suppressing, not using plausible arguments that we know to be unfair, not selecting unscrupulously to prove an ex parte case, not telling all the nice stories about the Scotch, and all the nasty stories about the Irish, not pretending to be disinterested when you are really angry, not pretending to be angry when you are really only avaricious. The one thing that is never taught by any chance in the atmosphere of public schools is exactly that—that there is a whole truth of things, and that in knowing it and speaking it we are happy.
• [H]is righteousness would be more effective without his refinement.
• We are justified in enforcing good morals, for they belong to all mankind; but we are not justified in enforcing good manners, for good manners always mean our own manners.
• Precisely because our political speeches are meant to be reported, they are not worth reporting.
• Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers another; the public enjoys both, but it is more or less conscious of the difference.
• Physical science is like simple addition: it is either infallible or it is false.
• The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it.

Q195: Mavis Gallant

"He had never really held a place and could not by dying leave a gap."

and 

"[S]he was the daughter of such a sensible, truthful, pessimistic woman — pessimistic in the way women become when they settle for what actually exists."

 — Mavis Gallant

These quotes come from "Voices Lost in Snow" by Mavis Gallant.   You can hear a reading of the story (and a discussion of it) here.

Q194: The Elect Lady

I'm currently reading George MacDonald's The Elect Lady (if occasionally returning to a book for a few minutes can be called "reading").    So far, the book is a veritable quote factory.    Here are some bits from what I've read up to this point:

• [T]here are other ways than idleness of wasting time.
• A man should not do what he would not have known.
• [H]e was a little too particular in the smaller points of his attire, and lacked in consequence something of the look of a gentleman.
• To many men and women the greatest trouble is to choose, for self is the hardest of masters to please[.]
• [W]hat we call degeneracy is often but the unveiling of what was there all the time; and the evil we could become, we are.
• He was more and more for himself, and thereby losing his life
• We wrong those near us in being independent of them.
• She had learned the how before the what, knew the body before the soul—could tell good binding but not bad leather [.]
• [T]o do the will of God is the only way to improve one's self.
• [P]eople mocked him for a poet and a heretic, because he did the things which they said they believed.
• [I]f we were so foolish [...], it would be better to find it out, and begin to grow wise!
• They got up from their knees. They had said what they had to say: why say more!
• To explain what the Lord means to one who is not obedient, is the work of no man who knows his work.
• It is a poor reward for being a great poet to be allowed to take liberties. I should say that, doing their work to the best of their power, they were rewarded with the discovery of higher laws of verse. Every one must walk by the light given him. By the rules which others have laid down he may learn to walk; but once his heart is awake to truth, and his ear to measure, melody and harmony, he must walk by the light, and the music God gives him.

Christian fiction for the 10th century

Douglas Wilson on how it is possible to see Beowulf as a kind of Christian apologetic:

"Hrothgar does not fight, and he cannot save the people. Beowulf does fight, successfully—and the ultimate point of the poem is (as we will see) that he cannot save the people from this cycle of violence either. Not fighting does no good, but neither does fighting. 

[...] This is where the poem brings us, only to abandon us there. What can be done to save this people from their lost condition? By the end of the poem, it is absolutely certain that there is nothing that the people of this culture can do themselves about their lostness."

Read the complete essay here...

An Untenanted Bicycle Rolls Into View...

I've been watching readings of Edward Gorey stories on Youtube today.   They are sometimes a bit dark and absurd, but that's half the fun right there.   Here's a reading of "The Epiplectic Bicycle":

The Wearisome Machine

Just finished reading an interesting short story ("The Machine Stops...") written by E.M. Forster in 1909.     Some of what he describes is uncomfortably close to reality today.    Here is a link to the full text, and below are some quotes I thought were particularly good:

"Man must be adapted to his surroundings, must he not? In the dawn of the world our weakly must be exposed on Mount Taygetus, in its twilight our strong will suffer euthanasia, that the Machine may progress [...]"

~ · ~ 

"I want to see you not through the Machine," said Kuno. "I want to speak to you not through the wearisome Machine."

~ · ~ 

"[S]he did not notice the noise, for she had been born with it in her ears." 

~ · ~ 

"[She] was seized with the terrors of direct experience." 

~ · ~ 

"What was the good of going to Peking when it was just like Shrewsbury? Why return to Shrewsbury when it would all be like Peking? Men seldom moved their bodies; all unrest was concentrated in the soul."

~ · ~ 

"Rather did they yield to some invincible pressure, which came no one knew whither, and which, when gratified, was succeeded by some new pressure equally invincible. To such a state of affairs it is convenient to give the name of progress." 

~ · ~ 

"[B]ehind all the uproar was silence - the silence which is the voice of the earth and of the generations who have gone."

Q177: Etgar Keret

Just finished reading Four Stories, a small collection of writings by Etgar Keret.   If you haven't read anything by him, I'd encourage you to find some of his work — it's available at different places around the Web.    Here are a few quotes:


"[...] a great work of art is often just residual evidence of a great human soul.  [...]  what we call 'craft' is really just the means by which the writer manages to give clear passage to these positive virtues."

— George Saunders, from the introduction

"There is not one emotion that I have that you don't share with me.   What it means to be afraid or cold or hungry — maybe I felt it ten thousand times more than you'll ever do.  But you can understand it, for sure.   And it's your duty to try and understand it.  You cannot be excused from that."

— Keret, quoting his father

"But you don't always have to understand to learn from something."

— Keret

The book also contained the (extremely) short work called "Asthma Attack", which summarizes Keret's philosophy of writing.   It's like a one-paragraph writing seminar.    Here's a link to a copy online...

Q170: The White Horse

"[...] hasty and ad hoc decrees that addressed immediate national problems without taking the time to reflect on and consider the eternal principles of justice were fated to end in villainy and abuse.   Only those laws that had been founded on the eternal principles of justice, had stood the test of time, had been passed on from generation to generation, and had received the approval of the wisest counsellors should be enacted and enforced by a just king."

— Ben Merkle

— and —

"And though skies alter and empires melt,

This word shall still be true:

If we would have the horse of old,

Scour ye the horse anew."

— G. K. Chesterton

These (and some other recent quotes) have come from Ben Merkle's life of King Alfred the Great called The White Horse King.   I recommend it to you highly.  

Q166: The Rain King

Just finished Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King, and here are some quotes that stood out:

"[...] in an age of madness, to expect to be untouched by madness is a form of madness."

·

"A brave man will try to make the evil stop with him.  He shall keep the blow.   No man shall get it from him, and that is a sublime ambition."

·

"Oh, death from what we do not want is the most common of all the causes."

·

"[...] if I wasn't going to abide by that one sentence, what good would it do to read the entire book?"

·

"[...] it's love that makes reality reality.   The opposite makes the opposite."

·

"More or less the same fear, more or less the same desire for thousands of generations.   Child, father, father, child doing the same.  Fear the same.  Desire the same.  [...]  Well, Henderson, what are the generations for, please explain to me?   Only to repeat fear and desire without a change?   This cannot be what the thing is for, over and over and over.  Any good man will try to break the cycle."

·

"But maybe time was invented so that misery might have an end.   So that it shouldn't last forever?   There may be something in this.   And bliss, just the opposite, is eternal?   There is no time in bliss.   All the clocks were thrown out of heaven."

·

"The repetition of a man's bad self, that's the worst suffering that's ever been known."

Silence

I stumbled upon this (very) short story by E. A. Poe while searching for geographical information about the Congo River.     Life apparently is very like a box of chocolates...

Link...

"Perchance to Dream"

Jonathan Franzen writes (quite a long while back) about the novel as a literary form.   He manages to touch on a number of different things in the process.   There's really a lot here.  Here's a taste:

"Panic grows in the gap between the increasing length of the project and the shrinking time-increments of cultural change:  how to design a craft that can float on history for as long as it takes to build it?  The novelist has more and more to say to readers who have less and less time to read: where to find the energy to engage with a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with the culture?"

[...] 

"We live under a tyranny of the literal.  The daily unfolding stories of Steve Forbes, Magic Johnson, Timothy McVeigh, and Hillary Clinton have an intense, iconic presence that relegates to a subordinate shadow-world our own untelevised lives."

[...] 

"Imagine that human existence is defined by an Ache:  the Ache of our not being, each of us, the center of the universe;  of our desires forever outnumbering our means of satisfying them.   If we see religion and art as the historically preferred methods of coming to terms with this Ache, then what happens to art when our technological and economic systems and even our commercialized religions become sufficiently sophisticated to make each of us the center of our own universe of choices and gratifications?"

[...] 

 "There's no bubble that can stay unburst."

Full text here...

"Ordeal By Golf"

P.G. Wodehouse:

To lose one's temper at golf is foolish. It gets you nothing, not even relief. Imitate the spirit of Marcus Aurelius. "Whatever may befall thee," says that great man in his "Meditations", "it was preordained for thee from everlasting. Nothing happens to anybody which he is not fitted by nature to bear." I like to think that this noble thought came to him after he had sliced a couple of new balls into the woods, and that he jotted it down on the back of his score-card. For there can be no doubt that the man was a golfer, and a bad golfer at that.

Full text of short story...

"Kapiolani"

When from the terrors of Nature a people have
      fashion'd and worship a Spirit of Evil,
Blest be the Voice of the Teacher who calls to
      them
'Set yourselves free!'

— from "Kapiolani", by A.L. Tennyson

"Ballade of Building"

Aelswith who built to the praise of Her
    Whose glory is most plain,
Walkelyn who founded Winchester
    To all men's after gain,
    Builders of Sarum, of Romsey fane,
Princes and priests long gone,
    Knew all that more than this was vain, —
'One stone on another stone.'


Bishop or queen, each labourer
    Builded in half disdain;
'What good', they said, 'though our word make stir
    Trowel and hod and crane?
    For this at best shall the work remain,
To teach one thing alone, —
    The marvel and might that sets with strain
One stone on another stone.'


It is told of the days when great deeds were
    That there was a king in Spain
Planned a church for his sepulchre;
    'Mid pomp of his whole demesne
    The second brick to the first was ta'en:
Then he ceased and from his throne
    Cried: 'Lo, be this the word of a reign,
One stone on another stone.'


L'Envoi:


Prince, dig and build and set in train
    Works, that thy name be known:
But only, at ending, of this be fain,
    One stone on another stone!

— Charles Williams, from Poems of Conformity.

Donald Rumsfeld Interview

An interview with Donald Rumsfeld about his life and his memoir (Known and Unknown).    A picture of the man emerges very different than what is usually assumed in popular culture.

Satire & the Bible

An interview with Douglas Wilson:

GH: Still, many Christians think that satire is inherently risky. How can it glorify God?

DW: By lampooning that which does not glorify God. Paul says knowledge puffs up, and when something is puffed up, what you need is a good, sharp pin. When someone applies the pinprick to the balloon of self-important knowledge, the balloon explodes! That glorifies God because the puffed-up knowledge was in defiance of God.

Full interview transcript...

Regex Dictionary

Search the American Heritage Dictionary directly using regular expressions.  

Marilynne Robinson on Home

Marilynne Robinson on her novel Home:

I think that the real emotional content of lives tends to be negotiated in terms of small gestures, little courtesies towards one another, little provisions for one another's comfort, and that whether we're conscious of these things or not we read them continuously as a sort of...we see them as the fabric of our lives with others, and I think that a great deal of generosity and care and love and so on are communicated in what we would call prosaic gestures, and that's just lovely to me. It's a great part of my imagination of the character, really.

Full interview (audio and transcript)...

Tolkien: "English and Welsh"

J.R.R. Tolkien:

Mr. C. S. Lewis, addressing students of literature, has asserted that the man who does not know Old English literature 'remains all his life a child among real students of English'. I would say to the English philologists that those who have no first-hand acquaintance with Welsh and its philology lack an experience necessary to their business. As necessary, if not so obviously and immediately useful, as a knowledge of Norse or French.

Read the essay (PDF)...