The search for a stable definition of melancholy is itself melancholic, because the emotion is inscrutable, unknowable, shading into so many differing and conflicting emotions. It is the melancholic mind—ever probing into an idea that can never be fully known—that produces something akin to Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy—a book that stretches over a thousand pages in search of a definition without ever reaching it, a quixotic futility that enacts rather than defines melancholy. The only way to approach it is as an inexhaustible void, pointless and unproductive.
The right to vote should be restricted to those with knowledge – Jason Brennan | Aeon Ideas
The right to vote should be restricted to those with knowledge – Jason Brennan | Aeon Ideas
Until you would-be epistocrats grasp the nettle and tell me who’s in the epistocracy, who’s out, and who decides I’m not listening.
Scholars & Writers for Trump - American Greatness
Scholars & Writers for Trump - American Greatness
- Some of the signatories really surprise me.
- Some don’t.
- I’m not saying which are which.
- If they had claimed, say, that “Trump will do far less damage to the American social and political order than HRC,” I’d have replied that I very much doubt that, but I can at least understand why you think so.
- But they say “We believe that Donald Trump is the candidate most likely to restore the promise of America,” which very few of them can possibly believe.
- I suspect then, that while they actually think that “Trump will do far less damage to the American social and political order than HRC,” they also know that saying so won’t serve to rally the troops to the Trumpian flag and produce the defeat of HRC.
- The substance of the “Statement of Support,” then, is what Socrates in Plato’s Republic calls a “noble lie.”
- I don’t see anything noble about it.
UPDATE: I am hearing from several sources who insist that most of the signatories here really do believe that Donald Trump — Donald. Trump — will indeed do mighty deeds that will at least help “restore the promise of America.” So I stand corrected, I guess? I certainly stand dumbfounded.
P. D. James — one of my favorite faces. I look at her and think It would not be possible to keep anything hidden from that woman.
I would have things as they were in all the days of my life, as in the days of my longfathers before me: to be the Lord of this City in peace, and leave my chair to a son after me, who would be his own master and no wizard’s pupil. But if doom denies this to me, then I will have naught: neither life diminished, nor love halved, nor honour abated.
Envisioning Trump as the restorer of heroic Western life — whether imperial, kingly, or mythical — is quite an act of creation. There is nothing about Trump that suggests he can hasten the end of Enlightenment principles through political rule. (Although an itchy nuclear trigger finger could.) These dreams are funnier still when considered next to Trump’s style, which is lamely democratic; his culture, which derives entirely from cable television; and his personal taste, which resides about one remove from Uday Hussein’s debauches. The man is clearly a product of a decadent society, not the scourge or redeemer of one.
Church tower of the village of Graun in Lago di Resia - Italy; by Martin R on Flickr via ChurchCrawler
[gallery] The city of Liège, Belgium in 1914, under siege, and in 2009. When, in August 1914, the German armies decided to cut through Belgium on their way to France, thereby mocking the treaty Germany had signed to protect the integrity of Belgium, they expected no resistance. They got resistance.
Their immediate response was to burn a nearby village to the ground, shoot a good many random civilians, and round up Catholic priests and execute them on the totally spurious, invented-on-the-spot grounds that they were spies working against Germany. All that happened on the first day of the German invasion. When those actions did not lead to a Belgian surrender, the Germans sent zeppelins over the city to terror-bomb it into submission.
The notion that the Great War was fought in a relatively civilized way, and that it was only World War II that introduced terror against civilians as an essential element of military strategy, is belied by these first events of the earlier conflict. The German army didn’t continue in this vein simply because it couldn’t: it had limited access to major population centers for the rest of the war. But from the moment the war began the Germans were prepared to destroy anyone who stood in their war, without regard to any other consideration, no matter how time-honored or essential to humanity.
Francis is a Jesuit, and like many members of Catholic religious orders, he tends to view the institutional church, with its parishes and dioceses and settled ways, as an obstacle to reform. He describes parish priests as ‘little monsters’ who 'throw stones’ at poor sinners. He has given curial officials a diagnosis of 'spiritual Alzheimer’s.’ He scolds pro-life activists for their 'obsession’ with abortion. He has said that Catholics who place an emphasis on attending Mass, frequenting confession, and saying traditional prayers are 'Pelagians’ — people who believe, heretically, that they can be saved by their own works. Such denunciations demoralize faithful Catholics without giving the disaffected any reason to return. Why join a church whose priests are little monsters and whose members like to throw stones? When the pope himself stresses internal spiritual states over ritual observance, there is little reason to line up for confession or wake up for Mass.
One thing can hardly come under the Hush Hush — I mean the beautiful planetary conjunction last Tuesday. Did you happen to see the moon (first quarter), Jupiter and Venus, all in a line and not more than three fingers apart? I saw them on a clear evening, emerging from the cloister of New Building to go to dinner, and understood what is at the back of all astrology i.e. the difficulty of believing that anything so splendid is without significance.
C. S. Lewis, letter to his brother Warnie, 18 February 1940. Warnie was serving in the Army, and “the Hush Hush” is the forbidding of sensitive topics by Army censors.
I thought of this passage this morning as I was walking my dog. It was still dark, and Orion stood at the top of the sky, and near the horizon the crescent moon lay on its back with the outline of the whole orb just visible. It’s hard at such a moment not to think that the constellations are indeed “the pattern and the mirror of the acts of earth.”