Across Difficult Country

[I]n the popular mind, there is a manifest association of political innovation with scientific advance. It is not uncommon to hear a politician supporting an argument for a radical reform by asserting that this is an Age of Progress, and appealing for proof of the assertion to the railway, the gigantic steamship, the electric light, or the electric telegraph. Now it is quite true that, if Progress be understood with its only intelligible meaning, that is, as the continued production of new ideas, scientific invention and scientific discovery are the great and perennial sources of these ideas. Every fresh conquest of Nature by man, giving him the command of her forces, and every new and successful interpretation of her secrets, generates a number of new ideas, which finally displace the old ones, and occupy their room…[but] experience shows that innovating legislation is connected not so much with science as with the scientific air which certain subjects, not capable of exact scienti...

I woke up one morning with a minor headache. With each hour the headache grew. I was walking to my job when I saw this girl on her way to class. I looked awful, and she gave me some Advil and kept going. By mid-afternoon I could barely stand. I called my supervisor. When he arrived I lay down in the stockroom, because I had no idea what else to do. I was afraid. I did not understand what was happening. I did not know whom to call. I was lying there simmering, half-awake, hoping to recover. My supervisor knocked on the door. Someone had come to see me. It was her. The girl with the long dreads helped me out and onto the street. She flagged down a cab. Halfway through the ride, I opened the door, with the cab in motion, and vomited in the street. But I remember her holding me there to make sure I didn't fall out and then holding me close when I was done. She took me to that house of humans, which was filled with all manner of love, put me in the bed, put Exodus on the CD player, ...

Gnostic societies and their leaders will recognize dangers to their existence when they develop, but such dangers will not be met by appropriate actions in the world of reality. They will rather be met by magic operations in the dream world, such as disapproval, moral condemnation, declarations of intentions, resolutions, appeals to the opinion of mankind, branding of enemies as aggressors, outlawing of war, propaganda for world peace and world government, etc. The intellectual and moral corruption which expresses itself in the aggregate of such magic operations may pervade a society with the weird, ghostly atmosphere of a lunatic asylum, as we experience it in our time in the Western crisis.  - Eric Voegelin,  The New Science of Politics .

     After dinner Barry would read his poems. Usually, he said, 'I'm not going to be an egotist tonight. I'm not going to read my poems.' And usually Désirée would cry, 'Oh do, Barry, do.' Always, eventually, he did. 'Marvellous,' Désirée would comment, 'wonderful.' By the third night of her visits, the farcical aspect of it all would lose its fascination for Sibyl, and boredom would fill her near to bursting point, like gas in a balloon.  To relive the strain, she would sigh deeply from time to time. Barry was too engrossed in his own voice to notice this, but Désirée was watching. At first Sibyl worded her comments tactfully. 'I think you should devote more of your time to your verses,' she said. And, since he looked puzzled, added 'You owe it to poetry if you write it.'      'Nonsense,' said Désirée, 'he often writes a marvelous sonnet before shaving in the morning.'      'Sibyl may be right,' said B...

Each new accession of an “issue” leads to the demand that we demonstrate our “commitment.” Not coincidentally, the desired commitment invariably involves swelling the bureaucratic class and its power over our lives.  The spirit of neologism is perhaps best illustrated when it fastens on a word in common use. Note the recent career of the word “ diversity .” This term denotes a key conservative theme. As is pointed out by Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn in writings including his classic Leftism (1974), a devotion to diversity arguably distinguishes the Right from the Left. The elements of this devotion are many; consider, for example, respect for regional traditions, the insistence that human beings are not interchangeable, the tendency to think in terms of distinct persons rather than large classes of people, support for various institutions that shield individuals from the State, as well as the related belief in decentralization. We are now expected to restrict the term to one expli...

More than thirty years ago, observation taught me that the great question of race—the most important, unquestionably, to man—had been for the most part scrupulously, shall we say purposely, avoided—by the statesman, the historian, the theologian; by journalists of nearly all countries. Unpalatable doctrines, no doubt, to dynasties lording it over nations composed of different races.   - Robert Knox, The Races of Men: A Fragment .

The Earl of Longford :  My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, said that he thought he was. He did not exactly think that, but when a journalist said to him, " Sir William , are you the cleverest man in England?", he paused and then he said, "Well, inductively perhaps yes, but deductively Maynard has it". So he did not exactly think that he was God because he had limitations. Maynard Keynes was ahead of him. That was Beveridge. I was with him for three years and I have dragged him in only because he has been mentioned. He did wonderful work with the foundation of the welfare state. The morning after it was completed I went into a newsagent to try to buy a paper. The lady said, "It's no good trying to buy a paper here. That Sir William Beveridge is going to abolish want, so all the papers were sold out". Later that day or the next day I asked him to come to lunch. I was meeting with Evelyn Waugh, an old friend and famous writer. They did not get on...

I can’t always remember their names, but in my nightmares I can see their faces. As the commissioner of the Georgia Department of Corrections from 1992 until 1995, I oversaw five executions. The first two were Thomas Dean Stevens and Christopher Burger, accomplices in a monstrous crime: as teenagers in 1977, they robbed and raped a cabdriver, put him in the trunk of a car, and pushed the vehicle into a pond . I had no doubt that they were guilty: they admitted it to me. But now it was 1993 and they were in their 30s. All these years later, after a little frontal-lobe development, they were entirely different people . - Allen Ault, " I Ordered Death in Georgia ."

“The foolish fire, is an Exhalation kindled by meanes of violent moving, when by cold of the night, in the lowest region of the ayre, it is beaten downe, and then commonly, if it be light, seeketh to ascend upward, and is sent downe agayne; so it banceth up and downe: Els if it move not up and downe, it is a great lumpe of glewish or oyly matter, that by moving of the heat in it selfe, is enflamed of it selfe, as moyst hay will be kindled of it selfe.” - William Fulke (1563), A Goodly Gallerye: William Fulke's Book of Meteors,   pp.10-13 . “There is some evidence that phenomena such as the Will o' the Wisp in England and Min Min Light in Australia are luminescing Barn Owls Tyto alba (e.g. Purdy 1908; Gurney 1908; McAtee 1947; Bunn et at 1982; Macnamara 1989). However, the source of the luminescence is yet to be resolved. The most common explanation for such luminescence is that the owls have become contaminated with luminous fungi that grow inside hollow trees (e.g. Bunn et a...

The beautiful Greek undressed when she went to rest for the night, yet her bed wanted the delicate and refined ventilators - sheets. When she arose from her blanket covered plane of repose, to array herself in woollen, she had no stays, nor stockings to add to her comfort, and a buckle only, or a skewer instead of a paper of pins, to make her garments air tight. If this perfumed model of womankind, with her painted cheeks and lips and eyebrows, did not indulge in the luxury of the shift, neither had her lord any shirt, nor drawers, nor hose, nor buttons, nor handkerchief, nor pockets, nor lining to his cloak, nor gloves,-items essential to the perfection of the most common modern portable climate. - Walter Bernan [Robert Stuart Meikleham], On the History and Art of Warming and Ventilating Rooms and Buildings: By Open Fires, Hypocausts, German, Dutch, Russian, and Swedish Stoves, Steam, Hot Water, Heated Air, Heat of Animals, and Other Methods; with Notices of the Progress of Personal a...

The eighteenth century has been called the century of reason. I’ve never understood that: they’re all mad! They give reason a responsibility which it simply can’t bear, it’s too weak. The Encyclopedists wanted to know everything...But that direct relation between the self and – as the Italians say – lo scibile , the knowable, was already broken. - Samuel Beckett. I am willing you should call this the Age of Frivolity as you do, and would not object if you had named it the Age of Folly, Vice, Frenzy, Brutality, Daemons, Buonaparte, Tom Paine, or the Age of the Burning Brand from Bottomless Pit, or anything but the Age of Reason. - John Adams.

"To make a clam play an accordion is to invent not to discover." - Wallace Stevens.

That mummy is medicinal, the Arabian Doctor Haly delivereth and divers confirm; but of the particular uses thereof, there is much discrepancy of opinion. While Hofmannus prescribes the same to epileptics, Johan de Muralto commends the use thereof to gouty persons; Bacon likewise extols it as a stiptic: and Junkenius considers it of efficacy to resolve coagulated blood. Meanwhile, we hardly applaud Francis the First, of France, who always carried Mummia with him as a panacea against all disorders; and were the efficacy thereof more clearly made out, scarce conceive the use thereof allowable in physic, exceeding the barbarities of Cambyses, and turning old heroes unto unworthy potions. Shall Egypt lend out her ancients unto chirurgeons and apothecaries, and Cheops and Psammiticus be weighed unto us for drugs? Shall we eat of Chamnes and Amosis in electuaries and pills, and be cured by cannibal mixtures? Surely such diet is dismal vampirism; and exceeds in horror the black banquet of D...

There are likewise here many birds called barnacles, which nature produces in a wonderful manner out of her ordinary course. They resemble the marsh geese, but are smaller. Being at first gummy excrescences from pine beams floating on the waters, and then enclosed in shells to secure their free growth, they hang by their beaks like seaweeds attached to the timber. Being in process of time well covered with feathers, they either fall into the water or take their flight in the free air, their nourishment and growth being supplied, while they are bred in this very unaccountable and curious manner, from the juices of the wood in the sea-water. I have often seen with my own eyes more than a thousand minute embryos of birds of this species on the seashore, hanging from one piece of timber, covered with shells, and already formed. No eggs are laid by these birds after copulation, as is the case with birds in general; the hen never sits on eggs in order to hatch them; in no corner of the world...

You sunburnt sicklemen, of August weary, Come hither from the furrow and be merry: Make holiday; your rye-straw hats put on And these fresh nymphs encounter every one In country footing. - Shakespeare, The Tempest (4.1.134-38).

We have known thousands who as young men at the University were volcanoes of originality and poetry, and promised to remain so, and now are either servile or liberal philistines. We, on the contrary, are steadily becoming strangers to the world and its ways, and live a private life which (silently for the moment) runs clean contrary to present trends. — Doesn’t it sometimes seem to you as though one fine day on a lonely path you would meet a dwarf who would open a secret door in the moss and stones of the forest and lead you into a new world? — Do drop your hostility to the Middle Ages! What weighs upon us, somewhat, are the apes of the Middle Ages, not the real, genuine age of Dante and his consorts, who were, au contraire, wonderful people. Classical antiquity, if it were imposed par ordre de Mufti, would not be much less irksome. I have in my hands the historical proofs of how wonderfully people enjoyed themselves in the Middle Ages, when life was more colorful and rich than can po...

There is no doubt then but Centaurs as well as other Monsters, are produced, partly by the influence of the stars, and partly by other causes, as the ill disposition of the matrix, the bad temperature of the seed, the perverse inclination of the woman, the commixtion of seeds of divers kinds, sudden fear, bad diet, unwholsome air, and untimely Venus.  - Alexander Ross, Arcana Microcosmi .

Respublica, by Geoffrey Hill The strident high civic trumpeting of misrule. It is what we stand for. Wild insolence, aggregates without distinction. Courage of common men: spent in the ruck their remnant witness after centuries is granted them like a pardon. And other fealties other fortitudes broken as named— Respublica brokenly recalled, its archaic laws and hymnody; and destroyed hope that so many times is brought with triumph back from the dead.

"The pain's nothing; pain many times is taken away with the apprehension of greater, as the toothache with the sight of a barber that comes to pull it out: there's philosophy for you." - John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi . Act. V, Scene V.

In Habentem Longum Barbam Thy beard is long: better it would thee fit, To have a shorter beard, and longer wit. On his Three Marriages Though marriage by some folks be reckoned a curse, Three wives did I marry, for better or worse; The first for her person, the next for her purse, And the third for a warming-pan, doctor, and nurse.