ARISTOCRACY

Human society is always aristocratic by its very essence, to the extreme that it is a society in the measure that it is aristocratic, and ceases to be such when it ceases to be aristocratic.

        ORTEGA Y GASSET

Democracy destroyed the old aristocratic hierarchy and has substituted nothing except the precarious hierarchy of greater and less wealth in its place.

HUXLEY

Being aristocratic, modern art compels the masses to recognise themselves for what they are—the inert matter of the historical process.

     ORTEGA Y GASSET

Language must be preserved as a vehicle for accurate and graceful expression, and it is in danger of death from the decay of stratified society. Aristocracy saved the artist in many ways. By its patronage it offered him rewards more coveted than the mere cash value of its purchases; in its security it invited him to share its own personal freedom of thought and movement; it provided the leisured reader whom alone it is worth addressing; it curbed the vanity of the publicist and drew a sharp line between fame and notoriety; by its caprices it encouraged experiment; its scepticism exposed the humbug. These and countless other benefits are now forgotten or denied.

WAUGH

There is no form of rational and assured government save an aristocracy. A monarchy or a republic, based upon democracy, are equally absurd and feeble. The immense nausea of advertisements.

BAUDELAIRE

Entrance into the aristocracy required the negotiation of a series of hurdles in a competition with rules heavily biased against newcomers.

     WAUGH

The purpose of the aristocrat is most emphatically not to work for money. In their view, effort is unrelated to money.

                           SITWELL

The eyes of the dead were always imagined as gazing at an aristocratic Roman, inspiring him to rival the great deeds of his family’s past.

                                                   HOLLAND

I am of noble descent; and I have profited by the accident of my birth, inasmuch as I have retained that firm love of liberty which characterizes an aristocracy whose last hour has sounded. Aristocracy has three successive ages: the age of superiority; the age of privilege, and the age of vanity.  Having emerged from the first age, it degenerates in the second, and perishes in the third. 

CHATEAUBRIAND

Aristocracy — To thee be all men heroes: every race noble; all women virgins; and each place a temple. Know thou nothing that is base.

                                                     BULWER-LYTTON

In every Anarchist, and therefore in every Christian there is also, or may be, an aristocrat—a man who, just like the anarchist, but with a perfectly holy right, wishes to obey no laws but those of his own conscience; a man who thinks too highly of his own faith and persuasion to convert other people to it.

LEVY

Under the old order the land-owning class was also the ruling class, and provided the permanent "cadres" from which the administrators and the servants of the state were recruited. But in an industrial state the wealthy class is a plutocracy that possesses no definite social function, and a separate governing class of paid bureaucrats has to be created and trained at the expense of the state. And thus the plutocracy of the industrialist order actually costs the country more than did the old ruling class, while it is decidedly inferior to the latter, from the non-economic point of view, as an organ of national culture.

                                    DAWSON

   257. To be sure, we must not give in to any humanitarian delusions about these aristocratic societies’ historical origins (that is, about the preconditions for that elevation of the type ‘human’): the truth is harsh. Let us not mince words in describing to ourselves the beginnings of every previous higher culture on earth! People who still had a nature that was natural, barbarians in every terrible sense of the word, predatory humans, whose strength of will and desire for power were still unbroken, threw themselves upon the weaker, more well-behaved, peaceable, perhaps trading or stockbreeding races, or upon old, crumbling cultures whose remaining life-force was flickering out in a brilliant fireworks display of wit and depravity. At the beginning, the noble caste was always the barbarian caste: its dominance was not due to its physical strength primarily, but rather to its spiritual—these were the more complete human beings (which at every level also means the ‘more complete beasts’).

                      NIETZSCHE

The crucial thing about a good and healthy aristocracy, however, is that it does not feel that it is a function [whether of monarchy or community] but rather its essence and highest justification – and that therefore it has no misgivings in condoning the sacrifice of a vast number of people who must for its sake be oppressed and diminished into incomplete people, slaves, tools. Its fundamental belief must simply be that society can not exist for its own sake, but rather only as a foundation and scaffolding to enable a select kind of creature to ascend to its higher task and in general to its higher existence – much like those sun-loving climbing plants on Java [called sipo matador] whose tendrils encircle an oak tree so long and so repeatedly that finally, high above it but still supported by it, they are able to unfold their coronas in the free air and make a show of their happiness.

                                                                                                              NIETZSCHE

Aristocrats can’t or won’t make money. The acceptance of high living and leisure as part of the natural order is a prerequisite of the aristocratic qualities and achievements. 

                                                                                              WAUGH

BOOZE

Modern life is often a mechanical oppression and liquor is the only mechanical relief.

HEMINGWAY             

   ‘Winston, you’re drunk!’

   ‘You’re right, Bessie. And you’re ugly. But tomorrow I’ll be sober and you’ll still be ugly.’

An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.

                HEMINGWAY                       

Archbishop MAGEE: I would rather see England drunk and free, than slaves and sober.

Ashes to ashes dust to dust, if the women don’t get you the liquor must. 

                                                                     JELLY ROLL MORTON

Drink is a great anodyne – I had forgotten how boring people are. I’d forgotten how afraid people are. I’d forgotten how boring I am.

                                                     BURTON

The gin and tonic has saved more Englishmen’s lives and minds than all the doctors in the empire. 

        CHURCHILL

Beware of sambuca. It brings out evil things. It is a turner over of stones in damp caves.

                                                              BURTON

Drinking cannot be sacramentalized except in religions which set no store on decorum. The worship of Dionysos or the Celtic god of beer was a loud and disorderly affair. The rites of Christianity are incompatible with even religious drunkenness. This does no harm to the distillers, but is very bad for Christianity.

           HUXLEY

RICHARD BURTON

   Drank too much, came home, and fell asleep before supper. E unkindly calls such premature sleep ‘passing-out.’

     I have been more or less drunk for two days. I don’t know why but I enjoyed it thoroughly.

   There are few pleasures to match tipsiness in this murderous world especially if, like me, you believe in your bones that it, the world as we know it, is not going to last much longer.

   Well now, instead of 1½ bottles of vodka a day, it is now cut down to ½ a bottle. What’s the next move? A descent and return to beer I think. … I shall become fat but jolly.

     Now that the poison is nearly out of my system – I’m told it takes six months to dry out totally – I can think clearly again. I don’t see the world whole, but I see it steadily. I have lost the hungover nightmarish fear of imminent disaster and early deaths and all its concomitants and am better balanced.

      E stopped her drinking dead in its tracks – or practically, as she did have one beer but that was not out of crying despair for alcohol but because it fitted with her food. You can’t, after all, have orange juice or Pepsi Cola with pizza. … It must be good for the mental well-being because it’s good to know that one can stop, that one hasn’t become an alcoholic, that one does not live by for and through booze.

       Ah! How I’d love the panacea of a drink now. A double ice cold vodka martini, the glass fogged with condensation, straight up and then straight down and the warm flood the pain-killer hitting the stomach and then the brain and an hour of sweetly melancholy euphoria. I shall have a Tab instead. Disgusting.

I do not work for the Gordon’s people and this is a testimonial which I offer freely and in what I hope is my right mind. This beverage is one of the sovereign antiseptics of our time. … Gordon’s product is of approved merit and can be counted on to fortify, mollify and cauterise practically all internal or external injuries. 

               HEMINGWAY

Do let me seriously advise you to take to drink. There is nothing like the aesthetic pleasure of being drunk and if you do it in the right way you can avoid being ill the next day.

                                                                                    WAUGH

The manager of the Gritti Palace in Venice tells me that three bottles of Valpolicella first thing in the day were nothing to Hemingway, then there were the daiquiris, Scotch, tequila, bourbon, vermouthless martinis.

                              BURGESS

The half bottle of champagne is the enemy of man. If I have any money, I can’t think of any better way of spending money than on champagne.

HEMINGWAY                     

BOREDOM

A period of law and order as long as the one our generation had behind it brought a real craving for the extraordinary.

                       JÜNGER

Boredom as a factor in human behaviour has received, in my opinion, far less attention than it deserves.

     RUSSELL

Society is now one polished horde,

Form’d of two mighty tribes, the Bores and Bored.

 BYRON

—

STROMBERG

Redemption by War

No one will ever know how many joined to escape their families, Shaw quipped.

A profound yearning for some cause great enough to redeem life and satisfy its ineffable desires is what one chiefly carries away from a reading of the books before the deluge.

To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping, 

Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary; 

Leave the sick hearts that honor could not move, 

And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary, 

      And all the little emptiness of love! 

                                                        [BROOKE]

In 1913 and 1914 Franz Kafka was at work on that enigmatic masterpiece The Trial. It seems to tell of a gulf between “real” life, such as unreflecting peasants live, and the artificial life of K., a bank clerk who lives mechanically, or between an ideal world of spontaneity, imagination, poetry, life as it should be, and the actual daily routine that deadens us all to beauty.

—

There are, if only rarely, men who would rather perish than work without any pleasure in their work. They do not fear boredom as much as work without pleasure; they actually require a lot of boredom if their work is to succeed. For thinkers and all sensitive spirits, boredom is that disagreeable ‘windless calm’ of the soul that precedes a happy voyage and cheerful winds.

                    NIETZSCHE

The tiny kindling of charity which came to him through his religion sufficed only to temper his disgust and change it to boredom.

        WAUGH

Boredom is a vital problem for the moralist, since at least half the sins of mankind are caused by fear of it. 

     RUSSELL

Boredom is the root of all evil.

                                     KIERKEGAARD

Human beings show their superiority to the brutes by their capacity for boredom. What the unspoilt races of savages really value among the gifts that we bring to them is intoxicating liquor which enables them, for the first time in their lives, to have the illusion for a few brief moments that it is better to be alive than dead.

                                        RUSSELL

227. Stupid to the point of sainthood, they say in Russia. We must ultimately take care not to become saints and bores out of honesty! Isn’t life a hundred times too short to live it—in a state of boredom? You’d really have to believe in life everlasting in order to. . .  I hope you will forgive me for the discovery that all moral philosophy until now has been boring and belongs among the sedatives.

NIETZSCHE

We read and studied, but the content of our lives was empty. We found ourselves reliving the past rather than forging plans for the future, and our daily concerns were with such immediate trivialities as the quality of the food and how much prison work would be expected of us. 

                      DAYAN

To have travelled a lot, to have spent, as I have done, the first twelve years of adult life on the move, is to this extent a disadvantage. At the age of thirty-five one needs to go to the moon, or some such place, to recapture the excitement with which one first landed at Calais.

                       WAUGH

   We are less bored than our ancestors were, but we are more afraid of boredom. We have come to know, or rather to believe, that boredom is not part of the natural lot of man, but can be avoided by a sufficiently vigorous pursuit of excitement.

   Too much travel, too much variety of impressions, are not good for the young, and cause them as they grow up to become incapable of enduring fruitful monotony.

   I do not mean that monotony has any merits of its own; I mean only that certain good things are not possible except where there is a certain degree of monotony. A generation that cannot endure boredom will be a generation of little men, of men unduly divorced from the slow processes of nature, of men in whom every vital impulse slowly withers, as though they were cut flowers in a vase.

   Among those who are rich enough to choose their way of life, the particular brand of unendurable boredom from which they suffer is due, paradoxical as this may seem, to their fear of boredom. In flying from the fructifying kind of boredom, they fall a prey to the other far worse kind. A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy can live.

RUSSELL

I don’t hear because I’m bored, not I’m bored because I can’t hear.

 WAUGH

THE BOURGEOISIE

Quelle atroce invention que celle du bourgeois, n’est-ce pas?

                                                                                                  FLAUBERT

That word ‘bourgeoisie’ means nothing to me. It is nothing but a medley of prejudices and habits of thought, many of them respectable, but without any deep-seated connexion, without traditions and a past. 

BERNANOS

Axiome: la haine du bourgeois est la commencement de la vertu. 

FLAUBERT

Tout le mal est venu de la bourgeoisie. Toute l’aberration, tout le crime.

PÉGUY

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of bourgeois stupidity.

FLAUBERT

He who flatters the bourgeoisie by becoming its champion is considered to have brought honour on himself. Because I write as I do, the intellectuals in the pay of the bourgeoisie try to make me believe that I am a demagogue. In fact, I am a man of the Old France, or, more simply, just of France; for a thousand years of history are not to be wiped out by a hundred and fifty years of wretched fumbling. Old France is still alive in the France of today. It is merely a matter of having the will to recognize it. I do.

BERNANOS

The bourgeois lives in the finite, he is afraid of the expanse of the infinite. It is true that he acknowledges the infinity of the development of economic power, but this is the only infinity of which he desires to take cognizance. The idea of personality is foreign to him. His interests are individual, while his consciousness is collective. Bourgeois nature is loss of freedom of spirit, the subjection of human existence to determinism. He wants everything for himself, but from out of his own self he produces nothing in thought or speech; he possesses material property, but he has no spiritual property.

                   BERDYAEV

Society itself, or at least nineteen parts out of twenty of that society, including everything that is vulgar and bourgeois, turns and turns again about one axis: vanity.

                                                       STENDHAL

The victory of bourgeois civilization has made England rich and powerful, but at the same time it has destroyed almost everything that made life worth living. The bourgeois lives for money, not merely as the peasant or the soldier or even the artist often does, but in a deeper sense, since money is to him what arms are to the soldier and land is to the peasant, the tools of his trade and the medium through which he expresses himself.

                                                        DAWSON

What held the cénacle together was that merry battle spirit we have all come to know and love: épatez la bourgeoisie, shock the middle class. With Guatier’s cenacle the modern picture of The Artist began to form: the poor but free spirit, plebeian but aspiring only to be classless, to cut himself forever free from the bonds of the greedy and hypocritical bourgeoisie, to be whatever the fat burghers feared most, to cross the line wherever they drew it, to look at the world in a way they couldn’t see, to be high, live low, stay young forever—in short, to be the bohemian.

                                                                                                                                                  WOLFE

BUDDHISM 

THE VINEGAR TASTERS

   A traditional subject in Chinese religious painting, the allegorical composition depicts the three founders of China’s major religious and philosophical traditions

   The three men are dipping their fingers in a vat of vinegar and tasting it; one man reacts with a sour expression, one reacts with a bitter expression, and one reacts with a sweet expression. The three men are Confucius, Buddha, and Laozi, respectively. Each man’s expression represents the predominant attitude of his philosophy: Confucianism saw life as sour, in need of rules to correct the degeneration of people; Buddhism saw life as bitter, dominated by pain and suffering; and Taoism saw life as fundamentally good in its natural state.

MARA is the demon that tempted Buddha by trying to seduce him with the vision of beautiful women who, in various legends, are often said to be Mara’s daughters. In Buddhist cosmology, Mara personifies unwholesome impulses, unskillfulness, the ‘death’ of the spiritual life. He is a tempter, distracting humans from practising the spiritual life by making mundane things alluring, or the negative seem positive.

SAMVEGA is a Pali Buddhist term which indicates the oppressive sense of shock, dismay, and alienation that come with realizing the futility and meaninglessness of life as it’s normally lived; a chastening sense of our own complacency and foolishness in having let ourselves live so blindly; and an anxious sense of urgency in trying to find a way out of the meaningless cycle. There are eight bases of samvega (samvega vatthu). They are “birth, old age, sickness, death, suffering in the woeful worlds, the round of suffering as rooted in the past, the round of suffering as rooted in the future, and the round of suffering in the search for food in the present.”

Among the notable nagas of Buddhist tradition is Mucalinda, Nagaraja and protector of the Buddha. In the Vinaya Sutra, shortly after his enlightenment, the Buddha is meditating in a forest when a great storm arises. But graciously, King Mucalinda gives shelter to the Buddha from the storm by covering the Buddha’s head with his seven snake heads and coiled his body into seven circles and lifted the meditating Buddha up above the powerful stream. The nine-headed naga represents finality; unity with the forces of nature and the ideal state of spiritual liberation.

Buddhism stands for a simplification of the mind and a reliance on the most indestructible ideas; Christianity stands for a simplification of the heart and a reliance on the most indestructible sentiments. The greater Christian insistence upon personal deity and immortality is not, we fancy, the cause so much as the effect of this essential trend towards an ancient passion and pathos as the power that most nearly rends the veil from the nature of things. Both creeds grope after the same secret sun, but Buddhism dreams of its light and Christianity of its heat. Buddhism seeks after God with the largest conception it can find, the all-producing and all-absorbing One; Christianity seeks after God with the most elementary passion it can find—the craving for a father, the hunger that is as old as the hills. It turns the whole cry of a lost universe into the cry of a lost child.  

        CHESTERTON

All created things perish. He who knows and sees this becomes passive in pain; this is the way to purity. 

      BUDDHA

According to Buddhist teaching, pain is an experience. Suffering is how we relate to this experience, and it is the pain that you hold onto that is the cause of suffering.

BURTON, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1638

Either say something that I never read nor heard of before, or else hold thy peace.

That which is necessary cannot be grievous. Whether thou wilt or no, it must be indured.

Our life is but short, a very dream; and, while we look about, eternity is at hand.

If all the men in the world should come and bring their grievances together, of body, mind, fortune—and lay them on a heap to be equally divided, wouldst thou share alike, and take thy portion, or be as thou art?

          SOCRATES

Our life is a pilgrimage on earth, which wise men pass with great alacrity.

                                                                                                                               PLATO

ECCLESIASTICUS 27:5  As the furnace proveth the potters vessell, so doth temptation trie mens thoughts.

As the mountains are about Jerusalem, so is the Lord about his people, from henceforth and for ever.

Christ himself was poor, born in a manger, and had not a house to hide his head in all his life, lest any man should make poverty a judgment of God, or an odious state.

’Tis the rarity and necessity that makes a thing acceptable and pleasant. Darius, put to flight by Alexander, drank puddle water to quench his thirst; and it was pleasanter, he swore, than any wine or mead.

To get wealth is a great trouble, anxiety to keep, grief to lose it.

Poverty is the mistress of philosophy, the mother of religion, virtue, sobriety, sister of innocency and an upright mind.

Greece, of old the seat of civility, mother of sciences and humanity, now forlorn, the nurse of barbarism, a den of theeves.

’Tis no dishonour then (as Guicciardini adds) for a flourishing man, city, or state, to come to ruine, nor infelicitie to be subject to the law of nature. Therefore (I say) scorn this transitory state; look up to heaven; think not what others are, but what thou art: qua parte locatus es in re; and what thou shalt be, what thou mayst be.

Qvem te devsesse ivssit et hvmana qva parte locatvs es in re.

What role is assigned you by god and where in the human world have you been stationed?

                        PERSIUS            

Nature is content with bread and water; and he that can rest satisfied with that, may contend with Jupiter himself for happiness.

                                               SENECA

PROVERBS 17:1  Better is a poor morsel with quietness, than abundance with strife.

Be not angry for what thou hast not, but give God hearty thanks for what thou hast.

      JOHN CHRYSOSTOM           

MICAH 8:7  Rejoice not against me, O my enemy; for though I fall, I shall rise: when I sit in darkness, the Lord shall lighten me.

It is an easie matter, when ones belly is full, to declame against feasting.

Enjoy thyself at length, and that which thou hast; the minde is all; be content; thou art not poor, but rich, and so much richer, as Censorinus writ to Cerillius, in wishing less, not having more.

No man should commend povertie, but he that is poor.

Misery is virtue’s whetstone.

A just man is impregnable, and not to be overcome. The gout may hurt his hands, lameness his feet, convulsions may torture his joints, but not his upright mind: his soule is free.

                                                                                               CHRYSOSTOM

Every man’s mind is stronger than fortune, and leads him to what side he will; a cause to himself each one is, of his good or bad life.

                                                      SENECA, Epistle 98

LORD BYRON

Permitting every thing to himself, and excusing nothing in others, how could he but ruin himself, and make the whole world his foe? Not only does the discontent of the writer infect the reader, but the end of all is negation; that is to say, nothing. If I call bad bad, what do I win? But if I call good bad, I lose much. He who would work aright must never rail,—must not trouble himself about what is already ill done,—but do well himself. Humanity finds its true joy, not in tearing to pieces, but in building anew.

                GOETHE 

When the pessimist is popular it must always be not because he shows all things to be bad, but because he shows some things to be good. Men can only join in a chorus of praise, even if it is the praise of denunciation. The man who is popular must be optimistic about something, even if he is only optimistic about pessimism. And this was emphatically the case with Byron and the Byronists.

CHESTERTON

Lord Byron, who has so long and so amply filled the highest place in the public eye, has shared the lot of humanity. He died at Missolonghi, on the 19th of April, 1824. That mighty genius, which walked among men as something superior to ordinary mortality, and whose powers were beheld with wonder, and something approaching to terror, as if we knew not whether they were of good or of evil, is laid as soundly to rest as the poor peasant whose ideas never went beyond his daily task.

         SCOTT               

—

MACCARTHY, Byron: life and legend

Through all Byron’s vicissitudes it was work that drove him, challenged him and steadied him, took him out of himself into the condition of total concentration in which the prevailing values were the literary ones. When he calls himself a ‘mighty Scribbler’ he acknowledges his need for the regular discipline of composition.

Byron’s daily expeditions to the monastery satisfied his intermittent yearning for the religious life. As Hobhouse noted, his deep instinctive sense of a divinity, though he was unable to account for it, was as certain a proof to him that there was a cause for it as the influence upon the compass was a sign that there was some cause for the attraction of the magnetic needle to the pole. Byron promised himself that he would turn devout when he turned thirty. 

Byron, Scott, and Mengaldo swam off from the Lido and past San Giorgio Maggiore to the entrance of the Grand Canal. He and Scott were well clear of Mengaldo, who was picked up by a gondola. Now on his own in the water, Byron swam down the whole length of the Grand Canal, from the Rialto bridge to Santa Chiara, getting out of the water at the point where the canal opened out to the lagoon again. He had been in the water for four and a quarter hours and reckoned he could have carried on for longer, in spite of the encumbrance of the trousers he was wearing. 

Byron was beginning to develop his skills in cultivating middle-aged grandes dames with a past.

Byron’s natural empathy was his most dangerous asset. The responsiveness that gave such depth and meaning to his writing caused havoc in his emotional life.

—

Byron would probably have been a pessimist anyway, it was part of his egotism. But appearing when he did, the tide of disillusion carried him along.

                                                                                CLARK

The great success of Childe Harold is due chiefly to Byron’s having dared to give utterance to certain feelings which every one must have encouraged in the melancholy & therefore masked hours of his existence, and also to the intimate knowledge which he has shown of the turns taken by the passions of women.

      HOBHOUSE

He was himself the beginning, the middle, and end of all his own poetry – the hero of every tale – the chief object of every landscape.

                                            MACAULEY

What helps it now, that Byron bore the pageant of his bleeding heart?

                                                                   ARNOLD

Byron had an incontinence, I believe unique, in talking of his affairs, and showing you other people’s letters.

          HUNT

The moment he reflects he is a child.

                                                         ARNOLD

Writing, even with genius, did not appear to him to fulfil a great man’s duty; it had to be linked to action.

     GUICCIOLI

His truth of observation was the most exact, and his chosen expression the most concentrated, that I had yet found in literature. Byron wrote, as easily as a hawk flies and as clearly as a lake reflects, the exact truth in the precisely narrowest terms; nor only the exact truth, but the most central and useful one. … That passage is noble, primarily because it contains the utmost number that will come together into the space, of absolutely just, wise, and kind thoughts. But it is more than noble, it is perfect, because the quantity it holds is not artificially or intricately concentrated, but with the serene swiftness of a smith’s hammer-strokes on hot iron; and with choice of terms which, each in its place, will convey far more than they mean in the dictionary.

                                     RVSKIN

There was created in the minds of Byron enthusiasts a pernicious and absurd association between intellectual power and moral depravity. From the poetry of Lord Byron they drew a system of ethics, compounded of misanthropy and voluptuousness, a system in which the two great commandments were, to hate your neighbour, and to love your neighbour’s wife. 

                                           MACAULEY

CAVALIERS 

A compleat Cavalier is a child of honour, a gentleman well born and bred, that loves his King for conscience sake, of a clearer countenance, and bolder look than other men, because of a more loyal heart.

      SYMMONS

—

THE TRIAL OF CHARLES I

here compiled from Cobbett’s Complete Collection

of State Trials and Proceedings for High Treason

and Other Crimes and Misdemeanors from

the Earliest Period to the year 1783,

in order and abridged.

   King. I would know by what power I am called hither. And when I know what lawful authority, I shall answer. Remember I am your King and what sins you bring upon your heads, and the judgment of God upon this land, think well upon it, I say, think well upon it, before you go from one sin to a greater. Therefore let me know by what lawful authority I am seated here, and I shall not be unwilling to answer. In the meantime, I shall not betray my trust; I have a trust committed to me by God, by old and lawful descent; I will not betray it, to answer to a new unlawful authority: therefore resolve me that, and you shall hear more of me.

   King. I do tell them so; England was never an elective kingdom, but an hereditary kingdom for near these thousand years. Therefore let me know by what authority I am called hither. I do stand more for the liberty of my people than any here that come to be my pretended judges. And therefore let me know by what lawful authority I am seated here and I will answer it; otherwise I will not answer it.

   King. A king cannot be tried by any superior jurisdiction on earth; but it is not my case alone, it is the Freedom and the Liberty of the people of England; and do you pretend what you will, I stand more for their Liberties. For if power without law, may make laws, may alter the fundamental laws of the kingdom, I do not know what subject he is in England that can be sure of his life, or any thing that he calls his own.

   King. For the Charge, I value it not a rush; it is the Liberty of the People of England that I stand for. For me to acknowledge a new Court that I never heard of before, I that am your king, that should be an example to all the people of England for to uphold justice, to maintain the old laws: indeed I do not know how to do it. You spoke very well the first day that I came here of the obligations that I had laid upon me by God, to the maintenance of the Liberties of my people; the same obligation you spake of, I do acknowledge to God that I owe to him, and to my people, to defend as much as in me lies the ancient laws of the kingdom: therefore, until that I may know that this is not against the fundamental Laws of the kingdom, by your favour I can put in no particular Charge.

— HIS SENTENCE IS READ —

   King. Will you hear me a word, Sir?

   Lord President. Sir, you are not to be heard after the Sentence.

   King. No, Sir?

   Lord President. No, Sir; by your favour, Sir. Guard, withdraw your Prisoner.

   King. I may speak after the Sentence—By your favour, Sir, I may speak after the Sentence ever. By your Favour—

   Lord President. Hold!

   King. The Sentence, Sir—

   Lord President. I say, Sir, I do—

   King. I am not suffered for to speak. Expect what Justice other People will have.

Dr  JONATHAN SWIFT

A

S   E   R   M   O   N

UPON  THE

M A R T Y R D O M   of   K. C H A R L E S   I.

1725

   When the Protestant faith was restored by Queen Elizabeth, those who fled to Geneva returned among the rest home to England, and were grown so fond of the government and religion of the place they had left, that they used all possible endeavours to introduce both into their own country. These people called themselves Puritans, as pretending to a purer faith than those of the church established. 

   The wicked insinuations of those fanatical preachers stirring up the cruelty of the soldiers, who, by force of arms, excluded from the house every member of Parliament, whom they apprehended to bear the least inclination towards an agreement with the King, suffering only those to enter who thirsted chiefly for his blood; and this is the very account given by their own writers: From whence it is clear that this Prince was, in all respects, a real martyr for the true religion and the liberty of his people. 

The famous rallying cry of Sir Bevill Grenville is often quoted as an instance of the basic loyalty of the Kings supporters at the start of the Civil War:

I cannot contain myself within my doors when the King of England’s standard waves in the field upon so just an occasion, the cause being such as must make all those that die in it little inferior to martyrs.

A complete Cavalier is a child of honour. He is the only reserve of English gentility and ancient valour, and hath rather chosen to bury himself in the tomb of honour, than to see the nobility of his nation vassalaged; the dignity of his country captivated or obscured by any base, domestic enemy, or by any foreign fore-conquered foe.

                                                     SYMMONS

Loyalty was to the Cavaliers’ politics what religion was to morals—a rule, a cause, and a foundation.

While the Cavaliers had the sins of men, their opponents had the sins of the Devil. Chillingworth, serving as Royalist chaplain, and very aware of his charges’ human failings, viewed the struggle pessimistically as prophaneness contending with hypocrisy: on the one side horrible oaths, curses, and blasphemies; on the other pestilent lyes, calumnies, and perjury. ‘Publicans and sinners,’ he wrote, ‘contended with Scribes and Pharisees.’

                  HERRICK

                 His Cavalier

GIVE me that man that dares bestride

The active sea-horse, and with pride

Through that huge field of waters ride.

   Who with his looks, too, can appease

   The ruffling winds and raging seas,

   In midst of all their outrages.

This, this a virtuous man can do,

Sail against rocks, and split them too;

Ay, and a world of pikes pass through.

   TO THE KING, UPON HIS COMING

   WITH HIS ARMY INTO THE WEST 

   by Robert Herrick

WELCOME, most welcome to our vows and us,

Most great and universal genius!

The drooping west, which hitherto has stood

As one, in long-lamented widowhood,

Looks like a bride now, or a bed of flowers,

Newly refresh’d, both by the sun and showers.

War, which before was horrid, now appears

Lovely in you, brave prince of cavaliers!

A deal of courage in each bosom springs

By your access, O you the best of kings!

Ride on with all white omens; so that where

Your standard’s up, we fix a conquest there.

CHANGE 

  ‘I don’t believe you’ve changed at all, Charles.’

  ‘No, I’m afraid not’

  ‘D’you want to change?’

  ‘It’s the only evidence of life.’

                                              WAUGH

   WE must, however, herein note carefully what distinction there is between a healthy and a diseased love of change; for as it was in healthy love of change that the Gothic architecture rose, it was partly in consequence of diseased love of change that it was destroyed.

   IF the pleasure of change be too often repeated, it ceases to be delightful, for then change itself becomes monotonous, and we are driven to seek delight in extreme and fantastic degrees of it. This is the diseased love of change of which we have above spoken. 

                                       RUSKIN

The expectation of change in the 20th century has been greater than the expectation of continuity, nearly everywhere. And the permanent things, as Eliot called them—those enduring truths and ways of life and standards of order—are awash in the flood of sensual appetite and ideological passion.

KIRK

Nothing endures but change.

                                   HERACLITUS

We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature, and the means perhaps of its conservation. All we can do, and that human wisdom can do, is to provide that the change shall proceed by insensible degrees. This has all the benefits which may be in change, without any of the inconveniences of mutation.

                                                               BURKE

The world has changed less since the time of Jesus Christ than it has in the last thirty years. 

                         PÉGUY, 1913

is it not the better part of wisdom to see that change in itself is good? ... It is out of their limitations that men create beauty, and the new and lovely things that have been given to the world have been very often but the result of the conflict of the artist with his shortcomings. I hazard the suggestion that Richard Wagner would never have written the Ring if he had been able to compose as neat a tune as Verdi and that Cèzanne would never have painted his exquisite pictures if he had been able to draw as well as the academic Ingres. And so with life. Everything changes, nothing remains in one stay, the rose that poured out its perfume on the air this morning is scattered this eve; and it is but good sense not to bewail this, the necessity of life, nor even to accept it with resignation, but to welcome it; it is the chief of the colours we have to work with, nay, it is the canvas on which we paint, and shall we ignore it, shall we deplore it, shall we complain that it makes it impossible to complete our picture? Does the rose smell less sweet because in an hour it dies, is love less precious because it passes, is a song less lovely because we tire of it? If all things are transitory let us find delight in their transitoriness.

            MAUGHAM

When I survey this work as a whole I find I have drawn a picture of a vanished age. The character of society, the foundations of politics, the methods of war, the outlook of youth, the scale of values, are all changed, and changed to an extent I should not have believed possible in so short a space without any violent domestic revolution. I cannot pretend to feel that they are in all respects changed for the better. I was a child of the Victorian era, when the structure of our country seemed firmly set, when its position in trade and on the seas was unrivalled, and when the realisation of the greatness of our Empire and of our duty to preserve it was ever growing stronger.

         CHURCHILL

Other epochs have witnessed disasters, have had to suffer disillusionment; but in no century have the disillusionments followed on one another’s heels with such unintermitted rapidity as in the twentieth, for the good reason that in no century has change been so rapid and so profound. The mal du siècle was an inevitable evil; indeed, we can claim with a certain pride that we have a right to our accidie. With us it is not a sin or a disease of the hypochondriacs; it is a state of mind which fate has forced upon us.

                   HUXLEY

I more and more learn the extreme slowness of things, and that though we are all disposed to think that every thing will change in our lifetime, it will not. Perhaps we shall end our days in the tail of a return current of popular religion, both ritual and dogmatic. Still, the change, for being slower than we expected, is not the less sure. 

                                                 ARNOLD

Is it change that a man fears? Why, what can have come to be without change, and what is dearer or more familiar to Universal Nature? Can you yourself take a bath, unless the firewood changes? Can you be nourished, unless what you eat changes? Do you not see that it is precisely your changing which is similar, and similarly necessary to Universal Nature? ... The Universe is change, life is opinion. 

        AVRELIVS

There are two principles inherent in the very nature of things, recurring in some particular embodiments whatever field we explore—the spirit of change, and the spirit of conservation. There can be nothing real without both. Mere change without conservation is a passage from nothing to nothing. Its final integration yields mere transient non-entity. Mere conservation without change cannot conserve. For after all, there is a flux of circumstance, and the freshness of being evaporates under mere repetition.

                                 WHITEHEAD

Progress is impossible without change; and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

     SHAW

CRITICS

It is a matter of thankfulness that the modern school of critics are unable or unwilling to compose a pleasurable sentence. It greatly limits the harm they do.

              WAUGH

One becomes a critic when one cannot be an artist, just as a man becomes a stool pigeon when he cannot be a soldier.

                         FLAUBERT

The malignant deity called Criticism... at her right hand sat Ignorance, her father and husband, blind with age; at her left, Pride, her mother. There was Opinion, her sister, light of foot, hood-winked, and head-strong, yet giddy and perpetually turning. About her played her children, Noise and Impudence, Dulness and Vanity, Positiveness, Pedantry, and Ill-manners. Her diet was the over-flowing of her own gall. "Goddess," said Momus, "can you sit idly here while our devout worshippers, the Moderns, are this minute entering into a cruel battle, and perhaps now lying under the swords of their enemies? who then hereafter will ever sacrifice or build altars to our divinities?

 SWIFT

Critics are men who watch the battle from a high place, then come down and shoot the survivors.

                  HEMINGWAY

That explains everything about our literary critics; they are young ladies, not outstandingly brilliant at anything, who have failed to make a success with poultry. 

WAUGH

The art of painting cannot be truly judged save by such as are themselves good painters. 

DÜRER

I am awfully encouraged that you like Officers and Gentlemen. The reviewers don’t, fuck them.

WAUGH

In Butler’s Education Act he provided for the free distribution of university degrees to the deserving poor. … I could make your flesh creep by telling you about the new wave of philistinism with which we are threatened by these sour young people who are coming off the assembly lines in their hundreds every year and finding employment as critics, even as poets and novelists. 

WAUGH

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. 

ROOSEVELT

Criticism is, alas, an unaristocratic habit, easily tempted into a false intimacy, in praise and negation alike.

HELLER

The good critic is the one who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.

FRANCE

It is in the nature of deconstruction to rob literary works of their intended content, substituting instead the subliminal messages the author did not intend.

     UPDIKE

I have been criticised so often because I joke all the time at myself and everybody else and at everything and most literary critics are very solemn and without humor and they resent that.

HEMINGWAY

I have made my career without the support of the critics, thank God.

      ZEFFIRELLI

THE CRUSADES

POPE URBAN II

FIRST CALL TO CRUSADE, 1095

O sons of God, you must with no further delay hasten to help your brethren who dwell in the East! For, as many of you have heard, a people come out of Persia, the Turks and the Arabs, have invaded their land. They occupy more and more of the lands of those Christians after having overcome them seven times in battle. They have killed and enslaved many. The Turks destroy churches and lay waste to God’s empire. I urge and beseech you; indeed, it is the Lord who does so, as heralds of Christ, to persuade all people, of whatever rank, whether foot-soldiers or knights, whether poor or rich, with your constant preaching, promptly to carry aid to those Christians and to drive that vile race far from our lands. I say this to those who are present, and I also command it of those who are absent: Christ commands it! What ignominy if such a despised, base race, which worships demons, were to conquer a people that worships God and is proud to call itself Christian! Go, therefore and wage battle against the infidels! From this day forward, be knights of Christ! Now fight honorably against the barbarians! Let all those who wish to go do so without delay. Let them set out on the way with God as their guide.

The crusaders arrived at Jerusalem in June 1099; a few of the neighbouring towns were taken first, and Jerusalem itself was captured on July 15. On 22 July, a council was held in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to establish a king for the newly created Kingdom of Jerusalem. Raymond IV of Toulouse and Godfrey de Bouillon were recognized as the leaders of the crusade and the siege of Jerusalem. Raymond was the wealthier and more powerful of the two, but at first he refused to become king, perhaps attempting to show his piety and probably hoping that the other nobles would insist upon his election anyway. The more popular Godfrey did not hesitate like Raymond, and accepted a position as secular leader.

Those who perceive in the crusades nothing but a mob of armed pilgrims running to rescue a tomb in Palestine, must take a very limited view of history. The point in question was not merely the deliverance of that sacred tomb, but likewise to decide which of the two should predominate in the world, a religion hostile to civilization, systematically favourable to ignorance, despotism and slavery, or a religion which has revived among the moderns the spirit of learned antiquity and abolished servitude. … The spirit of Islamism is persecution and conquest; the gospel, on the contrary, inculcates only toleration and peace.

CHATEAUBRIAND

When the Nusseibehs showed General Allenby round the Church, they claimed that he asked for the keys. ‘Now the Crusades have ended,’ he said. ‘I return you the keys but these are not from Omar or Saladin but from Allenby.’ 

I am in the heart of my own country, surrounded by my household and by my children, and able to get all I want. Moreover, I am an old man now, I have no longer any desire for the pleasures of the world; I have had my fill of them and have renounced them for ever. Above all, I believe that I am furthering God’s cause in acting as I do. I will not cease therefrom until God grants victory to whom He will.

          SALADIN, after being asked to divide Jerusalem

The Crusades, which now engrossed the attention of Europe, and have ever since engaged the curiosity of mankind, as the most signal and most durable monument of human folly, that has yet appeared in any age or nation.

                                                  HUME

   The crusades were in every way a defensive war. They were the West’s belated response to the Muslim conquest of fully two-thirds of the Christian world.

   The Enlightenment turned Western attention away from Heaven and toward the things of this world. Soon religion in the West became simply a matter of personal preference. Crusades became unthinkable—a foolishness of a civilization’s childhood.

    According to president Obama, Christians should avoid mounting their “high horse” when it comes to “faith being twisted and distorted,” since “during the Crusades and Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.” Well, yes. That’s true. But people commit terrible deeds in the name of everything. The question isn’t whether humans can be evil, but whether those acts are consistent with their religious beliefs. 

   Saladin, who is generally well regarded today, estimated that he had killed or executed 40000 European Christians after the Battle of Hattin in 1187.

           MADDEN

—

The First Crusade

and the idea of crusading

JONATHAN RILEY-SMITH

In the 11th century … the natural world, itself miraculous since it stemmed from God’s act of creation, was important only in so far as it gave men signs of what was in reality happening behind it, revealing to them the significance of these supernatural events. Nature was to be interpreted, not explained. 

God, the ruler of all things, whose wisdom and strength, when he wishes, taketh away kingdoms and changeth times.

                      URBAN II, on Christian advances in Sicily and Spain

It is no exaggeration to say that ‘liberation’ was the word most frequently used by Urban when justifying the need to crusade.

The attitude of 11th-century Christians towards Jerusalem and the Holy Land was obsessive. Jerusalem was the centre of the world, the spot on earth on which God himself had focused when he chose to redeem mankind by intervening in history.

No passage of scripture was to be more often quoted in connection with crusading than the opening words of Psalm 79: ‘O God, the heathens are come into thy inheritance’.

—

Forty years later, in the guise of the first crusade, the Eastern Empire was invaded by the vast host of beggars, dotards, prostitutes, and children that had flocked to the call of Peter the Hermit. At their head rode the freebooting chivalry of Europe, to implant a retrograde feudalism and hostile Church in the ancient territories of the Byzantine dominion.

R. BYRON

William the Old fought in the Battle of Hattin in 1187, where he was captured by Saladin’s forces. In the meantime, his second son, Conrad of Montferrat, had arrived at Tyre from Constantinople. Conrad was given the command of the defences. During the siege of Tyre in November that year, he is said to have refused to surrender as much as a stone of its walls to liberate his father, even threatening to shoot him with a crossbow himself when Saladin had him presented as a hostage.

DANGER

The secret to the great fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence is: to live dangerously! Build your cities under Vesuvius. Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves! Be robbers and conquerors, as long as you cannot be rulers and owners, you lovers of knowledge! Soon the age will be past when you could be satisfied to live like shy deer, hidden in the woods!

         NIETZSCHE

Danger or victory for a Christian depends on the dispositions of his heart and not on the fortunes of war. If he fights for a good reason, the issue of his fight can never be evil; and likewise the results can never be considered good if the reason were evil and the intentions perverse. 

                                                                           BERNARD OF CLAIRVAUX

Near is God, and hard to apprehend. 

But where danger is, there arises salvation also. 

HÖLDERLIN

Give me leave, therefore, without offence, always to live and die in this mind; that he is not worthy to live at all that, for fear or danger of death, shunneth his country’s service and his own honour, seeing that death is inevitable and the fame of virtue immortal, wherefore in this behalf mutare vel timere sperno. (I scorn to change or to fear).

 SIR HUMFREY GILBERT

We are of the opinion that harshness, violence, enslavement, danger on the street and in the heart, seclusion, stoicism, the art of the tempter and every kind of devilry, that everything evil, frightful, tyrannical, predatory, and snake-like about humans serves to heighten the species ‘human being’ as much as does its opposite.

                                       NIETZSCHE

I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life. The life of toil and effort, of labor and strife; to preach that highest form of success which comes, not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph.

      ROOSEVELT

We Futurists, who for over two years, scorned by the Lame and Paralyzed, have glorified the love of danger and violence, praised patriotism and war, the hygiene of the world, are happy to finally experience this great Futurist hour of Italy, while the foul tribe of pacifists huddles dying in the deep cellars of the ridiculous palace at The Hague.

        MARINETTI

DEATH

What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying.

CAMUS

Greater deaths win greater portions.

HERACLITUS

True philosophy consists in training to die readily.

         SOCRATES

Death is always and under all circumstances a tragedy, for if it is not, then it means that life itself has become one.

         ROOSEVELT

The tongues of dying men

Enforce attention like deep harmony:

Where words are scarce, they are seldom spent in vain,

For they breathe truth that breathe their words in pain.

          JOHN OF GAUNT

                  KING RICHARD II

No matter where; of comfort no man speak:

Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;

Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes

Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth,

Let’s choose executors and talk of wills:

And yet not so, for what can we bequeath

Save our deposed bodies to the ground?

Our lands, our lives and all are Bolingbroke’s,

And nothing can we call our own but death

And that small model of the barren earth

Which serves as paste and cover to our bones.

For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground

And tell sad stories of the death of kings;

How some have been deposed; some slain in war,

Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;

Some poison’d by their wives: some sleeping kill’d;

All murder’d: for within the hollow crown

That rounds the mortal temples of a king

Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits,

Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,

Allowing him a breath, a little scene,

To monarchize, be fear’d and kill with looks,

Infusing him with self and vain conceit,

As if this flesh which walls about our life,

Were brass impregnable, and humour’d thus

Comes at the last and with a little pin

Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!

Cover your heads and mock not flesh and blood

With solemn reverence: throw away respect,

Tradition, form and ceremonious duty,

For you have but mistook me all this while:

I live with bread like you, feel want,

Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus,

How can you say to me, I am a king?

A CYPRESS GROVE

BY WILLIAM DRUMMOND

OF HAWTHORNDEN

1623

   How can death be evil if it is the thaw of all these vanities which the frost of life bindeth together?

   It is not of death, perhaps, that we complain, but of time, under the fatal shadow of whose wings all things decay and wither. This is that tyrant, which, executing against us his diamantine laws, altereth the harmonious constitution of our bodies, benumbing the organs of our knowledge, turneth our best senses senseless, makes us loathsome to others, and a burthen to ourselves; of which evils death relieveth us.

Revenge triumphs over death; love slights it; honor aspireth to it; grief flieth to it; fear preoccupateth it.

Death hath this also; that it openeth the gate to good fame, and extinguisheth envy.

       BACON

LUCRETIUS

On The Nature of Things

   Wilt thou hesitate and fret at dying, whose life is well-nigh dead whilst thou art yet alive; who consumest in sleep the greater part of thy span, and when awake dronest and ceasest not to dream; and carriest about a mind troubled with baseless fear and canst not find what it is that aileth thee when thou staggerest like a drunken wretch in the press of thy cares, and welterest hither and thither in the unsteady wandering of thy spirit!

   A certain bound of life is fixed to mortals; nor can death be avoided, or can we exempt ourselves from undergoing it. Moreover, we are continually engaged and fixed in the same occupations; nor, by the prolongation of life, is any new pleasure discovered. Yet that which we desire, seems, while it is distant, to excel all other objects; but afterwards, when it has fallen to our lot, we covet something else· and thus a uniform thirst of life occupies us, longing earnestly for that which is to come; while what fate the last period may bring us, or what chance may throw in our way, or what death awaits us, still remains in uncertainty.

The shadow of death reduces every problem to a satisfying triviality.

                   JÜNGER

Exactly in proportion as the pride of life became more insolent, the fear of death became more servile; and the difference in the manner in which the men of early and later days adorned the sepulchre, confesses a still greater difference in their manner of regarding death. To those he came as the comforter and the friend, rest in his right hand, hope in his left; to these as the humiliator, the spoiler, and avenger. 

                             RUSKIN

Roderigo.  It is silliness to live when to live is torment; and then have we a prescription to die when death is our physician.

Death is all there is in life.

                                          VERDI

Hope humbly, then; with trembling pinions soar;

Wait the great teacher Death; and God adore.

What future bliss, He gives not thee to know,

But gives that hope to be thy blessing now.

Hope springs eternal in the human breast:

Man never is, but always to be blest:

The soul, uneasy and confined from home,

Rests and expatiates in a life to come.

                                                               POPE

The poet Auden called death ‘the distant sound of thunder at a picnic.’ Well, I’ve heard that thunder almost constantly since I was five years old. It’s ruined my life.

          ALLEN

                         You and I are old;

Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;

Death closes all: but something ere the end,

Some work of noble note, may yet be done,

Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.

TENNYSON

On the death of a friend, we should consider that the fates through confidence have devolved on us the task of a double living, that we have henceforth to fulfill the promise of our friend’s life also, in our own, to the world.

THOREAU

Death smiles at us all. All a man can do is smile back.

        GLADIATOR

     Mahler’s 4th

1st   — a funeral, Is there life after death?

2nd — a remembrance of happy times in life

3rd  — life as meaningless

4th  — a wish for release from life without meaning

5th  — revisits doubts of 3rd and questions of 1st, ends with fervent hope for transcendent renewal.

To support a great cause in a heroic struggle, where the honorability of the combatants and the presumption of right are equal, and both are at risk of giving or receiving death, what is so terrible there? What is, after all, immoral here? Death is the crowning of life: how could man, an intelligent, moral, and free creature, find a more noble end?

PROUDHON

Alexander asked a gymnosophist how long it were well for a man to live. He answered: ‘Until he does not regard death as better than life.’

I will have nothing to do with your immortality; we are miserable enough in this life, without the absurdity of speculating upon another. If men are to live, why die at all? and if they die, why disturb the sweet and sound sleep that ‘knows no waking’? 

BYRON

The sage is at peace with death, the learned man understands death, and the common man fears death.

SATO ISSAI

DEVOTION

True, the émigré armies are paid by our enemies, but they were or should have been bound to the cause of their King. France gave death to their action, and tears to their courage. All devotion is heroic.

    NAPOLEON

We are the last. Almost beyond the last. Immediately after us begins another age, a quite different world, the world of those who no longer believe in anything; those for whom this is a source of pride and glory... That is: the world of those who believe in nothing, not even in atheism, who show neither devotion nor sacrifice for anything.

PEGUY

The greatness of an epoch or a cause depends on the proportion of those capable of sacrifice, on whatever side it may be. In this respect the Middle Ages pass muster rather well. Devotion! And not a guarantee of regular pay! Where does greatness begin? With devotion to a cause, whatever it may be, with complete extinction of personal vanity.

BURCKHARDT

What little I’ve accomplished has been by the most laborious and uphill work, and I wish now I’d never relaxed or looked back—but said at the end of The Great Gatsby: “I’ve found my line—from now on this comes first. This is my immediate duty—without this I am nothing.”

           FITZGERALD

The credit belongs to the man who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. 

ROOSEVELT

Even the impossible becomes possible through devotion.

       SRI SARADADEVI

In the age of sacrifices, the truth of religion was not in the greatness and fat of the offerings, but in the devotion and zeal of the sacrificers.

JONSON

ENGLAND

More than once already in the preceding pages mention has been made of the obliteration of English villages. The process is notorious and inevitable. Expostulation is futile, lament tedious. This is part of the grim cyclorama of spoliation which surrounds all English experience in this century and any understanding of the immediate past (which presumably is the motive for reading a book such as this) must be incomplete unless this huge deprivation of the quiet pleasures of the eye is accepted as a dominant condition, sometimes for mere sentimental apathy, sometimes poisoning love of country and of neighbours. To have been born into a world of beauty, to die amid ugliness, is the common fate of all us exiles.

                          WAUGH

This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle,

This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,

This other Eden, demi-paradise,

This fortress built by Nature for herself

Against infection and the hand of war,

This happy breed of men, this little world,

This precious stone set in the silver sea,

Which serves it in the office of a wall,

Or as a moat defensive to a house,

Against the envy of less happier lands,

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,

This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,

Fear’d by their breed and famous by their birth,

Renowned for their deeds as far from home,

For Christian service and true chivalry.

                                                             RICHARD II

SINCE first the dominion of men was asserted over the ocean, three thrones, of mark beyond all others, have been set upon its sands: the thrones of Tyre, Venice, and England. Of the First of these great powers only the memory remains; of the Second, the ruin; the Third, which inherits their greatness, if it forget their example, may be led through prouder eminence to less pitied destruction.

RUSKIN

If a stranger should now travel in England, and observe the churches in his way, he could not otherwise conclude, than that some vast army of Turks or heathens had been sent on purpose to ruin and blot out all marks of Christianity.

                                                               SWIFT, 1725

Venice is superficially and apparently commercial;—at heart passionately heroic and religious; precisely the reverse of modern England, who is superficially and apparently religious; and at heart, entirely infidel, cowardly, and dishonest.

                     RUSKIN

In a short time, and that a period approaching nearer to be counted by months than by years, nothing will remain of England but the name and the soil. Its greatness will be in history, but everything which occasioned it, preserved it, and would perpetuate it, will be annihilated.

THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON

Milton! thou should’st be living at this hour:

England hath need of thee: she is a fen 

Of stagnant waters.    

                 WORDSWORTH

I have no doubt that the Elizabethan and the Victorian Ages will appear to the historian of the future as the twin peaks in which English civilisation culminated.

                 DEAN INGE

To me England has been a country where I had obligations that I did not want to fulfil and responsibilities that irked me. I never felt entirely myself till I had put at least the Channel between my native country and me. 

                                       MAUGHAM

I dwell on the joy of never seeing Great Britain again, with its horrid, wearisome dinner-parties and miseries. How we can put up with those things, passes my imagination! It is a perfect bondage … I would sooner live like a Dervish with the Mahdi, than go out to dinner every night in London. I hope, if any English general comes to Khartoum, he will not ask me to dinner. Why men cannot be friends without bringing the wretched stomachs in, is astounding.

                           GORDON

Never again will I spend another winter in this accursed bucketshop of a refrigerator called England.

          CONRAD

ENGLISH

English is incomparably the richest of languages, dead or living. One can devote one’s life to learning it and die without achieving mastery. No two words are identical in meaning, sound and connotation. … There has been a notable flight from magnificence in English writing.

                                                                        WAUGH

Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech: that your native language is the language of Shakespear and Milton and The Bible; and don’t sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon. 

                              SHAW

For the more vigorous, however, the choice lies in the two extremes of anarchic bohemianism and ascetic seclusion. Each provides a refuge from the state. The Bohemians will have a valuable function in teasing, it may be hoped to madness, the new bourgeoisie, but I believe it will be left to the ascetics to produce the works of art in which, if at all, English culture will survive.

WAUGH

Churchill mobilised the English language and sent it into battle to steady his fellow countrymen and hearten those Europeans upon whom the long dark night of tyranny had descended.

 MURROW

Today in England we are faced with writers who in their formative years learned the uncouth tongue of the pit and the factory and later, with effort, amassed a wider vocabulary of words they know only from books; in America the case is even worse, for vast sections of the population have learned English as a foreign language. The excruciating products of this education—when a man schooled to talk vaguely of his rudimentary needs finds himself desirous of expressing accurately abstract, delicate or complicated thoughts—are on every bookstall.

WAUGH

Although, as I have already observed, our English tongue is too little cultivated in this kingdom, yet the faults are, nine in ten, owing to affectation, and not to the want of understanding. When a man’s thoughts are clear, the properest words will generally offer themselves first, and his own judgment will direct him in what order to place them so as they may be best understood.

SWIFT

It makes one weep to think what English might have been; for in spite of all that Shakespeare and Milton have done with the compound I cannot doubt that no beauty in a language can make up for want of purity. 

                HOPKINS

In the second-to-last stage of our language’s decay it was enough to write correctly in order to gain a reputation for writing well. Now we are in the last stage, when almost nobody knows what it means to write correctly. Among ordinary pens for hire it is no longer common to write without solecisms; even those who can are likely to bolt phrases together with no real attention to their derivation; and in too many cases the language is utterly emptied of the history that brought it into being. 

CLIVE JAMES

NATVRE | THE ENVIRONMENT

Whoever feels unhappy in this world, whoever fails to find what he seeks—then let him enter the world of books, art and nature, this eternal domain which is both ancient and modern simultaneously, and let him live there in this secret church of a better world. There he will surely find a lover and a friend, a fatherland and a God.

            NOVALIS

   YOU have despised Nature; that is to say, all the deep and sacred sensations of natural scenery. The French revolutionists made stables of the cathedrals of France; you have made race-courses of the cathedrals of the earth. Your one conception of pleasure is to drive in railroad carriages round their aisles, and eat off their altars.

  YOU have put a railroad bridge over the fall of Schaffhausen. You have tunneled the cliffs of Lucerne by Tell’s chapel; you have destroyed the Clarens shore of the Lake of Geneva; there is not a quiet valley in England that you have not filled with bellowing fire; there is no particle left of English land which you have not trampled coal ashes into.

RUSKIN

Turner had found hope after hope fail him. Only one thing remained unchangeable, and that was nature. On the Yorkshire fells or beside the Swiss lakes he forgot his cares in the love and gratitude he felt for the stainless beauty of God’s world. Then alone he forgot all sorrows, and was once more happy as a child.

                       THORNBURY

Then came industrial progress with its prodigious multiplication of filth, misery, and ill-gotten wealth; the defilement of nature by modern industry was in itself enough to sadden many sensitive minds.

       HUXLEY

Our part is not fitly sustained upon the earth, unless the range of our intended and deliberate usefulness include, not only the companions but the successors of our pilgrimage. God has lent us the earth for our life; it is a great entail. It belongs as much to those who are to come after us, and whose names are already written in the book of creation, as to us; and we have no right, by anything that we do or neglect, to involve them in unnecessary penalties, or deprive them of benefits which it was in our power to bequeath. And this the more, because it is one of the appointed conditions of the labour of men that, in proportion to the time between the seed-sowing and the harvest, is the fulness of the fruit; and that generally, therefore, the farther off we place our aim, and the less we desire to be ourselves the witnesses of what we have laboured for, the more wide and rich will be the measure of our success. Men cannot benefit those that are with them as they can benefit those who come after them; and of all the pulpits from which human voice is ever sent forth, there is none from which it reaches so far as from the grave.

                                                   RUSKIN

The rain fell not as in our temperate zone, but with an angry vehemence, in sheets, storming down as though the heavens were emptying themselves of flooded lakes. It seemed to fall with no blind unconscious force, but with a purpose and a malignancy which were, alas, but too human. I stood in a doorway, not a little frightened, and as the lightning tore the darkness like a veil I saw the jungle stretching endlessly before me, and it seemed to me that these great temples and their gods were insignificant before the fierce might of nature. Its power there was so manifest, spoke with so stern and insistent a voice, that it was easy to understand how man had devised his gods and built great temples to house them to serve as a screen between himself and the force that terrified and crushed him. For nature is the most powerful of all the gods.

MAUGHAM

The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.

                                                       MUIR

There is in nature an eternal life, becoming, and movement. She alters herself eternally, and is never still. She has no conception of stasis, and can only curse it. She is strong, her step is measured, her laws unalterable. She has thought and constantly reflects—not as a human being, but as nature. She appears to everyone in a particular form. She hides herself in a thousand names and terms, and is always the same. 

                        GOETHE

   In God’s wildness lies the hope of the world—the great fresh, unblighted, unredeemed wilderness. The galling harness of civilization drops off, and wounds heal ere we are aware.

   Most people are on the world, not in it—have no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them—undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate.

           MVIR

After reading Thoreau I felt how much I have lost by leaving nature out of my life.

      FITZGERALD

The truth of nature is a part of the truth of God; to him who does not search it out, darkness, as it is to him who does, infinity.

                                       RUSKIN

And now, when, in a little while, it is unparadised again, if there were any other mistake the world could make, it would of course make it. But I see not that there is any other; and, standing fairly at its wits’ end, having found that going fast, when it is used to it, is no more paradisiacal than going slow; and that all the prints and cottons in Manchester cannot make it comfortable in its mind, I do verily believe it will come, finally, to understand that God paints the clouds and shapes the moss-fibres, that men may be happy in seeing Him at His work, and that in resting quietly beside Him, and watching His working, and—according to the power He has communicated to ourselves, and the guidance He grants—in carrying out His purposes of peace and charity among all His creatures, are the only real happinesses that ever were, or will be, possible to mankind.

         RUSKIN

Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life,—no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances,—master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.

                   EMERSON

EQVALITY

By introducing a uniform system of education and by seeking to make it universal and compulsory, the State is attempting to minimize natural superiorities. No doubt many public men and bureaucrats are consciously aware that their tasks would be easier if mankind lost its diversity and became wholly docile in accepting what is represented to it as its own good.

 WAUGH

To me all men are equal: there are jackasses everywhere, and I have the same contempt for them all.

KRAUS

Men are not naturally equal and can only seem so when enslaved.

WAUGH

Some day I must buy myself a slave in Constantinople, a Georgian girl—a man who doesn’t own a slave is a nonentity; is there anything more stupid than equality, especially for those who are crippled by it?—and it cripples me horribly. 

FLAUBERT

The new barbarism decrees an equal share of misery, ugliness, hebetude, shame, and ultimately of nihility, for each and all. 

                                   SITWELL

“Equality” as a certain factual increase in similarity, which merely finds expression in the theory of “equal rights,” is an essential feature of decline. The cleavage between man and man, status and status, the plurality of types, the will to be oneself, to stand out—what I call the pathos of distance, that is characteristic of every strong age. The strength to withstand tension, the width of the tensions between extremes, becomes ever smaller today; finally, the extremes themselves become blurred to the point of similarity.

                         NIETZSCHE

DE TOCQUEVILLE

When all the prerogatives of birth and fortune are destroyed, when all professions are open to all, and when one can reach the summit of each of them by oneself, an immense and easy course seems to open before the ambition of men, and they willingly fancy that they have been called to great destinies. But that is an erroneous view corrected by experience every day. The same equality that permits each citizen to conceive vast hopes renders all citizens individually weak. It limits their strength in all regards at the same time that it permits their desires to expand.

The constant opposition reigning between the instincts that equality gives birth to and the means that it furnishes to satisfy them is tormenting and fatiguing to souls.

Men will never found an equality that is enough for them. Whatever a people’s efforts, it will not succeed in making conditions perfectly equal within itself; and if it had the misfortune to reach this absolute and complete levelling, the inequality of intellects would still remain, which, coming directly from God, will always escape the laws.

—

EVROPE

War and culture, those are the two poles of Europe, her heaven and hell, her glory and shame, and they cannot be separated from one another. When one comes to an end the other will end also and one cannot end without the other.

         KUNDERA

REFLECTIONS

ON THE

REVOLUTION IN FRANCE

1790

EDMUND BURKE

The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever. Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that charity of honor, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.

But now all is to be changed. All the pleasing illusions, which made power gentle and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason. All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off.

Quite another question is how we are to regard this Downfall. Here we are at the parting of the ways. Those who cling definitely to the past, those who venerate time-honoured cultural forms, the Knights of a treasured morality, must seek to delay this Downfall and will mourn it inconsolably when it passes. For them the Downfall is the End; for the others, it is the Beginning. For the first, Dostoevsky is a criminal, for the others a Saint. For the one party Europe and its soul constitute an entity once and for all, foreordained, inviolate, a thing fixed and immutable. For the other it is a becoming, a mutable, ever-changing thing.

  HESSE

I do not believe that the culture of Europe could survive the complete disappearance of the Christian Faith. And I am convinced of that, not merely because I am a Christian myself, but as a student of social biology. If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes. Then you must start painfully again, and you cannot put on a new culture ready made. You must wait for the grass to grow to feed the sheep to give the wool out of which your new coat will be made. You must pass through many centuries of barbarism. We should not live to see the new culture, nor would our great-great-great-grandchildren: and if we did, not one of us would be happy in it.

            ELIOT 

FLAUBERT

Letter to Ernest Chevalier, November 14, 1840

My mind is dried up, exhausted. I’m disgusted to be back in this damned country where you see the sun in the sky about as often as a diamond in a pig’s ass-hole. I don’t give a shit for Normandy and la belle France. Ah! To live in Spain, in Italy, even in Provence! Some day I must buy myself a slave in Constantinople, a Georgian girl—a man who doesn’t own a slave is a nonentity; is there anything more stupid than equality, especially for those who are crippled by it?—and it cripples me horribly. I hate Europe, France—my own country, my succulent motherland that I’d gladly send to hell now that I’ve had a glimpse of what lies beyond. I think I must have been transplanted by the winds to this land of mud; surely I was born elsewhere—I’ve always had what seem like memories or intuitions of perfumed shores and blue seas. I was born to be emperor of Cochin-China, to smoke 100-foot pipes, to have 6 thousand wives and 1400 catamites, scimitars to slice off heads I don’t like the look of, Numidian horses, marble pools — and I have nothing but immense, insatiable desires, frightful boredom and incessant yawns. Also a broken pipe and dried-out tobacco. Shit! Adieu; keep well. Too bad if you’re shocked by the cynicism of this letter: that would be proof you’re stupid and I like to think you’re not.

What a comfort it will be to be back in Europe again! And to think there was a time when I read books about Yoga and did breathing exercises and tried to persuade myself that I didn’t really exist! What a fool!

HUXLEY, Point Counter Point

Nietzsche praised the institution of caste, for he thought it right that life should grow colder towards the summit. As the Markandeya Purana pronounces, a Brahman should do nothing for the sake of enjoyment. Those who have comprehended the decline and fall of Western civilisation will recognise in Nietzsche the reawakening of the conscience of Europe.

      COOMARASWAMY

In Europe, on the other hand, and still more, no doubt, in America, the Way of Gautama has all the appearance of the way of Salvation. One is all for religion until one visits a really religious country. There, one is all for drains, machinery and the minimum wage. To travel is to discover that everybody is wrong. The philosophies, the civilisations which seem, at a distance, so superior to those current at home, all prove on a close inspection to be in their own way just as hopelessly imperfect. That knowledge, which only travel can give, is worth, it seems to me, all the trouble, all the discomfort and expense of a circumnavigation.        

HUXLEY, Jesting Pilate

The growing melancholy of enlightened Europe, veiled as it may be, with sometimes a conceited bustle, sometimes a desperate shipwreck gaiety. 

DISRAELI

In its pursuit of the truths of the natural order Europe had come to negate the truths of humility—the truths of the inner life. In the literal sense of the word, it has lost its orientation, for it originally received these truths from the Orient. One remembers Arnold’s account of this former contact between East and West: first, the impact of a Europe drunk with power upon Asia.

   The East bowed low before the blast

   In patient deep disdain;

   She let the legions thunder past,

   And plunged in thought again.

                                                 BABBITT

We are still the heirs of long centuries during which a civilization was formed in Europe inspired by Christianity. During the Middle Ages, from a certain cohesion of the entire continent, Europe built a luminous civilization of which many testimonies remain.

JOHN PAUL II

I am talking about the common tradition of Christianity which has made Europe what it is, and about the common cultural elements which this common Christianity has brought with it. If Asia were converted to Christianity tomorrow, it would not thereby become a part of Europe. It is in Christianity that our arts have developed; it is in Christianity that the laws of Europe have — until recently — been rooted. It is against a background of Christianity that all our thought has significance. An individual European may not believe that the Christian Faith is true, and yet what he says, and makes, and does, will all spring out of his heritage of Christian culture and depend upon that culture for its meaning. Only a Christian culture could have produced a Voltaire or a Nietzsche. I do not believe that the culture of Europe could survive the complete disappearance of the Christian Faith. [...] The Western World has its unity in this heritage, in Christianity and in the ancient civilisations of Greece, Rome, and Israel, from which, owing to two thousand years of Christianity, we trace our descent.

                                ELIOT

The ego is an alert, prominent, and enlightened little part of the id—much as Europe is a small and lively province of the greater Asia.

MANN

There is no doubt that Europe has given birth to monsters, but at the same time it has given birth to theories that make it possible to understand and destroy these monsters.

America asserts itself, Europe questions itself. One says, “I want,” the other says, “Who am I?”

        BRUCKNER

What distinguishes much of Western Europe and the United States is not that they were born in a crucible of blood and violence; that is a common origin. What distinguishes them is that they have managed, to an extraordinary extent, to transcend those sanguinary beginnings in order to propagate the values of individual liberty and democratic capitalism.

        KIMBALL

None of you has any idea yet what a people is and how easily it deteriorates into a barbarous mob. You do not know yet what a tyrannical rule is to be set up over the spirit… We may all perish; but I for one shall choose the cause for which I am going to perish: the culture of old Europe. [die Bildungs Alteuropas]

BVRCKHARDT

It is now more dangerous for a European citizen to publicly object to illegal immigration than for a foreigner to enter Europe illegally.

Atheistic nihilism and a soulless modernism—not religious piety and a reverence for custom and tradition—fuelled German and Italian fascism and Russian Communism. Contrary to politically correct dogma, Christianity, military deterrence, democracy and veneration of a unique past did not destroy Europe. Instead, the culprit of European decline was the very absence of such ancient values—both then and now.

        HANSON

EUROPE. In the Middle Ages, European unity rested on the common religion. In the Modern Era, religion yielded its position to culture (to cultural creation), which came to embody the supreme values by which Europeans recognized themselves, defined and identified themselves. Now, in our own time, culture is in turn yielding its position. But to what and to whom? What sphere will provide the sort of supreme values that could unify Europe? Technology? The marketplace? Politics involving the democratic ideal, the principle of tolerance? But if that tolerance no longer has any rich creativity or any powerful thought to protect, will it not become empty and useless? Or can we take culture’s abdication as a kind of deliverance, to be welcomed euphorically? I don’t know. I merely believe I know that culture has already yielded. And thus the image of European unity slips away into the past. European: one who is nostalgic for Europe.

KUNDERA

EXILE

To have been born into a world of beauty, to die amid ugliness, is the common fate of all us exiles. 

                  WAUGH

Exiles shall you be from all father- and forefather-lands! Your children’s land shall you love.

NIETZSCHE

I hate not to be banished; ‘tis honour with most lands to be at odds.

SHAKESPEARE

JOHN OF GAUNT

What is six winters? they are quickly gone.

HENRY BOLINGBROKE

To men in joy; but grief makes one hour ten.

JOHN OF GAUNT

Call it a travel that thou takest for pleasure.

HENRY BOLINGBROKE

My heart will sigh when I miscall it so,

Which finds it an inforced pilgrimage.

JOHN OF GAUNT

The sullen passage of thy weary steps

Esteem as foil wherein thou art to set

The precious jewel of thy home return.

HENRY BOLINGBROKE

Nay, rather, every tedious stride I make

Will but remember me what a deal of world

I wander from the jewels that I love.

Must I not serve a long apprenticehood

To foreign passages, and in the end,

Having my freedom, boast of nothing else

But that I was a journeyman to grief?

JOHN OF GAUNT

All places that the eye of heaven visits

Are to a wise man ports and happy havens.

Teach thy necessity to reason thus;

There is no virtue like necessity.

Think not the king did banish thee,

But thou the king. Woe doth the heavier sit,

Where it perceives it is but faintly borne.

Go, say I sent thee forth to purchase honour

And not the king exiled thee; or suppose

Devouring pestilence hangs in our air

And thou art flying to a fresher clime:

Look, what thy soul holds dear, imagine it

To lie that way thou go’st, not whence thou comest:

Suppose the singing birds musicians,

The grass whereon thou tread’st the presence strew’d,

The flowers fair ladies, and thy steps no more

Than a delightful measure or a dance;

For gnarling sorrow hath less power to bite

The man that mocks at it and sets it light.

HENRY BOLINGBROKE

O, who can hold a fire in his hand

By thinking on the frosty Caucasus?

Or cloy the hungry edge of appetite

By bare imagination of a feast?

Or wallow naked in December snow

By thinking on fantastic summer’s heat?

O, no! the apprehension of the good

Gives but the greater feeling to the worse:

Fell sorrow’s tooth doth never rankle more

Than when he bites, but lanceth not the sore.

Change of place then may be borne by every man. It is the delight of many. But who can bear the evils which accompany exile? You who ask the question can bear them. Every one who considers them as they are in themselves, instead of looking at them through the false optick which prejudice holds before our eyes. For what? you have lost your estate: reduce your desires, and you will perceive yourself to be as rich as ever, with this considerable advantage to boot, that your cares will be diminished. Our natural and real wants are confined to narrow bounds, while those which fancy and custom create are confined to none. Truth lies within a little and certain compass, but error is immense. If we suffer our desires therefore to wander beyond these bounds, they wander eternally. “Nescio quid curtae semper abest rei.” We become necessitous in the midst of plenty, and our poverty increases with our riches. Reduce your desires, be able to say with the apostle of Greece, to whom Erasmus was ready to address his prayers, “quain multis ipse non egeo!" banish out of your exile all imaginary, and you will suffer no real wants. The little stream which is left will suffice to quench the thirst of nature, and that which cannot be quenched by it, is not your thirst, but your distemper; a distemper formed by the vicious habits of your mind, and not the effect of exile.

BOLINGBROKE

And I repeat it, better, far better, were it to retire from the world altogether than thus to engage in it—better with Elijah to fly to the desert, than to serve Baal and Ashtoreth in Jerusalem.

LEWIS

Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile,

Hath not old custom made this life more sweet

Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods

More free from peril than the envious court?

Here feel we but the penalty of Adam,

The seasons’ difference, as the icy fang

And churlish chiding of the winter’s wind,

Which, when it bites and blows upon my body,

Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say

‘This is no flattery: these are counsellors

That feelingly persuade me what I am.’

Sweet are the uses of adversity,

Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,

Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;

And this our life exempt from public haunt

Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,

Sermons in stones and good in every thing.

I would not change it.

                          SHAKESPEARE

I suppose there is no word quite as evocative in the English language as ‘home’ especially if you don’t have one.

BURTON

Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?

CIORAN

FAME

Oh Swift! If fame be life thou canst not wholly die.

        PARNELL

Beethoven replied, ‘So much the worse, Your Highness, but with men who will not believe and trust in me because I am as yet unknown to universal fame, I cannot hold intercourse.’

Democritus did not care to win fame from a place, but preferred himself to make a place famous.

Desert and virtue for the most part want monuments and memory, seldom are recorded in the volumes of admiration, nay, are often branded with infamy, while statues and trophies are erected to those whose names should have been buried in their dust, and folded up in the darkest clouds of oblivion: so do the rank weeds in this garden of the world choke and over-run the sweetest flowers. Applause whilst thou livest, serveth but to make thee that fair mark against which envy and malice direct their arrows, and when thou art wounded, all eyes are turned towards thee (like the sun, which is most gazed on in an eclipse), not for pity or praise, but detraction.

DRUMMOND

Fame is the wise man’s means; his ends are his own good, and the good of society. You poets and orators have inverted this order; you propose fame as the end; and good, or at least great actions are the means.

BOLINGBROKE

The fame of success remains, when the motives of attempt are forgotten.

              RUSKIN

FRANCE | THE FRENCH

The Frenchman is a farmyard animal, so well domesticated that he dares not jump over any fence.

BAUDELAIRE

Coleridge tells of the Prussian artist who described the Frenchman as the “only animal in human shape, that by no possibility can lift itself up to religion or poetry.” Hazlitt derides France as a “frivolous and pedantic nation,” and observes, “The French have to me a character of littleness in all about them; but they have produced three great men that belong to every country, Moliere, Rabelais and Montaigne.

France is passing through a period of vulgarity. Paris: a centre radiating stupidity in every direction. Despite Moliere and Beranger, no one would ever have supposed that France would take to the road of progress at such a rate. Matters of art: terrae incognito.

BAUDELAIRE

THE FRANCO-OTTOMAN ALLIANCE

Established in 1536 The "Impious Alliance" or "The Sacrilegious Union of the Lily and the Crescent". After the siege of Nice the Ottomans were offered by France to winter at Toulon, so that they could continue to harass the Holy Roman Empire, and especially the coast of Spain and Italy. During the wintering of Hayreddin Barbarossa, Toulon Cathedral was transformed into a mosque, the call to prayer occurred five times a day, and Ottoman coinage was the currency of choice. According to an observer: ‘To see Toulon, one might imagine oneself at Constantinople.’

FLAUBERT

Letter to Ernest Chevalier, November 14, 1840

My mind is dried up, exhausted. I’m disgusted to be back in this damned country where you see the sun in the sky about as often as a diamond in a pig’s ass-hole. I don’t give a shit for Normandy and la belle France. Ah! To live in Spain, in Italy, even in Provence! Some day I must buy myself a slave in Constantinople, a Georgian girl—a man who doesn’t own a slave is a nonentity; is there anything more stupid than equality, especially for those who are crippled by it?—and it cripples me horribly. I hate Europe, France—my own country, my succulent motherland that I’d gladly send to hell now that I’ve had a glimpse of what lies beyond.

  A Royal Navy officer said to the French corsair Robert Surcouf "You French fight for money, while we British fight for honour." Surcouf replied, "Sir, a man fights for what he lacks the most.”

  A French diplomat once said to Lord Palmerston, "If I were not a Frenchman, I should wish to be an Englishman,” to which Lord Palmerston replied, "If I were not an Englishman, I should wish to be an Englishman."

FRIENDSHIP

Human life is thus only a perpetual illusion; men deceive and flatter each other. No one speaks of us in our presence as he does of us in our absence. Human society is founded on mutual deceit; few friendships would endure if each knew what his friend said of him in his absence, although he then spoke in sincerity and without passion.

PASCAL

   Duke. I know thee well; how dost thou, my good fellow?

   Clown. Truly, sir, the better for my foes and the worse for my friends.

   Duke. Just the contrary; the better for thy friends.

   Clown. No, sir, the worse.

   Duke. How can that be?

   Clown. Marry, sir, they praise me and make an ass of me; now my foes tell me plainly I am an ass: so that by my foes, sir I profit in the knowledge of myself, and by my friends, I am abused: so that, conclusions to be as kisses, if your four negatives make your two affirmatives why then, the worse for my friends and the better for my foes.

Some pretend to be Israel’s friend, but there is no such thing as friendship: There are proofs of friendship.

    KALIFAT

To let friendship die away by negligence and silence is voluntarily to throw away one of the greatest comforts of the weary pilgrimage.

       JOHNSON

THE GOLDEN AGE

The majority of historical periods did not look upon their own time as superior to preceding ages. On the contrary, the most usual thing has been for men to dream of better times in a vague past, of a fuller existence; of a “golden age,” as those taught by Greece and Rome have it; the Alcheringa of the Australian bushmen.

This indicates that such men feel the pulse of their own lives lacking in full vigour, incapable of completely flooding their blood channels. For this reason they looked with respect on the past, on “classic” epochs, when existence seemed to them fuller, richer, more perfect and strenuous than the life of their own time. As they looked back and visualised those epochs of greater worth, they had the feeling, not of dominating them, but, on the contrary, of falling below them, just as a degree of temperature, if it possessed consciousness, might feel that it does not contain within itself the higher degree, that there are more calories in this than in itself. From A.D. 150 on, this impression of a shrinking of vitality, of a falling from position, of decay and loss of pulse shows itself increasingly in the Roman Empire. Had not Horace already sung: “Our fathers, viler than our grandfathers, begot us who are even viler, and we shall bring forth a progeny more degenerate still”? 

ORTEGA Y GASSET

There was a pristine human condition, Greece in the Golden Age, followed by cultural fall.

In fullness of form no less than of content, at once philosophic and creative, sensitive and energetic, the Greeks combined the first youth of imagination with the manhood of reason in a glorious manifestation of humanity.

Poetry had not as yet coquetted with wit, nor speculation prostituted itself to sophistry.

              SCHILLER

This century, like a golden age, has restored to light the liberal arts, which were almost extinct: grammar, poetry, rhetoric, painting, sculpture, architecture, music. 

              FICINO, 1492

Those who compare the age on which their lot has fallen with a golden age which exists only in their imagination may talk of degeneracy and decay: but no man who is correctly informed as to the past will be disposed to take a morose or desponding view of the present. 

MACAULEY, 1848

The purpose of the United States, in stating these proposals, is simple. These proposals spring, without ulterior motive or political passion, from our calm conviction that the hunger for peace is in the hearts of all people—those of Russia and of China no less than of our own country. They conform to our firm faith that God created man to enjoy, not destroy, the fruits of the earth and of their own toil. They aspire to this: the lifting, from the backs and from the hearts of men, of their burden of arms and of fears, so that they may find before them a golden age of freedom and of peace.

         EISENHOWER, 1953

Read Chaucer’s description of the Good Parson, and bow the head and the knee to Him, Who, in every age, sends us such a burning and a shining light. Search, O ye rich and powerful, for these men and obey their counsel; then shall the golden age return. 

BLAKE

Happy the age and happy the centuries were those on which the ancients bestowed the name of golden, not because gold was then to be obtained with ease, but because men living in such times did not know those two words, Yours and Mine. ... In those times the amorous conceptions of the soul were expressed as simply as they had been conceived, without any search for artificial circumlocutions to enhance them.

CERVANTES

HINDVISM

The TRIMURTI (Sanskrit: ‘three forms’) is the trinity of supreme divinity in Hinduism in which the cosmic functions of creation, preservation, and destruction are personified as a triad of deities, typically Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver, and Shiva the destroyer/regenerator.  Divine preservation is represented in the Hindu tradition more particularly by the doctrine of Avatars or ‘descents’ of the divine Principle into the manifested world.

Whenever righteousness wanes and unrighteousness increases I send myself forth.

For the protection of the good and for the destruction of evil,

and for the establishment of righteousness,

I come into being age after age.

              — Bhagavad Gita 4.7–8

The Hindus are too much interested in metaphysics and ultimate Reality to make good artists. Art is not the discovery of Reality—whatever Reality may be, and no human being can possibly know. It is the organisation of chaotic appearance into an orderly and human universe. 

HUXLEY

Unlike the West in the age of Galileo, India was not traumatised by the revelation that the universe is infinite and the human place in it tiny; that all things, the gods too, are subject to cycles of cosmic destruction, over aeons of time, and that human life is a pool of light in an infinite darkness.

           WOOD

Hinduism is not only the oldest of the mystery religions, or rather metaphysical disciplines, of which we have a full and precise knowledge from literary sources, and as regards the last two thousand years also from iconographic documents, but also perhaps the only one of these that has survived with an unbroken tradition and that is lived and understood at the present day by many millions of men, of whom some are peasants and others learned men well able to explain their faith in European as well as in their own languages.

                   COOMARASWAMY

As long as egotism veils the heart, God cannot shine upon it. 

        SRI RAMAKRISHNA

Purify the spectacles of your mind, and you will see that the world is God. 

      SRI RAMAKRISHNA

Within its diffuse and open structure, spirituality in Hindu philosophy is an individual experience, and referred to as kṣaitrajña. In ancient Hindu scripts, darsana is the name of six methods or alternate viewpoints of understanding Truth. Each of them flowered into their own schools of Hinduism, and each are considered valid, alternate paths to underst-anding Truth and realizing Self in the Hindu way of life.

In the embrace of his beloved a man forgets the whole world, everything both within and without; in the same way he who embraces the Self, knows neither within nor without.

— Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, 7th century BC

The apparent multiplication of gods is bewildering at the first glance, but you soon discover that they are the same God. There is always one uttermost God who defies personification. This makes Hinduism the most tolerant religion in the world, because its one transcendent God includes all possible gods. In fact Hinduism is so elastic and so subtle that the most profound Methodist, and crudest idolater, are equally at home with it.

       SHAW

THE TRISHULA

Wielded by Shiva, its three points are said to represent various trinities—creation, maintenance and destruction; past, present and future; the three gunas. 

[The three gunas, always present in all things and beings in the world, are: sattva (goodness, constructive, harmonious), rajas (passion, active, confused), and tamas (darkness, destructive, chaotic).]

When looked upon as a weapon of Shiva, it is said to destroy the three worlds: the physical world, the world of the forefathers (representing culture drawn from the past) and the world of the mind (representing the processes of sensing and acting). The three worlds are supposed to be destroyed by Shiva into a single non-dual plane of existence, that is bliss alone.

The Trishula is the symbol of getting rid of all impossibilities. It is the weapon of rejuvenation. Through the trishula He removes all the old impossibilities. Through the damaru He creates all the possibilities. 

        NITHYANANDA

Hinduism has not been made, but has grown. It is a jungle, not a building. It is a living example of a great national paganism such as might have existed in Europe if Christianity had not become the state religion of the Roman Empire, if there had remained an incongruous jumble of old local superstitions, Greek philosophy, and oriental cults such as the worship of Sarapis or Mitras.

                          ELIOT (Charles)

MVRVGAN

The Hindu god of war, love, and youth.

He is shown with six heads, which comes from the story of his birth. His seed was so hot that Agni, god of fire, plunged it into the Ganges. But the river was in agony so caste the seed out upon a bank of reeds. Six nymphs called the Krittikas [hence one of his names Karttikeya] came to bathe and saw the new baby chuckling on the bank. It was so beautiful that all of them desired to nurse it, whereupon the baby grew six heads to suckle on them all.

He defeated the asura Surapadman, sparing his life and instead splitting him into two and making one half a peacock, and his vahana; the other a rooster, his flag.

‘There is a great moral in the peacock and the snake lying quietly at Murugan’s feet—enmity vanishes at the feet of the Divine.’

His wives, Valli and Devasena, represent his duality. Devasena was an arranged marriage given to him after defeating Surapadman—war and tradition, while Valli was a marriage of conquest—love. 

He is India's version of what would be known later in Europe as Puer Aeturnus—eternal youth, representing not chronological age but an attitude of optimism and joyful vigor. 

MAHISHASVRA

Mahishasura is a buffalo demon who waged war on the gods. He is known for deception, pursuing his evil ways by shape-shifting into different forms.

He is described as evil that always changes its shape and outward appearance, but never its values, intent or goals. Symbolically he represents the forces of ignorance and chaos hidden by outward appearances.

DVRGA

A warrior goddess whose mythology centres around combating evils and demonic forces that threaten peace, prosperity and dharma of the good. She is the fierce form of the protective mother goddess, willing to unleash her anger against wrong, violence for liberation and destruction to empower creation. 

A long war was going on between the gods and the antigods, led by Mahishasura. He won the war and installed himself in heaven, while the gods wandered homeless on earth. Shiva and Vishnu then guided the gods to concentrate their powers to create a goddess, whose head was formed from the power of Shiva, the hair from Yama, the arms from Vishnu, the breasts from the Moon, the waist from Indra, and the feet from Brahma. Riding a lion she went to defeat the armies of the antigods. She fought Mahisa, who took many forms. Finally he became a buffalo, symbol of death. Durga killed the buffalo with Shiva’s trishula and when Mahisa tried to escape from the animal she cut off his head.

As she slays Mahishasura, Durga’s serene look is derived from the belief that she is protective and violent not because of her hatred, egotism or getting pleasure in violence, but because she acts out of necessity, for the love of the good, for liberation of those who depend on her, and a mark of the beginning of soul’s journey to creative freedom.

O Brahman, by going on a pilgrimage to seek you, I have denied your omnipresence; by meditating on you, I have given you form in my mind and thus denied your formless nature; by singing hymns, I have described you and thus denied your indescribable nature. Forgive me for these three offenses.

      AVADHUTA GITA

As the different streams having their sources in different places all mingle their water in the sea, so, O Lord, the different paths which men take, through different tendencies, various though they appear, crooked or straight, all lead to Thee. Whosoever comes to Me, through whatsoever form, I reach him; all men are struggling through paths that in the end lead to Me.

  VIVEKANANDA

HONOVR

Count it the greatest of all sins to prefer life to honour, and to lose, for the sake of living, all that makes life worth living.

       JUVENAL

A complete Cavalier is a child of honour. He is the only reserve of English gentility and ancient valour, and hath rather chosen to bury himself in the tomb of honour, than to see the nobility of his nation vassalaged; the dignity of his country captivated or obscured by any base, domestic enemy, or by any foreign fore-conquered foe.

          SYMMONS

Honour is that enigmatic mixture of conscience and egotism which often survives in the modern man after he has lost, whether by his own fault or not, faith, love, and hope. This sense of honour is compatible with much selfishness and great vices, and may be the victim of astonishing illusions; yet, nevertheless, all the noble elements that are left in the wreck of a character may gather around it, and from this fountain may draw new strength.

BURCKHARDT

What the world lacks is honour. The world has everything it needs, but it doesn’t enjoy anything because it lacks honour. The world has lost its self-esteem. 

BERNANOS

The basic concept of all living custom-ethic is honour. Everything else — loyalty, modesty, bravery, chivalry, self-control, resolution — is comprised in it. And honour is a matter of the blood and not of the reason. One does not reflect on a point of honour — that is already dishonour. To lose honour means to be annulled so far as Life and Time and History are concerned. The honour of one’s class, one’s family, of man and woman, of one’s people and one’s country, the honour of peasant and soldier and even bandit — honour means that the life in a person is something that has worth, historical dignity, delicacy, nobility. It belongs to directional Time, as sin belongs to timeless Space.

SPENGLER