Staunch courage of yesteryear

Bishop Latimer to Nicholas Ridley on their way to execution by public immolation as ordered by Queen Mary in 1555.

"Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out."

A stranger to history

From Jacques Barzun in Where is History Now? from The Culture We Deserve:

History is not a piece of crockery dredged up from the Titanic; it is, first, the shipwreck, then a piece of writing. What is more, it is a piece of writing meant to be read, not merely entered on shelves and in bibliographies. By these criteria, modern man must be classed as a stranger to history; he is not eager for it nor bothered by the lack of it. The treasure hunt for artifacts seems to him a sufficient acknowledgment of the past.

The two modes of thought do not mix well

From A Jacques Barzun Reader by Michael Murray, the essay History as Counter-Method and Anti-Abstraction:

The reason lies in the difference between two orientations of the human mind: the intuitive and the scientific. Pascal, who possessed the genius for both, gave of them a definitive account in his Pensees. Whoever wants to understand the difference between, say, Carlyle's French Revolution and Crane Brinton's Jacobins - why one is a history and the other not - should turn to Pascal's first chapter and assimilate the series of distinctions set forth there between the esprit de finesses and the esprit de geometrie. Neither esprit is higher or deeper or better than the other. They are only radically divergent modes of conceiving and working with reality.

A compressed paraphrase could run as follows: in science (the geometrical mind), the elements and definitions are clear, abstract, and unchangeable, but stand outside the ordinary ways of thought and speech. Because of this clarity and fixity, it is easy to use these concepts correctly, once their strange artificiality has been firmly grasped; it is then but the application of a method. In the opposite realm of intuitive thought (finesse), the elements come out of the common stock and are known by common names, which elude definition. Hence it is hard to reason justly with them because they are so numerous, mixed, and confusing: there is no method.

From the dissimilarity it follows that genius in science consists in adding to the stock of such defined entities and showing their place and meaning within the whole system of science and number; whereas genius in the realm of intuition consists in discerning pattern and significance in the uncontrollable confusion of life and embodying the discovery in intelligible form.

Obviously the two modes of thought do not mix well: there are no natural transititions from one to the other, the movement of the mind in each goes counter to the other. Once understood, the opposition resolves many puzzles and conflicts in contemporary culture, which is torn and racked by the imperialistic demands of each "mind" simultaneously.

Still, it is a family. It has its private language and its common memories . .

From George Orwell in his essay The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and English Genius:

England is not the jewelled isle of Shakespeare's much-quoted message, nor is it the inferno depicted by Dr Goebbels. More than either it resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons. It has rich relations who have to be kow-towed to and poor relations who are horribly sat upon, and there is a deep conspiracy of silence about the source of the family income. It is a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts. Still, it is a family. It has its private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it closes its ranks. A family with the wrong members in control - that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.

Not just a discovery but an orientation

At 2am on October 12th, 1492, Columbus (or one of his crew members) spotted an island in the New World, the first documented sighting by Europeans of North America since the Vikings half a millineum before.

Columbus
by Joaquin Miller

Behind him lay the gray Azores,
Behind the Gates of Hercules;
Before him not the ghost of shores,
Before him only shoreless seas.
The good mate said: "Now we must pray,
For lo! the very stars are gone.

Brave Admiral, speak, what shall I say?"
"Why, say, 'Sail on! sail on! and on!' "

"My men grow mutinous day by day;
My men grow ghastly wan and weak."
The stout mate thought of home; a spray
Of salt wave washed his swarthy cheek.
"What shall I say, brave Admiral, say,
If we sight naught but seas at dawn?"
"Why, you shall say at break of day,
'Sail on! sail on! and on!' "

They sailed and sailed, as winds might blow,
Until at last the blanched mate said:
"Why, now not even God would know
Should I and all my men fall dead.
These very winds forget their way,
For God from these dead seas is gone.
Now speak, brave Admiral, speak and say" --
He said, "Sail on! sail on! and on!"

They sailed. They sailed. Then spake the mate:
"This mad sea shows his teeth tonight.
He curls his lip, he lies in wait,
With lifted teeth, as if to bite!
Brave Admiral, say but one good word:
What shall we do when hope is gone?"
The words leapt like a leaping sword:
"Sail on! sail on! sail on! and on!"

Then pale and worn, he kept his deck,
And peered through darkness. Ah, that night
Of all dark nights! And then a speck --
A light! a light! at last a light!
It grew, a starlit flag unfurled!
It grew to be Time's burst of dawn.
He gained a world; he gave that world
Its grandest lesson: "On! sail on!"

In order to live in a wider world

From Jacques Barzun's Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning

But why, after all, learn to read differently by tackling the classics? The answer is simple: in order to live in a wider world. Wider than what? Wider than the one that comes through the routine of our material lives and through the paper and the factual magazines - Psychology Today, House and Garden, Sports Illustrated; wider also than friends' and neighbors' plans and gossip; wider especially than one's business or profession. For nothing is more narrowing than one's own shop, and it grows ever more so as one bends the mind and energies to succeed. This is particularly true today, when each profession has become a cluster of specialties continually subdividing. A lawyer is not a jurist, he is a tax lawyer, or a dab at trusts and estates. The work itself is a struggle with a mass of jargon, conventions, and numbers that have no meaning outside the specialty. The whole modern world moves among systems and abstractions superimposed on reality, a vast make-believe, though its results are real enough in one's life if one does not know and follow these ever-shifting rules of the game.

Even the intelligentsia have only accepted it in theory

From George Orwell in his essay The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and English Genius:

And yet the gentleness of English civilization is mixed up with barbarities and anachronisms. Our criminal law is as out-of-date as the muskets in the Tower. Over against the Nazi Storm Trooper you have got to set that typically English figure, the hanging judge, some gouty old bully with his mind rooted in the nineteenth century, handing out savage sentences. In England people are still hanged by the neck and flogged with the cat o' nine tails. Both of these punishments are obscene as well as cruel, but there has never been any genuinely popular outcry against them. People accept them (and Dartmoor, and Borstal) almost as they accept the weather. They are part of 'the law', which is assumed to be unalterable.

Here one comes upon an all-important English trait: the respect for constitutionalism and legality, the belief in 'the law' as something above the State and above the individual, something which is cruel and stupid, of course, but at any rate incorruptible.

It is not that anyone imagines the law to be just. Everyone knows that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor. But no one accepts the implications of this, everyone takes it for granted that the law, such as it is, will be respected, and feels a sense of outrage when it is not. Remarks like 'They can't run me in; I haven't done anything wrong', or 'They can't do that; it's against the law', are part of the atmosphere of England. The professed enemies of society have this feeling as strongly as anyone else. One sees it in prison-books like Wilfred Macartney's Walls Have Mouths or Jim Phelan's Jail Journey, in the solemn idiocies that take place at the trials of conscientious objectors, in letters to the papers from eminent Marxist professors, pointing out that this or that is a 'miscarriage of British justice'. Everyone believes in his heart that the law can be, ought to be, and, on the whole, will be impartially administered. The totalitarian idea that there is no such thing as law, there is only power, has never taken root. Even the intelligentsia have only accepted it in theory.

How is "real book" defined?

From Jacques Barzun's Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning

How is "real book" defined? Quite simply: it is a book one wants to reread.

Wiser for all time

From Jacques Barzun's Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning

The student who reads history will unconsciously develop what is the highest value of history: judgment in worldly affairs. This is a permanent good, not because "history repeats" - we can never exactly match past and present situations - but because the "tendency of things" shows an amazing uniformity within any given civilization. As the great historian Burckhardt said of historical knowledge, it is not "to make us more clever the next time, but wiser for all time."

It is easier than ever to travel, and not at all easier to write well

From an essay by Graeme Wood in Foreign Policy, October 5, 2010: Travel Writing is Dead:

The simplest reason for this catastrophic turn is that it is easier than ever to travel, and not at all easier to write well. In 1955, Claude Levi-Strauss wrote that travel is "an unavoidable drawback" of acquainting oneself with the world: "There are hours of inaction . . . and always the thousand and one dreary tasks which eat away the days to no purpose. . . . The truths which we seek so far afield only become valid when they have been separated from this dross." The good news for travelers is that these inconveniences are disappearing. The bad news for readers is that those inconveniences are the very stuff that concentrates the mind and transmutes narcissism into something approaching insight.