Progress and success

Progress is measured in relative terms, success in absolute terms.

Welcome to our brave new world

From a commenter, Lars Porsena, on Ann Althouse's blog post about a 6th court decision that defies logic. It is wonderful for a blogger to have intelligent commenters.

Yesterday the 6th Circuit ruled that "inactivity is activity." Today it's "discrimination is equal protection."

..and bombing does not equal
hostilities.

Welcome to our brave new world.

To be a Frenchman abroad is to be miserable; to be an American abroad is to make others miserable

Other quotes from the imminently quotable Ambrose Bierce.

Egotist, n. A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me!

"Abroad, adh. At war with savages and idiots. To be a Frenchman abroad is to be miserable; to be an American abroad is to make others miserable."

Politics, n. Strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.

Education, n. That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.

Pray, v. To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.

There is nothing new under the sun but there are lots of old things we don't know.

Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum (I think that I think, therefore I think that I am.)

Extremists right and left are cut out of the same piece of cloth

From Florence King's With Charity Toward None: A Fond Look at Misanthropy. Purchased and half read fifteen years ago, then set aside temporarily for some unremembered reason. I came across it on my shelves yesterday and am finishing up reading it. As insightful, sharp and entertaining as ever. Page 168.

Comparing Bierce's reaction against democracy to that of the later Mark Twain, Edmund Wilson wrote: "The insistence of Ambrose Bierce on discipline, law and order, and on the need for the control of the disorderly mob by an enlightened and well-washed minority has today a familiar fascistic ring."

True enough, but the left-wing Wilson forgot to include his own side. Socialists have their own agenda for discipline and law and order, and they also believe in the control of the disorderly mob by an enlightened, though not necessarily well-washed, minority. Extremists right and left are cut out of the same piece of cloth. Both are idealists with lofty standards for human nature who often become misanthropic once the inevitable disillusionment sets in. Right wingers, concluding that mankind is despicable and hopeless, turn to the savage misanthropy of Jonathan Swift and Ambrose Bierce. Left wingers, concluding that mankind is inherently good and needs only one more chance to prove it, turn to the sentimental misanthropy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his naive dream of universal love and cooperation. Both are susceptible to totalitarianism, for when human nature invariably declines to be perfected, the only thing left to perfect is the State.

Behind the Screens

Dennis Butts has an essay, Seeking an Oasis in the Spring edition of Slightly Foxed. He references a poem by a nurse from among the Oasis collection of World War II poetry:

Behind the Screens
by Joy Westren

Meticulously
I dress your wound
knowing you cannot live . . .
In ten swift rivers
from my finger-tips
Compassion runs
into your pale body
that is so hurt
it is no more
than the keeper
of your being.
Behind these screens,
soldier,
we two are steeped
in a peace deeper
than life gives,
you with closed eyes
and I moving quietly
as though you could wake,
all my sense aware
that your other self
is here,
waiting to begin
life without end.

Roofed with lost opportunities

From Story of My Life by Augustus J.C. Hare, preface.

IN the autumn of 1878, the desire to comfort and amuse one of my kindest friends during hours of wearing pain and sickness induced me to begin writing down some of the reminiscences of my life. As almost all those who shared my earlier interests and affections had passed away, I fancied at first that it would be impossible to rescue anything like a connected story from "the great shipwreck of Time." But solitude helps remembrance; and as I went on opening old letters and journals with the view of retracing my past life, it seemed to unfold itself to memory, and I found a wonderful interest in following once more the old track, with its almost forgotten pleasures and sorrows, though often reminded of the story of the old man who, when he heard for the first time the well-known adage, "Hell is paved with good intentions," added promptly, "Yes, and roofed with lost opportunities."

On contradiction

Walt Whitman in “Song of Myself”

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

The new culture spread slowly at first

From the June 11th, 2011 edition of The Economist, The Neolithic Boom-Time Machine. Reports on a new technique for dating archaeological remains to a much narrower and accurate time range than is currently possible. With the more precise dates, a new understanding of sequence of events and possible cause and effect are emerging. Pretty neat.

Agriculture seems to have arrived fully formed in what is now Kent, in the south-east, around 4050BC. The new culture spread slowly at first, taking 200 years to reach modern-day Cheltenham, in the west, but over the following five decades it penetrated as far north as Aberdeen. Soon afterwards, causewayed enclosures (circular arrangements of banks and ditches hundreds of metres across—see picture) began springing up all over the country.

Why and why not

In the June 11th, 2011 edition of The Economist, there is a book review of Conservativism by Kieron O'Hara. Apparently the book spends a fare amount of time attempting to settle on what constitutes a conservative and I can see where that is a tangled ball of yarn.

I wonder if it isn't as simple as "A conservative asks why? A liberal asks why not?" Maybe.

I witness this every year.

Marilyn Chandler McEntyre's Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies page 19.

When I teach Jane Austen, I pause over a description of the Bennett sisters' hearing the sound of horses' hooves a mile away and ask students to try to imagine the ambient silences of the early nineteenth century, where sounds were discrete and distinct, and the sounds of the natural world were not obscured by white noise. The point is this: because they hear so many words so constantly, their capacities to savor words - to pause over them, ponder them, reflect upon them, hear the echoes of ancient cadences, and attune themselves to allusiveness and alliteration - are eroding. I witness this every year.