Uncommon sense (B.C.)

At times her wisdom astounded me, as much for its unfamiliar character as for its perspicuity. It would come without warning, spun from a mundane sphere to dazzle me with its sudden profundity, often from an oddball direction, a strange and startling sensibility—or was it merely my own deficiency in equivalent insight that made it seem so? In many ways and areas her life seemed askew and adrift—like mine, and like the lives of everyone else I knew, filled with similar problems, mistakes, and upheavals—but the humanistic warmth and clarifying wit which she occasionally evinced (and "occasional" here is not a condemnation but an accolade) left me to wonder how many of her seeming frailties and failures were in fact such, and what part of them comprised the necessary, if alien, infrastructure essential to her uncommon sense, mysterious underpinnings which were opaque to me but which empowered her to see and say what I could not.

The size of a soul (Nozick)

The size of a soul, the magnitude of a person, is measured in part by the extent of what that person can appreciate and love.

Robert Nozick, The Examined Life

The chains of authority

The chains of authority should be consensual, light, and long.

Emotions

Emotions are clouded cognition.

Scruples are the signals

Scruples are the signals of the soul.

Entropy assures us

Entropy assures us that one and one can never make two.

I long believed that one was born a writer (Bénabou)

I long believed that one was born a writer, that it was enough to allow to ripen within oneself for an appropriate number of years this precious seed, and that then one day the first book would appear, as had earlier, at the appointed hour, the first tooth. All this should take care of itself spontaneously and without any particular effort. After the fashion of what happens during certain hours of dreaming, when ideas and phrases suddenly start bursting forth: pages then seem to write themselves, words call forth words, verbs crowd in, adjectives overlap, and in the guise of a bedazzled spectator, one attends a feast prepared by someone else.

Marcel Bénabou, Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books

If I could go back

If I could go back
there is much I would have me do
I didn't do then—
but, busy with all I was doing,
how would I do it?
and when?

In the high and far off times (Wolfe)

In the high and far off times before women warred upon men, the tale of the sleeping beauty was told at firesides so that young women might know they slept but might someday be awakened, and so that young men might know young women sleep, and that gallantry and chivalry are needed, not threats or force. Perhaps the best way to explain the sleeping beauty story is to say that it is the other side of the story about the frog who is kissed.

Gene Wolfe

a thing with one face (MacNeice)

O fill me
with strength against those who would freeze my
humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton,
would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with
one face, a thing, and against all those
who would dissipate my entirety, would
blow me like thistledown hither and
thither or hither and thither
like water held in the
hands would spill me.

Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me.
Otherwise kill me.

Louis MacNeice

Wolves (MacNeice)

I do not want to be reflective any more
Envying and despising unreflective things
Finding pathos in dogs and undeveloped handwriting
And young girls doing their hair and all the castles of sand
Flushed by the children's bedtime, level with the shore.

The tide comes in and goes out again, I do not want
To be always stressing either its flux or its permanence,
I do not want to be a tragic or philosophic chorus
But to keep my eye only on the nearer future
And after that let the sea flow over us.

Come then all of you, come closer, form a circle,
Join hands and make believe that joined
Hands will keep away the wolves of water
Who howl along our coast. And be it assumed
That no one hears them among the talk and laughter.

Louis MacNeice

When we give them no alternative

It is a severe indictment of 21st-century society in the United States that we have established so little sense of community that those with a high-level need for it must yet seek it in the intellectually- and morally-bankrupt cults of organized religion.