“Much history-telling casts our ancestors as stupid or villainous, who deserve our pity and scorn accordingly. This helps us swallow contemporary notions of ourselves, which are unheroic and uninteresting.”
Christopher Jolliffe “The Attack on ANZAC Day” in Dorchester Review #32 (Vol. 15 #2 Summer 2025)
“If you leave your children a world where you never stood up, they’ll inherit one where they can’t.”
Emailed as an image and without attribution by a friend Sept. 8, 2025
“Again and again in 1967 we came across a statement said to be a Balinese proverb (sometimes a Balinese potter’s answer to an anthropologist’s question) to the effect that we Balinese ‘have no art, we just do everything as well as we can.’”
Charles Perry, The Haight-Ashbury: A History [I doubt the authenticity of this proverb but it is both revealing of the mindset at the time and also good advice up to a point].
“Lewis spoke to these questions two years before he and Tolkien launched their barbed wire university [it was under the British Red Cross/Order of Saint John of Jerusalem “Joint War Organisation” “Educational Books Section” program]. In a sermon titled ‘Learning in War-Time,’ which he preached at Oxford’s Church of St. Mary the Virgin on October 22, 1939, he addressed whether humanistic learning was irresponsible when England faced hellish threats and Europe’s liberties hung in the balance. If in the past ‘men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure,’ Lewis observed, ‘the search would never have begun.’ We are mistaken when we compare war with ‘normal life,’ he continued, adding ‘Life has never been normal.’ Plausible reasons have never been lacking for putting off all merely cultural activities until some imminent danger has been averted or some crying injustice put right. But humanity long ago chose to neglect those plausible reasons. They wanted knowledge and beauty now, and would not wait for the suitable moment that never comes. They propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffolds, discuss the last new poem while advancing the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae. And – he could have added a few years later – strive for an Oxford ‘First’ in English Literature, while imprisoned in a Nazi POW camp. Why does man make such efforts – search for truth and beauty in the midst of great adversity? Lewis’ response is simple: ‘This is not panache, it is our nature.’”
Mark Johnson in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #6 (July/August 2025)
In my latest Loonie Politics column I take aim at the 20th-anniversary Harper revisionist rationalizations that he never intended to implement conservative policies, just build a winning party… which he didn’t even do anyway.
“St Augustine, it would be generally agreed, has had a greater influence upon the history of dogma and upon religious thought and sentiment in Western Christendom than any other writer outside the canon of Scripture. It is easy to find at least one reason for this in the circumstances of the age during which his life was passed. From A.D. 350 till about A.D. 500 the vital powers of the ancient civilization were steadily declining, while at the same time the church was coming to social maturity with a number of insistent needs and demands which had not made themselves felt until full freedom of action had been attained. This period was followed by another, some 500 years in length, in which intellectual life at the higher levels was all but extinct in the West, and this epoch in its turn by one in which an adolescent Europe turned avidly for mental food to the masters nearest to hand and latest in time, the Latin writers of the imperial decline, who alone were available in the libraries of the age. These circumstances gave great importance and a new significance to a scattered group of teachers who had been the last to absorb the message of the ancient world while it was still to be heard, and who had therefore been the last to hand on the legacy of the past…”
David Knowles The Evolution of Medieval Thought [the metaphor of an “adolescent Europe” deserves attention but not respect].
“To paraphrase Japanese Emperor Hirohito after the detonation of two atomic bombs on Japan in 1945, in the light of this week’s events, it is time for the ‘unthinkable.’ (The Japanese emperor acknowledged that the war had not gone ‘entirely as we had hoped.’)”
Conrad Black in National Post June 28, 2025 [re Gaza and Iran]
“Apparently, I must give you a lecture. I grimaced neither at your impudence nor at your sentiment, but at your diction and style. I condemn clichés, especially those that have been corrupted by fascists and communists. Such phrases as ‘great and noble cause’ and ‘fruits of their labour’ have been given an ineradicable stink by Hitler and Stalin and all their vermin brood. Besides, in this century of the overwhelming triumph of science, the appeal of the cause of human freedom is no longer that it is great and noble; it is more or less than that; it is essential. It is no greater or nobler than the cause of edible food or the cause of effective shelter. Man must have freedom or he will cease to exist as man. The despot, whether fascist or communist, is no longer restricted to such puny tools as the heel or the sword or even the machine gun; science has provided him weapons that can give him the planet; and only men who are willing to die for freedom have any chance of living for it.’”
Nero Wolfe to his adopted daughter for being reckless and romantic not practical in fighting for liberty in Rex Stout The Black Mountain