Category: Quotable

A meditation for November

Whenever a person’s lack of shame offends you, you should immediately ask yourself: “So is it possible for there to be no shameless people in the world?” It isn’t, and you should therefore stop demanding the impossible. He’s just one of those shameless people who must necessarily exist in the world. You should keep the same thought readily available also for when you’re faced with devious and untrustworthy people, and people who are flawed in any way. As soon as you remind yourself that it’s impossible for such people not to exist, you’ll be kinder toward each and every one of them. It’s also helpful immediately to consider what virtue nature has granted us human beings to deal with any offense—gentleness, for instance, to counter discourteous people, and other ways to counter others. Generally speaking, you can get someone who’s gone astray to mend his ways—and whatever his wrong, a wrongdoer is missing his mark and has gone astray. Besides, have you been harmed in any way? You’ll find that none of the people who make you lose your temper has done anything that might affect your mind for the worse; and outside of the mind there’s nothing that is truly detrimental or harmful for you. Moreover, what is unusual or surprising about an uneducated man doing uneducated things? It’s worth considering whether you ought rather to blame yourself for failing to foresee that he would transgress in this way.

—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 9.42, trans. Robin Waterfield

Parting words from Clint Maroon

“I could show you this country’s gone a long ways in the last fifty sixty years. I don’t mean machinery and education and that. I mean folks’ rights. They’ve clamped down on fellows like me who damn near ruined this country….

“Another quarter century of grabbers like us and there wouldn’t have been a decent stretch of forest or soil or waterway that hadn’t been divided among us. Museums and paintings and libraries—that’s was our way of trying to make peace with our conscience. I’m the last of the crowd that had all four feet in the trough and nothing to stop ’em. We’re getting along toward a real democracy now and don’t let anybody tell you different. These will be known as the good new days and those were the bad old days. The time’s coming when there’ll be no such thing as a multi-millionaire in America, and no such thing as a pauper. You’ll live to see it but I won’t. That’ll be a real democracy.”

—Edna Ferber, Saratoga Trunk (1941) (pp. 350-351)

On the way to Pirsig Avenue

The houses along Maple were a free-for-all of competitive decoration, their shrubbery and railings and rooflines infested with green plastic vines bearing fruits in dull colors. It wasn’t clear to Marion that the charm of Christmas lights at night was enough to offset how ugly the hardware looked in daylight hours, of which there were many. Nor was it clear that the excitement of Christmas for children was enough to make up for the disenchanted drudgery of it in their adult years, of which there were likewise many.

Jonathan Franzen, Crossroads (2021), p. 127

Photo stop

At the lake we stop and stretch and mingle affably with the small crowd of tourists holding cameras and children yelling, “Don’t get too close!” and see cars and campers with all different license plates, and see the Crater Lake with a feeling of “Well, there it is,” just as the pictures show. I watch the other tourists, all of whom seem to have out-of-place looks too. I have no resentment at all this, just a feeling that it’s all unreal and that the quality of the lake is smothered by the fact that it’s so pointed to. You point to something as having Quality and the Quality tends to go away. Quality is what you see out of the corner of your eye, and so I look at the lake below but feel the peculiar quality from the chill, almost frigid sunlight behind me, and the almost motionless wind.

“Why did we come here?” Chris says.

“To see the lake.”

—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), p. 341

Forecast

Assume, then, a prospect of chaos in the streets, joined by every group on the island with a grudge. This would include nearly everyone but the OAG and his staff. Doubtless each would think only of his immediate desires. But mob violence, like tourism, is a kind of communion. By its special magic a large number of lonely souls, however heterogeneous, can share the common property of opposition to what is. And like an epidemic or earthquake the politics of the street can overtake even the most stable-appearing of governments; like death it cuts through and gathers in all ranks of society.

—Thomas Pynchon, V. (1963), epilogue, “1919,” I

Article VI

To say that [the revival of evangelical Christianity in the 1820s] marked a turn away from the spirit of the nation’s founding is to wildly understate the case. The United States was founded during the most secular era in American history, either before or since. In the late eighteenth century, church membership was low, and anticlerical feeling was high. It is no accident that the Constitution does not mention God….

The United States was not founded as a Christian nation. The Constitution prohibits religious tests for officeholders. The Bill of Rights forbids the federal government from establishing a religion, James Madison having argued that to establish a religion would be “to foster in those who still reject it, a suspicion that its friends are too conscious of its fallacies to trust it to its own merits.”

—Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States (2018), pp. 199-200

Canon

This book is the final chapter of, and the summation of, a work conceived and begun in 1925. Since the author likes to believe, hopes that his entire life’s work is a part of a living literature, and since “living” is motion, and “motion” is change and alteration and therefore the only alternative to motion is un-motion, stasis, death, there will be found discrepancies and contradictions in the thirty-four-year progress of this particular chronicle; the purpose of this note is simply to notify the reader that the author has already found more discrepancies and contradictions than he hopes the reader will—contradictions and discrepancies due to the fact that the author has learned, he believes, more about the human heart and its dilemma than he knew thirty-four years ago; and is sure that, having lived with them that long time, he knows the characters in this chronicle better than he did then.

W.F. [William Faulkner, preface to The Mansion (1959)]

Future justification

Samuel Pepys lays down a paper trail:

…and that I do foresee the Duke of York would call us to an account why the fleete is not abroad, and we cannot answer otherwise than our want of money; and that indeed we do not do the King any service now, but do rather abuse and betray his service by being there, and seeming to do something, while we do not. Sir G. Carteret asked me (just in these words, for in this and all the rest I set down the very words for memory sake, if there should be occasion) whether 50l. or 60l. would do us any good; and when I told him the very rum man must have 200l., he held up his eyes as if we had asked a million. Sir W. Coventry told the Duke of York plainly he did rather desire to have his commission called in than serve in so ill a place, where he cannot do the King service, and I did concur in saying the same. This was all very plain, and the Duke of York did confess that he did not see how we could do anything without a present supply of 20,000l., and that he would speak to the King next Council day, and I promised to wait on him to put him in mind of it. This I set down for my future justification, if need be, and so we broke up, and all parted, Sir W. Coventry being not very well, but I believe made much worse by this night’s sad discourse.