Quite odd, all this pornography in America, a country with a remarkably high percentage of people who identify themselves as Christians. Kinda reminds me of Walker Percy’s reference in The Moviegoer to the “cult of the naughty nice”: Where “everyone is nicer than Christians and naughtier than pagans.”
Michigan in MarchOf all the Meadian gifts from Zeus, the sudden surprise of nature has always been my favorite. A wise man once said that those who set out to appreciate nature are the ones most likely to miss it. The converse is also true: Those who set out with no thought to nature are [...]
The pagan gods don’t drink mead with mortals for a reason, and it’s not snobbery. It comes from the desire to hang out with their peers—with those who know they are merely imperfect gods and can jokingly point out their flaws.
There is an amiable muse and a mordant muse. I’m not sure which should be indulged more. The amiable muse is more edifying; the mordant muse, more entertaining.
Thomas Merton described the Tao as “the simple good with which one is endowed by the very fact of existence. Instead of self-conscious cultivation of this good (which vanishes when we look at it and becomes intangible when we try to grasp it), we grow quietly in the humility of a simple, ordinary life.” The [...]
It’s Just My ImaginationIn the second volume of lectures published posthumously as Redeeming the Time, Russell Kirk celebrates the workings of the moral imagination (the power of ethical perception) and contrasts it with the idyllic imagination (the fanciful imagination of people like Rousseau) and the diabolic imagination (the imagination which delights in the perverse and [...]
When a sneering acquaintance told the poverty-bitten Diogenes that he wouldn’t have to eat lentils (a poor man’s food) if only he would learn to flatter the king, Diogenes said his acquaintance wouldn’t have to flatter the king if he just learned to eat lentils.
“To be subtle without ceasing to be simple; to be realist, yet not crude; to be minute at the right moment, but not all the time; to add here and there the little concrete touch, but only here and there—this, at their best, the Greeks achieved.” F. L. Lucas
Pithecanthropus Pithecanthropus is the Ape Man. He’s also known as Java Man and Peking Man. Latin-loving scientists call him Homo erectus, Homo modjokertenses, Meganthropus palaeojavanicus, Pithecanthropus robustus, and Pithecanthropus dubius.He is the creation of Dutch physician Eugene Dubois. In the 1890’s, Dubois discovered a few bony remains of a primitive-looking human in the gravels of [...]
“It is aptly related of the great Dr. Clarke, that when in one of his leisure hours he was unbending himself with a few friends in the most playful and frolicksome manner, he observed Beau Nash approaching; upon which he suddenly stopped—’My boys (said he), let us be grave: here comes a fool.’” Boswell
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