Quotations
An online friendship does not feel, to me, like friendship. It feels like an ever-receding touch.
Tanya Gold, Guardian October 14 2018
If Facebook is for lying about being happy, Twitter is for lying about being right. It is exhausting.
Ibid.
It is my (admittedly mildly eccentric) belief that Brexit is not just about sovereignty; on a subconscious level, some of us are trying to claw our way out of a much more serious existential abyss. The companies of the future, like FaceApp and Neural Link, as well as Brussels, are trying to impose on us a disturbingly unchecked, unaccountable definition of human ‘progress’.
Perhaps that is why so many dismiss Brexit as backwards; it goes against civilisation’s broader direction of travel, which is centralising, controlling and hyper rational, and respects neither the individual nor the concept of limits. It is not hyperbole to suggest that the future of humanity may hinge on whether projects like leaving the EU are successful; if civilisations cannot craft alternative visions of “progress” that respect the individual and operate within proverbial as well as literal borders, then I am afraid that man is heading for an era of unprecedented despotism, swiftly followed by his extinction.
Sherelle Jacobs in today's Daily Telegraph
Let us leave the Trojans, since we have seen neither their disasters nor their glories; let us leave the Romans, although we hear and read their stories; let us not trouble to know about that past age and what became of it; let us come to affairs of yesterday, which are as thoroughly forgotten as the tale of Rome is.
What has become of the King Don Juan? The princes of Aragon, where are they? What has become of all those gallants? What has become of the many innovations they brought? The jousts and tourneys, ornaments, embroideries, and crests, were they only an imagination? What were they but the grass of the threshing-floors?
What has become of the ladies, of their head-dresses, their robes and their scents? What has become of the flames of the fires the lovers lit? What of all that playing, and of the harmonious music that they made? What has become of that dancing, and of the beautiful dresses that they wore?
Jorge Manrique (1440-1479), "Verses on the Death of His Father," translated by J.M. Cohen
He shall endure all that his destiny and the heavy Spinnersspun for him with the thread at his birth, when his mother bore him. Homer, Odyssey 7.197-198 (translated by Richmond Lattimore)
While walking about the town, I picked up a little Mass-book, and read for the first time in my life—strange, and almost disgraceful, that it should be so—the service of the Mass from beginning to end. It seemed to me inferior to our Communion service in one most important point. The phraseology of Christianity has in Latin a barbarous air, being altogether later than the age of pure Latinity. But the English language has grown up in Christian times; and the whole vocabulary of Christianity is incorporated with it. The fine passage in the Communion Service: 'Therefore with Angels, and Archangels, and all the company of heaven,' is English of the best and most genuine description. But the answering passage in the Mass: 'Laudant Angeli, adorant dominationes, tremunt potestates, coeli Coelorumque virtutes ac beati Seraphim,' would not merely have appeared barbarous, but would have been utterly unintelligible,—a mere gibberish,—to everyone of the great masters of the Latin tongue, Plautus, Cicero, Caesar, and Catullus. I doubt whether even Claudian would have understood it. I intend to frequent the Romish worship till I come thoroughly to understand this ceremonial.
Thomas Babington Macaulay, diary (Naples, November 7, 1838)
But in the end the Koran turns out to be much better than I thought, now that I’ve reread it—or rather, read it. The most obvious conclusion is that the jihadists are bad Muslims. Obviously, as with all religious texts, there is room for interpretation, but an honest reading will conclude that a holy war of aggression is not generally sanctioned, prayer alone is valid. So you might say I’ve changed my opinion. That’s why I don’t feel that I’m writing out of fear. I feel, rather, that we can make arrangements. The feminists will not be able to, if we’re being completely honest. But I and lots of other people will.
ReplyDeleteMichel Houellebecq
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/01/02/scare-tactics-michel-houellebecq-on-his-new-book/
Novelist Sebastian Faulks: 'It’s a depressing book. It really is. It’s just the rantings of a schizophrenic. It’s very one-dimensional, and people talk about the beauty of the Arabic and so on, but the English translation I read was, from a literary point of view, very disappointing.
Delete'There is also the barrenness of the message. 'I mean, there are some bits about diet, you know, the equivalent of the Old Testament, which is also crazy.
'But the great thing about the Old Testament is that it does have these incredible stories. Of the 100 greatest stories ever told, 99 are probably in the Old Testament and the other is in Homer.
'With the Koran there are no stories. And it has no ethical dimension like the New Testament, no new plan for life. It says ‘the Jews and the Christians were along the right tracks, but actually, they were wrong and I’m right, and if you don’t believe me, tough — you’ll burn for ever'. That’s basically the message of the book.'
Thomas Carlyle on the Koran:
Delete'. . . I must say, it [the Koran] is as toilsome reading as I ever undertook. A wearisome confused jumble, crude, incondite; endless iterations, long-windedness, entanglement; most crude, incondite; — insupportable stupidity, in short! Nothing but a sense of duty could carry any European through the Koran . . . It is the confused ferment of a great rude human soul; rude, untutored, that cannot even read; but fervent, earnest, struggling vehemently to utter itself in words . . . We said "stupid:" yet natural stupidity is by no means the character of Mahomet's Book; it is natural uncultivation rather. The man has not studied speaking; in the haste and pressure of continual fighting, has not time to mature himself into fit speech . . . The man was an uncultured semi-barbarous Son of Nature, much of the Bedouin still clinging to him: we must take him for that. But for a wretched Simulacrum, a hungry Impostor without eyes or heart . . . we will not and cannot take him. Sincerity, in all senses, seems to me the merit of the Koran; what had rendered it precious to the wild Arab men . . . Curiously, through these incondite masses of tradition, vituperation, complaint, ejaculation in the Koran, a vein of true direct insight, of what we might almost call poetry, is found straggling.'
Houellebecq is running circles around his interviewer...
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