tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11705245421252538032024-03-12T19:48:43.397-07:0040 Eridani Apeaceandlonglifehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09059683906637157584noreply@blogger.comBlogger10125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1170524542125253803.post-92200876117538810372018-10-01T07:36:00.003-07:002021-03-10T00:04:26.031-08:00Painting and Sculpture<i id="top"><a href="https://40-eridani-a.blogspot.com/p/peace-and-long-life_9.html#contents">Peace and Long Life</a></i><br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<div align="center"><a href="https://40-eridani-a.blogspot.com/p/peace-and-long-life_9.html#top" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-x8ND3lyXaVA/VYcK7Lm9VdI/AAAAAAAAB1M/BhIMJoxyLFcJzELNjyAoGNmw-w6HdmHcQCPcB/s640/dalek.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<a href="https://twitter.com/scepticwatch">peaceandlonglife@scepticwatch</a><br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<h2 id="Leonardo"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_da_Vinci">Leonardo da Vinci</a> (1452 – 1519)</h2>
<br>
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-KJBm3nfJiu0/W7IqGApOczI/AAAAAAAAC3o/ZGTplXtdNEo9HwePzRqJq9vP9dS4SqpWQCLcBGAs/s1600/ermine0.png" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-KJBm3nfJiu0/W7IqGApOczI/AAAAAAAAC3o/ZGTplXtdNEo9HwePzRqJq9vP9dS4SqpWQCLcBGAs/s491/ermine0.png" data-original-width="727" data-original-height="991"></a><br>
<br>
<i>Lady with an Ermine</i><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-aTfHg0tpS6U/W7IqWYbz9nI/AAAAAAAAC3w/KBhKs24cg5g6o3wJc2OtHoj3GcgqaQ1eACLcBGAs/s1600/Ferronni%25C3%25A8re0.png" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-aTfHg0tpS6U/W7IqWYbz9nI/AAAAAAAAC3w/KBhKs24cg5g6o3wJc2OtHoj3GcgqaQ1eACLcBGAs/s510/Ferronni%25C3%25A8re0.png" data-original-width="705" data-original-height="999"></a><br>
<br>
<i>La Belle Ferronnière</i><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-w2DgNFDJh4Q/W7IqlwcRH8I/AAAAAAAAC30/F2smp_Th2L0NFdh09s64bau6WuyxNfmkACLcBGAs/s1600/Principessa0.png" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-w2DgNFDJh4Q/W7IqlwcRH8I/AAAAAAAAC30/F2smp_Th2L0NFdh09s64bau6WuyxNfmkACLcBGAs/s500/Principessa0.png" data-original-width="713" data-original-height="991"></a>><br>
<br>
<i>Portrait of a Young Fiancée</i><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-d28XtzkvkkE/W8sSBpNFh-I/AAAAAAAAC8A/8mg6mckh_igSVO6QbjGDC7oQWkZ23uaDgCLcBGAs/s1600/vitruvianman0.png" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-d28XtzkvkkE/W8sSBpNFh-I/AAAAAAAAC8A/8mg6mckh_igSVO6QbjGDC7oQWkZ23uaDgCLcBGAs/s511/vitruvianman0.png" data-original-width="700" data-original-height="994"></a><br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitruvian_Man">Vetruvian Man</a></i><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-jGbsul9Vr4I/W8sURRU-YMI/AAAAAAAAC8Q/YifaRdA57589U-F8u4_t_t3kachI_UeSwCLcBGAs/s1600/turin0.png" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-jGbsul9Vr4I/W8sURRU-YMI/AAAAAAAAC8Q/YifaRdA57589U-F8u4_t_t3kachI_UeSwCLcBGAs/s556/turin0.png" data-original-width="645" data-original-height="996"></a><br>
<br>
<i>The Turin Portrait</i><br>
<br>
(Walter Isaacson, <i>Leonardo Da Vinci</i>, Simon & Schuster, 2017)<br>
<br>
<a name='more'></a>
<br>
<br>
<h2><a href="#clark">The Smile of Reason</a></h2>
<br>
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ETXklMTlg3M/UZoHYwWbuPI/AAAAAAAAA3E/FCH5Zy2qp8E/s1600/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+07+-+Grandeur+and+Obedience.avi_snapshot_19.41_%5B2013.05.20_21.10.15%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ETXklMTlg3M/UZoHYwWbuPI/AAAAAAAAA3E/FCH5Zy2qp8E/s640/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+07+-+Grandeur+and+Obedience.avi_snapshot_19.41_%5B2013.05.20_21.10.15%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
Ignatius Loyola: the visionary soldier turned psychologist.</div>
<br>
<br>
<h3 id="clark"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Clark">Kenneth Clark</a> (1903 – 83)</h3>
<br>
Belief in Natural Law.<br>
Belief in Justice.<br>
Belief in Toleration. …<br>
<br>
The philosophers of the Enlightenment pushed European civilisation some steps up the hill.<br>
And in theory at, at any rate, this gain was consolidated throughout the nineteenth century.<br>
Up to the 1930's people were supposed not to
<ul><li>burn witches and other members of minority groups, or</li>
<li>extract confessions by torture, or</li>
<li>pervert the course of justice, or</li>
<li>go to prison for speaking the truth</li></ul>
— except of course during wars. …<br>
<br>
The great achievement of the Catholic Church lay in harmonising, humanising, civilising, the deepest impulses of ordinary people.<br>
<br>
(<i>Civilisation</i>, 1969)<br>
<br>
<br>
<h3 id="contents">Contents</h3>
<br>
<a href="#clark">Clark, Kenneth</a>
<ul><a href="#3">Romance and Reality</a></ul>
<ul><a href="#4">Man The Measure of all Things</a></ul>
<ul><a href="#5">The Hero as Artist</a></ul>
<ul><a href="#6">Protest and Communication</a></ul>
<ul><a href="#7">Grandeur and Obedience</a></ul>
<ul><a href="#8">The Light of Experience</a></ul>
<ul><a href="#11">The Worship of Nature</a></ul>
<ul><a href="#12">The Fallacies of Hope</a></ul>
<ul><a href="#13">Heroic Materialism</a></ul>
<br>
<a href="#Leonardo">Leonardo da Vinci</a><br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<h2>Painting and Sculpture</h2>
<br>
<h3 id="clark"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Clark">Kenneth Clark</a> (1903 – 83)</h3>
<p><ul><li><i>Civilisation</i>, <a href="https://scepticwatch.blogspot.com/2012/03/british-broadcasting-corporation.html#top">BBC</a>, 1969.</li></ul></p>
<br>
<br>
<div align="center"><h2>Romance and Reality</h2>
<br>
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-sV-Qng3596Q/UZixC3XLNeI/AAAAAAAAA0g/QYS0kULID5w/s1600/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+03+-+Romance+and+Reality.avi_snapshot_13.37_%5B2013.05.09_23.12.29%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-sV-Qng3596Q/UZixC3XLNeI/AAAAAAAAA0g/QYS0kULID5w/s640/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+03+-+Romance+and+Reality.avi_snapshot_13.37_%5B2013.05.09_23.12.29%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<h2>Man: The Measure of All Things</h2>
<br>
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-VlyHapUF8VE/UZosNIRT-cI/AAAAAAAAA30/AxrRY-yyYFY/s1600/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+04+-+Man+The+Measure+of+all+Things.avi_snapshot_21.00_%5B2013.05.20_23.52.10%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-VlyHapUF8VE/UZosNIRT-cI/AAAAAAAAA30/AxrRY-yyYFY/s640/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+04+-+Man+The+Measure+of+all+Things.avi_snapshot_21.00_%5B2013.05.20_23.52.10%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-x7IgoYfaxN8/UZixCEnmWwI/AAAAAAAAA0U/CrylqAkZdDc/s1600/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+04+-+Man+The+Measure+of+all+Things.avi_snapshot_21.48_%5B2013.05.11_23.13.30%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-x7IgoYfaxN8/UZixCEnmWwI/AAAAAAAAA0U/CrylqAkZdDc/s640/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+04+-+Man+The+Measure+of+all+Things.avi_snapshot_21.48_%5B2013.05.11_23.13.30%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-g3TYIcVZxPI/UZixDMN_pTI/AAAAAAAAA0o/BG3jGLdfFr8/s1600/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+04+-+Man+The+Measure+of+all+Things.avi_snapshot_25.29_%5B2013.05.12_20.11.24%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-g3TYIcVZxPI/UZixDMN_pTI/AAAAAAAAA0o/BG3jGLdfFr8/s640/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+04+-+Man+The+Measure+of+all+Things.avi_snapshot_25.29_%5B2013.05.12_20.11.24%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-AlHgGpGSjmM/UZixEP3Nn1I/AAAAAAAAA00/ZYFhwzBbt00/s1600/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+04+-+Man+The+Measure+of+all+Things.avi_snapshot_25.41_%5B2013.05.12_20.12.27%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-AlHgGpGSjmM/UZixEP3Nn1I/AAAAAAAAA00/ZYFhwzBbt00/s640/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+04+-+Man+The+Measure+of+all+Things.avi_snapshot_25.41_%5B2013.05.12_20.12.27%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-mrwhU0CUqYA/UZnwmAMm0bI/AAAAAAAAA1w/3UcLflrxzkA/s1600/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+04+-+Man+The+Measure+of+all+Things.avi_snapshot_27.13_%5B2013.05.12_20.14.46%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-mrwhU0CUqYA/UZnwmAMm0bI/AAAAAAAAA1w/3UcLflrxzkA/s640/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+04+-+Man+The+Measure+of+all+Things.avi_snapshot_27.13_%5B2013.05.12_20.14.46%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Kt2cznWfTBU/UZ3tiVsDsgI/AAAAAAAAA50/OCB-4D84B9Y/s1600/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+04+-+Man+The+Measure+of+all+Things.avi_snapshot_33.02_%5B2013.05.12_20.21.14%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Kt2cznWfTBU/UZ3tiVsDsgI/AAAAAAAAA50/OCB-4D84B9Y/s640/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+04+-+Man+The+Measure+of+all+Things.avi_snapshot_33.02_%5B2013.05.12_20.21.14%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<h2>The Hero as Artist</h2>
<br>
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-UETVsUHMxK4/UZixEa4zF9I/AAAAAAAAA1A/-UPaav6wn0k/s1600/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+05+-+The+Hero+as+Artist.avi_snapshot_15.46_%5B2013.05.12_20.58.04%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-UETVsUHMxK4/UZixEa4zF9I/AAAAAAAAA1A/-UPaav6wn0k/s640/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+05+-+The+Hero+as+Artist.avi_snapshot_15.46_%5B2013.05.12_20.58.04%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-9cW2_MglNKE/UZixFD2h13I/AAAAAAAAA1U/-jpgxEDvgRs/s1600/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+05+-+The+Hero+as+Artist.avi_snapshot_23.37_%5B2013.05.16_01.54.36%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-9cW2_MglNKE/UZixFD2h13I/AAAAAAAAA1U/-jpgxEDvgRs/s640/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+05+-+The+Hero+as+Artist.avi_snapshot_23.37_%5B2013.05.16_01.54.36%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-M4pk3n92x94/UZuPDrba0UI/AAAAAAAAA5E/MhJz71edBJI/s1600/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+05+-+The+Hero+as+Artist.avi_snapshot_25.35_%5B2013.05.22_01.06.51%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-M4pk3n92x94/UZuPDrba0UI/AAAAAAAAA5E/MhJz71edBJI/s640/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+05+-+The+Hero+as+Artist.avi_snapshot_25.35_%5B2013.05.22_01.06.51%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<h2>Protest and Communication</h2>
<br>
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-9OJb3yCty7s/UZn3KsXOWgI/AAAAAAAAA2s/t1bi6j4MtVQ/s1600/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+06+-+Protest+and+Communication.avi_snapshot_01.00_%5B2013.05.17_00.12.20%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-9OJb3yCty7s/UZn3KsXOWgI/AAAAAAAAA2s/t1bi6j4MtVQ/s640/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+06+-+Protest+and+Communication.avi_snapshot_01.00_%5B2013.05.17_00.12.20%5D.jpg"></a>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<h2>Grandeur and Obedience</h2>
<br>
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-qLK2tRsmpos/UZoojQ6w98I/AAAAAAAAA3k/VZViJkoy4h0/s1600/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+07+-+Grandeur+and+Obedience.avi_snapshot_27.36_%5B2013.05.20_23.35.54%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-qLK2tRsmpos/UZoojQ6w98I/AAAAAAAAA3k/VZViJkoy4h0/s640/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+07+-+Grandeur+and+Obedience.avi_snapshot_27.36_%5B2013.05.20_23.35.54%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-zXgzxPGaNKY/UZuUsZveBlI/AAAAAAAAA5U/wjAivOAtRo0/s1600/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+07+-+Grandeur+and+Obedience.avi_snapshot_41.00_%5B2013.05.22_01.31.32%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-zXgzxPGaNKY/UZuUsZveBlI/AAAAAAAAA5U/wjAivOAtRo0/s640/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+07+-+Grandeur+and+Obedience.avi_snapshot_41.00_%5B2013.05.22_01.31.32%5D.jpg"></a></div>
<br>
<blockquote>[The] rarest, and most precious of all emotional states [is] that of religious ecstasy.<br>
[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernini">Bernini</a> illustrates the passage in Saint Teresa's] autobiography in which she describes the supreme moment of her life — how an angel with a flaming golden arrow pierced her heart repeatedly:
<blockquote>The pain was so great that I screamed aloud.<br>
But simultaneously felt such infinite sweetness, I wished the pain would last eternally.<br>
It was the sweetest caressing of the soul by God.</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<br>
<div align="center"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-P_3LR9KGWM8/UZudKgzkDLI/AAAAAAAAA5k/IPtmREI3dk4/s1600/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+07+-+Grandeur+and+Obedience.avi_snapshot_47.49_%5B2013.05.22_01.43.44%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-P_3LR9KGWM8/UZudKgzkDLI/AAAAAAAAA5k/IPtmREI3dk4/s640/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+07+-+Grandeur+and+Obedience.avi_snapshot_47.49_%5B2013.05.22_01.43.44%5D.jpg"></a></div>
<br>
<blockquote>I wonder, if a single thought that has helped forward the human spirit, has ever been conceived, or written down, in an enormous room.</blockquote>
<br>
<br>
<div align="center"><h2>The Light of Experience</h2>
<br>
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-oa9Tuqx8DEg/UZ3zjxL9s0I/AAAAAAAAA6Y/AlH2piPNHGU/s1600/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+08+-+The+Light+of+Experience.avi_snapshot_24.59_%5B2013.05.23_20.22.15%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-oa9Tuqx8DEg/UZ3zjxL9s0I/AAAAAAAAA6Y/AlH2piPNHGU/s640/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+08+-+The+Light+of+Experience.avi_snapshot_24.59_%5B2013.05.23_20.22.15%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-L4mRyXq03Rc/UZ3zj3YGwRI/AAAAAAAAA6M/0y0I1VhF1D8/s1600/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+08+-+The+Light+of+Experience.avi_snapshot_25.40_%5B2013.05.23_20.23.30%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-L4mRyXq03Rc/UZ3zj3YGwRI/AAAAAAAAA6M/0y0I1VhF1D8/s640/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+08+-+The+Light+of+Experience.avi_snapshot_25.40_%5B2013.05.23_20.23.30%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ZnG-nbV2hXU/UZ3zjIDfDbI/AAAAAAAAA6E/sSRYtM2TK5I/s1600/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+08+-+The+Light+of+Experience.avi_snapshot_26.14_%5B2013.05.23_20.26.31%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ZnG-nbV2hXU/UZ3zjIDfDbI/AAAAAAAAA6E/sSRYtM2TK5I/s640/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+08+-+The+Light+of+Experience.avi_snapshot_26.14_%5B2013.05.23_20.26.31%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-AW7lC3EX1-U/UZ3zkGg36nI/AAAAAAAAA6U/kfKTE1ZUnFc/s1600/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+08+-+The+Light+of+Experience.avi_snapshot_28.31_%5B2013.05.23_20.29.45%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-AW7lC3EX1-U/UZ3zkGg36nI/AAAAAAAAA6U/kfKTE1ZUnFc/s640/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+08+-+The+Light+of+Experience.avi_snapshot_28.31_%5B2013.05.23_20.29.45%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-zNwY07epDyU/UZ3zk7L78ZI/AAAAAAAAA6k/ReKdXkNDzrA/s1600/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+08+-+The+Light+of+Experience.avi_snapshot_29.05_%5B2013.05.23_20.30.43%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-zNwY07epDyU/UZ3zk7L78ZI/AAAAAAAAA6k/ReKdXkNDzrA/s640/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+08+-+The+Light+of+Experience.avi_snapshot_29.05_%5B2013.05.23_20.30.43%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-uYs6jzVAmh0/UZ3zlPt3VxI/AAAAAAAAA6s/8zFyP96G4Gs/s1600/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+08+-+The+Light+of+Experience.avi_snapshot_29.35_%5B2013.05.23_20.31.28%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-uYs6jzVAmh0/UZ3zlPt3VxI/AAAAAAAAA6s/8zFyP96G4Gs/s640/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+08+-+The+Light+of+Experience.avi_snapshot_29.35_%5B2013.05.23_20.31.28%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-RCbbNtmnc38/UZ3zlp0lFGI/AAAAAAAAA60/mLHZE-TETqs/s1600/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+08+-+The+Light+of+Experience.avi_snapshot_29.37_%5B2013.05.23_20.31.35%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-RCbbNtmnc38/UZ3zlp0lFGI/AAAAAAAAA60/mLHZE-TETqs/s640/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+08+-+The+Light+of+Experience.avi_snapshot_29.37_%5B2013.05.23_20.31.35%5D.jpg"></a></div>
<br>
<br>
<h2 align="center" id="11">The Worship of Nature</h2>
<blockquote>A sympathy with the humble, the voiceless, be they human or animal, does seem to be a necessary accompaniment to the worship of Nature. …<br>
The new religion was anti-hierarchical.<br>
It proposed a new set of values.<br>
[It] was based on right instincts, rather than on learning. …<br>
[A recognition] that simple people and animals often show more courage and loyalty and unselfishness than sophisticated people.<br>
[And] a greater sense of the wholeness of life.</blockquote>
<br>
<div align="center"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-smAaSKQyffY/UaSReTyf47I/AAAAAAAAA9w/qMwxlWfYQVw/s1600/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+11+-+The+Worship+of+Nature.avi_snapshot_23.31_%5B2013.05.28_20.59.59%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-smAaSKQyffY/UaSReTyf47I/AAAAAAAAA9w/qMwxlWfYQVw/s640/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+11+-+The+Worship+of+Nature.avi_snapshot_23.31_%5B2013.05.28_20.59.59%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-bnFbGKB6s_4/UaYB6oScgaI/AAAAAAAAA-U/c-4D1pSF6Yg/s1600/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+11+-+The+Worship+of+Nature.avi_snapshot_22.09_%5B2013.05.28_21.10.39%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-bnFbGKB6s_4/UaYB6oScgaI/AAAAAAAAA-U/c-4D1pSF6Yg/s640/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+11+-+The+Worship+of+Nature.avi_snapshot_22.09_%5B2013.05.28_21.10.39%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ilgCnuij85Q/UaYB670FeSI/AAAAAAAAA-c/NV14c5RkgCM/s1600/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+11+-+The+Worship+of+Nature.avi_snapshot_24.27_%5B2013.05.28_21.07.12%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ilgCnuij85Q/UaYB670FeSI/AAAAAAAAA-c/NV14c5RkgCM/s640/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+11+-+The+Worship+of+Nature.avi_snapshot_24.27_%5B2013.05.28_21.07.12%5D.jpg"></a></div>
<br>
<blockquote><i>William Wordsworth:</i><br>
One impulse from a vernal wood, may teach you more of Man, of moral Evil and of Good, than all the sages can.</blockquote>
<br>
<div align="center"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Y8lbRU5pyb0/UaYCXLEVZsI/AAAAAAAAA-w/01XHXu4aPsg/s1600/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+11+-+The+Worship+of+Nature.avi_snapshot_38.22_%5B2013.05.29_22.58.16%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Y8lbRU5pyb0/UaYCXLEVZsI/AAAAAAAAA-w/01XHXu4aPsg/s640/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+11+-+The+Worship+of+Nature.avi_snapshot_38.22_%5B2013.05.29_22.58.16%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-kbQsfyB4t90/UaYCWzR_viI/AAAAAAAAA-k/dGjJS0CQuFk/s1600/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+11+-+The+Worship+of+Nature.avi_snapshot_39.45_%5B2013.05.29_23.00.25%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-kbQsfyB4t90/UaYCWzR_viI/AAAAAAAAA-k/dGjJS0CQuFk/s640/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+11+-+The+Worship+of+Nature.avi_snapshot_39.45_%5B2013.05.29_23.00.25%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-8y3UiQUzFr4/UaYCXQJdwuI/AAAAAAAAA-s/ZIffa5zWis8/s1600/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+11+-+The+Worship+of+Nature.avi_snapshot_41.08_%5B2013.05.29_23.02.26%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-8y3UiQUzFr4/UaYCXQJdwuI/AAAAAAAAA-s/ZIffa5zWis8/s640/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+11+-+The+Worship+of+Nature.avi_snapshot_41.08_%5B2013.05.29_23.02.26%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-J6HW-moleek/UaYBRjQpNeI/AAAAAAAAA-I/z5jJbqRcKK0/s1600/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+11+-+The+Worship+of+Nature.avi_snapshot_44.53_%5B2013.05.29_23.07.39%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-J6HW-moleek/UaYBRjQpNeI/AAAAAAAAA-I/z5jJbqRcKK0/s640/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+11+-+The+Worship+of+Nature.avi_snapshot_44.53_%5B2013.05.29_23.07.39%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-zXJywpj6l_k/UaYCZDXRnGI/AAAAAAAAA_E/h3iAuMRlMY0/s1600/BBC%2520Kenneth%2520Clark%2527s%2520Civilisation%2520-%252011%2520-%2520The%2520Worship%2520of%2520Nature.avi_snapshot_47.44_%255B2013.05.29_23.10.35%255D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-zXJywpj6l_k/UaYCZDXRnGI/AAAAAAAAA_E/h3iAuMRlMY0/s640/BBC%2520Kenneth%2520Clark%2527s%2520Civilisation%2520-%252011%2520-%2520The%2520Worship%2520of%2520Nature.avi_snapshot_47.44_%255B2013.05.29_23.10.35%255D.jpg"></a></div>
<br>
<blockquote>Total immersion.<br>
This is the ultimate reason why the love of Nature has been for so long accepted as a religion.<br>
It is the means by which we can lose our identity in the whole.<br>
And gain, thereby, a more intense consciousness of being.</blockquote>
<br>
<br>
<h2 align="center" id="12">The Fallacies of Hope</h2>
<blockquote>The revolutionaries [of the late eighteenth century] wanted to replace Christianity with the religion of Nature. …<br>
<br>
People who hold forth about the modern world, often say what we need is a new religion.<br>
It may be true.<br>
But it isn't easy to establish. …<br>
<br>
In 1792, France was fighting for her life against the forces of ancient corruption.<br>
And for a few years, her leaders suffered from the most terrible of all delusions — they believed themselves to be virtuous. …<br>
<br>
The men of 1793 desperately tried to control anarchy be violence.<br>
[But were, in the end,] destroyed by the evil means they had brought into existence.<br>
Robespierre himself, and many many others, followed the members of the old regime onto the scaffold. …<br>
And thus for the first cloud to overcast Wordsworth's dawn, and darken the optimism of the first romantics into a pessimism that has lasted to our own day. …<br>
<br>
Then in, 1798, the French got a leader with a vengeance. …<br>
Communal enthusiasm may be a dangerous intoxicant.<br>
But if human beings were to lose altogether the sense of glory — I think we should be the poorer. …<br>
<br>
[After the storming of] the Bastille [it was] knocked down stone by stone.<br>
But repression did not come to an end.<br>
On the contrary, Napoleon organised the most efficient secret police in Europe.</blockquote>
<br>
<div align="center"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-mfiuhZT2bZY/UajMEQ_HDnI/AAAAAAAAA_o/tKPt29iLiK0/s1600/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+12+-+The+Fallacies+of+Hope.avi_snapshot_45.46_%5B2013.06.01_01.55.21%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-mfiuhZT2bZY/UajMEQ_HDnI/AAAAAAAAA_o/tKPt29iLiK0/s640/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+12+-+The+Fallacies+of+Hope.avi_snapshot_45.46_%5B2013.06.01_01.55.21%5D.jpg"></a></div>
<br>
<blockquote>[Rodin's] Balzac with his prodigious understanding of human motives, scorns conventional values, defies fashionable opinions — as Beethoven did — and should inspire us to defy all those forces that threaten to impair our humanity:
<ul><li>lies,</li>
<li>tanks,</li>
<li>tear gas,</li>
<li>ideologies,</li>
<li>opinion polls,</li>
<li>mechanisation,</li>
<li>planners,</li>
<li>computers</li></ul>
The whole lot.</blockquote>
<br>
<br>
<h2 align="center" id="13">Heroic Materialism</h2>
<blockquote>It's reckoned that over 9 million slaves died of heat and suffocation in [the holds of slave ships], on the way to America. …<br>
The anti-slavery movement was the first communal expression of the awakened conscience.<br>
It took a long time to succeed.<br>
The trade was prohibited in 1807 and, as Wilberforce lay dying, in 1835, slavery itself was abolished.<br>
<br>
And in the middle of the century, Lord Shaftsbury, whose long struggle to prevent the exploitation of children in factories, puts him next to Wilberforce in the history of humanitarianism.<br>
In the middle of the nineteenth century there was no children's hospital in London.<br>
And children weren't taken into ordinary hospitals for fear that they might be infectious.<br>
Shaftsbury was one of the founders of the Hospital for Sick Children — Dickens helped raise the money for it.</blockquote>
<br>
<div align="center"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-AxRcXqJr2V4/Uaok1IUaEPI/AAAAAAAAA_4/MRg8GT4nU3I/s1600/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+13+-+Heroic+Materialism.avi_snapshot_13.34_%5B2013.06.02_02.14.44%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-AxRcXqJr2V4/Uaok1IUaEPI/AAAAAAAAA_4/MRg8GT4nU3I/s640/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+13+-+Heroic+Materialism.avi_snapshot_13.34_%5B2013.06.02_02.14.44%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-WjWBWrMemY0/Uaok1lETOtI/AAAAAAAABAA/HrRyypkqX-I/s1600/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+13+-+Heroic+Materialism.avi_snapshot_13.54_%5B2013.06.02_02.15.15%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-WjWBWrMemY0/Uaok1lETOtI/AAAAAAAABAA/HrRyypkqX-I/s640/BBC+Kenneth+Clark's+Civilisation+-+13+-+Heroic+Materialism.avi_snapshot_13.54_%5B2013.06.02_02.15.15%5D.jpg"></a></div>
<br>
<blockquote>[Humanitarianism] was the great achievement of the nineteenth century.<br>
We're so accustomed to the humanitarian outlook, that we forget how little it accounted in earlier ages of civilisation. …<br>
We forget the horrors that were taken for granted in early Victorian England.<br>
The hundreds of lashes inflicted daily on harmless men in the Army and Navy.<br>
The women chained in threes, rumbling through the streets, in open carts on their way to transportation.<br>
These, and even more unspeakable cruelties, were carried out by agents of the Establishment — usually in defence of property.</blockquote>peaceandlonglifehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09059683906637157584noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1170524542125253803.post-61735207040057580092017-05-05T08:54:00.004-07:002021-03-09T07:46:31.899-08:00Michel de Montaigne<i id="top"><a href="https://40-eridani-a.blogspot.com/2017/03/prose.html#contents">Prose</a></i><br>
<br>
<br>
<blockquote><i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livy">Livy</a> (64 or 59 BCE – 17 CE):</i><br>
Nothing is more deceitful than a depraved piety by which the will of the gods serves as a pretext for crimes.<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suetonius">Suetonius</a> (c69 – after 122 CE):</i><br>
He who suffers before he needs to, suffers more than he needs to.<br>
(<i>Life of Caesar</i>)</blockquote>
<br>
<br>
<h3 id="perdition"><a href="https://40-eridani-a.blogspot.com/2017/05/michel-de-montaigne.html#II:12">The Road to Perdition</a></h3>
<br>
There is a plague on Man: his opinion that he knows something.<br>
That is why ignorance is so strongly advocated by our religion as a quality appropriate to belief and obedience.<br>
(pp 543-4)<br>
<br>
In Man curiosity is an innate evil, dating from his origins …<br>
The original Fall occurred when Man was anxious to increase his wisdom and knowledge: that path led headlong to eternal damnation.<br>
Pride undoes man; it corrupts him; pride makes him leave the trodden paths, welcome novelty and prefer to be the leader of a lost band wandering along the road to perdition …<br>
(p 555)<br>
<br>
Whatever share in the knowledge of Truth we may have obtained, it has not been acquired by our own powers.<br>
God has clearly shown us that [by choosing from among the common people] simple and ignorant apostles to bear witness of his wondrous secrets …<br>
Our religion did not come to us through reasoned arguments or from our own intelligence: it came to us from outside authority, by commandments.<br>
That being so, weakness of judgement helps us more than strength; blindness, more than clarity of vision.<br>
We become learned in God's wisdom more by ignorance than by knowledge.<br>
It is not surprising that our earth-based, natural means cannot conceive knowledge which is heaven-based and supernatural; let us merely bring our submissiveness and obedience …<br>
(p 557)<br>
<br>
Our minds are dangerous tools, rash and prone to go astray: it is hard to reconcile them with order and moderation. …<br>
It is a miracle if you find one who is settled and civilized.<br>
We are right to erect the strictest possible fences around the human mind. …<br>
Certainly few souls are so powerful, so law-abiding and so well endowed that we can trust them to act on their own, allowing them liberty of judgement to sail responsibly and moderately beyond accepted opinion.<br>
It is more expedient to keep them under tutelage.<br>
(pp 629-30)<br>
<br>
Every single idea which results from our own reflections and our own faculties — whether it is true or false — is subject to dispute and uncertainty. …<br>
Everything we undertake without God's help, everything we try and see without the lamp of his grace, is vanity and madness.<br>
(<a href="https://40-eridani-a.blogspot.com/2017/05/michel-de-montaigne.html#II:12">An apology for Raymond Sebond</a>, p 622)<br>
<br>
<a id="I:33" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_of_Poitiers">St Hilary</a>, the Bishop of Poitiers and a famous enemy of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arian_controversy">Arian heresy</a>, was in Syria when he was told that his only daughter Abra, whom he had left overseas with her mother, was being courted by some of the most notable lords of the land …<br>
He wrote to her … saying that he had found for her during his journey a Suitor who was far greater and more worthy, a Bridegroom of very different power and glory, who would vouchsafe her a present of robes and jewels of countless price.<br>
His aim was to make her lose the habit and taste of worldly pleasures and to wed her to God; but since the most sure and shortest way seemed to him that his daughter should die, he never ceased to beseech God in his prayers, vows and supplications that he should take her from this world and call her to Himself.<br>
And so it happened: soon after his return she did die, at which he showed uncommon joy. …<br>
<br>
[And,] when St Hilary's wife heard from him how the death of their daughter had been brought about by his wish and design, and how much happier she was to have quitted this world than to have remained in it, she too took so lively a grasp on that eternal life in Heaven that she besought her husband, with the utmost urgency, to do the same for her.<br>
Soon after, when God took her to Himself in answer to both their prayers, the death was welcomed with open arms and with an uncommon joy which both of them shared.<br>
(On fleeing from pleasures at the cost of one's life, p 246)<br>
<br>
<a name='more'></a>
<br>
<h3 id="top"><a id="8318580" href="http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/counterpoint/soapbox:-smack-fairy/8318580">Honour and Freedom</a></h3>
<br>
<span id="II:8">I condemn all violence in the education of tender minds which are being trained for honour and freedom … and I hold that you will never achieve by force what you cannot achieve by reason, intelligence and skill. …<br>
I have never seen caning achieve anything except making souls more cowardly or more maliciously stubborn. …<br>
[Indeed, even] if I were able to make myself feared [by my children,] I would rather make myself loved.<br>
(On the affection of fathers for their children, pp 437 & 441)</span><br>
<br>
<span id="II:31">Anyone can see that all things within a State depend upon the way it educates and brings up its children. <br>
Yet quite injudiciously that is left to the mercy of the parents, no matter how mad or wicked they may be.<br>
How many times have I been tempted, among others things, to make a dramatic intervention so as to avenge some little boys whom I saw being bruised, knocked about and flayed alive by some frenzied father or mother beside themselves with anger.<br>
You can see fire and rage flashing from their eyes …<br>
(On Anger, p 809)</span><br>
<br>
(<i>The Essays of Michel de Montaigne</i>, M A Screech, Translator, Penguin, 1991)<br>
<br>
<br>
<b><i><a href="https://40-eridani-a.blogspot.com/p/peace-and-long-life_9.html#top">peaceandlonglife</a></i></b><br>
<br>
Control through Fear<br>
Education through Violence<br>
Domination through Force<br>
Obedience through Submission<br>
<br>
Submission is a poor substitute for respect.<br>
Fear instils only servility; it does not command respect.<br>
It is important <i>not</i> to mistake one for the other.<br>
<br>
(23 April 2017)<br>
<br>
<br>
<h3 id="contents">Contents</h3>
<br>
Book I
<ul><a href="#I:26">On educating children</a></ul>
<ul><a href="#I:27">That it is madness to judge the true and the false from our own capacities</a></ul>
<ul><a href="#I:31">On the Cannibals</a></ul>
<ul><a href="#I:32">Judgements on God's ordinances must be embarked upon with prudence</a></ul>
<ul><a href="#I:33">On fleeing from pleasures at the cost of one's life</a></ul>
<ul><a href="https://scepticwatch.blogspot.com/2012/07/matthieu-ricard.html#I:53">On one of Caesar's sayings</a></ul>
<br>
Book II
<ul><a href="#II:3">A custom of the Isle of Cea</a></ul>
<ul><a href="#II:6">On Practice</a></ul>
<ul><a href="#II:8">On the affection of fathers for their children</a></ul>
<ul><a href="#II:11">On Cruelty</a></ul>
<ul><a href="#II:12">An apology for Raymond Sebond</a></ul>
<ul><a href="#II:13">On judging someone else's death</a></ul>
<ul><a href="https://40-eridani-a.blogspot.com/2012/05/psychological-dictionary.html#II:16">On glory</a></ul>
<ul><a href="#II:17">On presumption</a></ul>
<ul><a href="https://scepticwatch.blogspot.com/2017/04/donald-trump.html#II:18">On giving the lie</a></ul>
<ul><a href="#II:19">On freedom of conscience</a></ul>
<ul><a href="#II:31">On Anger</a></ul>
<ul><a href="#II:32">In defence of Seneca and Plutarch</a></ul>
<ul><a href="#II:37">On the resemblance of children to their fathers</a></ul>
<br>
Book III
<ul><a href="#III:1">On the useful and the honourable</a></ul>
<ul><a href="#III:2">On repenting</a></ul>
<ul><a href="#III:5">On some lines of Virgil</a></ul>
<ul><a href="#III:9">On vanity</a></ul>
<ul><a href="#III:10">On restraining your will</a></ul>
<ul><a href="https://scepticwatch.blogspot.com/2013/05/carl-sagan.html#III:11">On the lame</a></ul>
<ul><a href="#III:12">On physiognomy</a></ul>
<ul><a href="#III:13">On experience</a></ul>
<br>
<br>
<h2><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_de_Montaigne">Michel Eyquem</a> (1533 – 92)</h2>
<br>
Lord of Montaigne.<br>
<p><ul><li id="contents"><i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essays_(Montaigne)">The Essays of Michel de Montaigne</a></i>, 1580, M A Screech, Translator, Penguin, 1991.<br>
<br>
<h3 id="I:26">On educating children</h3>
<br>
[These] are <i>my</i> humours, <i>my</i> opinions:<br>
I give them as things which <i>I</i> believe, not as things <i>to be</i> believed.<br>
My aim is to reveal my own self, which may well be different tomorrow if I am initiated into some new business which changes me.<br>
I have not, nor do I desire, enough authority to be believed.<br>
(p 167, emphasis added)<br>
<br>
Truth and reason are common to all: they no more belong to the man who first put them into words than to him who last did so.<br>
(p 170)<br>
<br>
<br>
<h3 id="I:27">That it is madness to judge the true and the false from our own capacities</h3>
<br>
[How] many things which were articles of belief for us yesterday are fables for us today?<br>
(p 204)<br>
<br>
<br>
<h3 id="I:31">On the Cannibals</h3>
<br>
[Every] man calls barbarous anything he is not accustomed to; it is indeed the case that we have no other criterion of truth or right-reason than the example and form of the opinions and customs of our own country.<br>
(p 231)<br>
<br>
It is not sensible that artifice should be reverenced more than Nature, our great and powerful Mother.<br>
We have so overloaded the richness and beauty of her products by our own ingenuity that we have smothered her entirely.<br>
Yet wherever her pure light does shine, she wondrously shames our vain and frivolous enterprises: …<br>
All our strivings cannot even manage to reproduce the nest of the smallest little bird, with its beauty and appropriateness to its purpose; we cannot even reproduce the web of the wretched spider.<br>
(p 232)<br>
<br>
Those who treat subjects under the guidance of human limitations can be excused if they have done their best; but those who come and cheat us with assurances of powers beyond the natural order and then fail to do what they promise, should they not be punished for it and for the foolhardiness of their deceit?<br>
(p 233)<br>
<br>
<br>
<h3 id="I:32">Judgements on God's ordinances must be embarked upon with prudence</h3>
<br>
The real field and subject of deception are things unknown:
<ul><li>firstly because their very strangeness lends them credence;</li>
<li>second, because they cannot be exposed to our usual order of argument, so stripping us of the means of fighting them. …</li></ul>
And so it turns out that nothing is so firmly believed as whatever we know least about, and that no persons are more sure of themselves than those who tell us tall stories …<br>
(p 242)<br>
<br>
What I consider wrong is our usual practice of trying to support and confirm our religion by the success or happy outcome of our undertakings.<br>
Our belief has enough other foundations without seeking sanction from events: people who have grown accustomed to such plausible arguments well-suited to their taste are in danger of having their faith shaken when the turn comes for events to prove hostile and unfavourable.<br>
(p 243)<br>
<br>
<br>
<h3 id="II:3">A custom of the Isle of Cea</h3>
<br>
Living is slavery if the freedom to die is wanting.<br>
(p 393)<br>
<br>
God gives us ample leave to go when he reduces us to the state where living is worse than dying. …<br>
Just as I break no laws against theft when I make off with my own property or cut my own purse, nor the laws against arson if I burn my own woods, so too I am not bound to the laws against murder if I take my own life.<br>
(p 394)<br>
<br>
Of all incitements [to suicide] unbearable pain and a worse death seem to me the most pardonable.<br>
(p 407)<br>
<br>
Of all the violences done to the conscience the one most to be avoided, it seems to me, is violence against the chastity of women, since an element of bodily pleasure is naturally in it for them.<br>
For this reason their resistance cannot be absolutely complete and it would seem that the rape may be mingled with a kind of willingness.<br>
(pp 400-1)<br>
<br>
<br>
<h3 id="II:6">On Practice</h3>
<br>
[Perhaps] our ability to fall asleep, which deprives us of all action and sensation, is [Nature's way of teaching] us that she has made us as much for dying as for living [by showing] us that everlasting state which she is keeping for us when life is over, to get us accustomed to it and to take away our terror [of it.]<br>
(p 417)<br>
<br>
[Those] who have [suddenly] fallen into a swoon [and] lost all sensation, have been … very close to seeing Death's true and natural face, for it is not to be feared that the fleeting moment at which we pass away comports any hardship or distress, since we cannot have sensation without duration.<br>
For us, suffering needs time; and time is so short and precipitate when we die that death must be indiscernible.<br>
(p 418)<br>
<br>
It is a thorny undertaking … to follow so roaming a course as that of our mind's, to penetrate its dark depths and its inner recesses, to pick out and pin down the innumerable characteristics of its emotions. …<br>
For many years now the target of my thoughts has been myself alone; I examine nothing, I study nothing, but me …<br>
No description is more difficult than the describing of oneself; and none, certainly, is more useful. …<br>
My business, my art, is to live my life.<br>
(p 424-5)<br>
<br>
<br>
<h3 id="II:11">On Cruelty</h3>
<br>
[There] is a kind of respect and a duty in man as a genus which link us not merely to the beasts, which have life and feelings, but even to trees and plants.<br>
We owe justice to men: and to the other creatures who are able to receive them we owe gentleness and kindness.<br>
Between them and us there is some sort of intercourse and a degree of mutual obligation.<br>
(p 488)<br>
<br>
<br>
<h3 id="II:12">An apology for Raymond Sebond</h3>
<br>
When I play with my cat, how do I know that she is not passing time with me rather than I with her?<br>
(p 505)<br>
<br>
Whoever sets out to find something eventually reaches the point where he can say:
<ul><li>that he has found it, or</li>
<li>that it cannot be found, or</li>
<li>that he is still looking for it.</li></ul>
The whole of Philosophy can be divided into these three categories …<br>
(p 159)<br>
<br>
I find it unacceptable that the power of God should be limited … by the rules of human language …<br>
Our speech, like everything else, has its defects and weaknesses.<br>
Most of the world's squabbles are occasioned by grammar!<br>
(p 590)<br>
<br>
The hand of God's governance supports all things with an equal and unchanging sway, with the same order, the same power.<br>
Our concerns contribute nothing to this; our human activities and standards are quite irrelevant …<br>
(p 592)<br>
<br>
[If] we draw our moral rules from ourselves, what confusion we cast ourselves into!<br>
For the most convincing advice we get from reason is that each and every man should obey the laws of his own country …<br>
But what does that mean, except that our rules of conduct are based on chance?<br>
Truth must present the same face everywhere. …<br>
Could that ancient god, [the oracle of Apollo,] have more clearly emphasized the place of ignorance within our human knowledge of the divine Being, or taught us that religion is really no more than a human invention, useful for binding societies together, than by telling those who came before his Tripod to beg for instruction that the true way of worship is the one hallowed by custom in each locality?<br>
(p 652-3)<br>
<br>
We may all lack some sense or other [and] because of that defect, most of the features of objects may be concealed from us.<br>
How can we know that the difficulties we have in understanding many of the works of Nature do not derive from this, or that several of the actions of animals which exceed our powers of understanding are produced by a sense-faculty which we do not possess?<br>
Perhaps some of them, by such means, enjoy a fuller life, a more complete life than we do. …<br>
We have fashioned a truth by questioning our five senses working together; but perhaps we need to harmonize the contributions of eight or ten senses if we are ever to know, with certainty, what Truth is in essence.<br>
(p 666-7)<br>
<br>
<br>
<h3 id="II:13">On judging someone else's death</h3>
<br>
[We] set too much store by ourselves.<br>
It appears to us that the whole universe in some way suffers when we are obliterated and that it feels compassion for our predicament …<br>
None of us gives enough thought to his being only <i>one</i>.<br>
(p 684-5)<br>
<br>
<br>
<h3 id="II:17">On presumption</h3>
<br>
Finding myself since birth with such a degree of fortune that I had cause to remain as I was, and with such a degree of intelligence as to make me appreciate that fact, I have sought nothing — and have taken nothing either …<br>
All I needed was gently to enjoy such good things as God in his bounty has placed in my hands.<br>
I have never tasted excruciating toil of any kind.<br>
I have had to manage little apart from my own affairs; or if I have had to do anything else, it was in circumstances which let me manage things in my own time and in my own way, delegated to me by such as trusted me, never bothered me and knew me. …<br>
My very boyhood was spent in a manner slack and free, exempt from rigorous subjection.<br>
(p 732)<br>
<br>
Faced with danger I do not reflect on how to escape but on how little it matters that I do so.<br>
If I remained in danger what would it matter?<br>
Not being able to control events I control myself: if they will not adapt to me then I adapt to them. …<br>
(p 733)<br>
<br>
[It] is a good thing to be born in a century which is deeply depraved, for by comparison with others you are reckoned virtuous on the cheap. …<br>
[Thus] there never was a time and place in which princes could find greater or surer reward given to their generosity and justice.<br>
Unless I am mistaken, the first prince to make himself favoured and trusted in that way will, at little cost, outstrip his companions.<br>
Might and violence can achieve something, but not always and not everything.<br>
(p 734-5)<br>
<br>
We should not always say everything: that would be stupid; but what we do say must be what we think: to do otherwise is wicked.<br>
(p 736)<br>
<br>
[The] more I mistrust my memory, the more confused it gets; it serves me best when I take it by surprise;
I have to address requests to it somewhat indifferently, for it becomes paralysed if I try to force it, and once it has started to wobble the more I dig into it the more it gets tied up and perplexed; it serves me in its own time not in mine.<br>
(p 738)<br>
<br>
[There] is no system so bad (provided it be old and durable) as not to be better than change and innovation.<br>
Our manners are corrupt in the extreme and wondrously inclined to get worse; many of our French laws and customs are monstrous and barbaric: yet, because of the difficulty of putting ourselves into a better state, and because such is the danger of collapse into ruin, if I could jam the brake on our wheel and stop it dead at this point I would happily do so.<br>
<br>
I find that the worst aspect of the state we are in is our lack of stability …<br>
It is easy enough to condemn a polity as imperfect since all things mortal are full of imperfection; it is easy enough to generate in a nation contempt for its ancient customs: no man has ever tried to do so without reaching his goal; but as for replacing the conditions you have ruined by better ones, many who have tried to do that have come to grief.<br>
<br>
In my own activities I allow but a small part to my intelligence: I readily let myself be led by the public order of this world.<br>
Blessed are they who, without tormenting themselves about causes, do what they are told rather than tell others what to do; who, as the Heavens roll, gently roll with them.<br>
(p 745)<br>
<br>
<br>
<h3 id="II:19">On freedom of conscience</h3>
<br>
It is certain that, in those early days when our religion began to be backed by the authority of law, zeal provided many with weapons to use against all sorts of pagan books, causing the learned public to suffer staggering losses.<br>
I reckon that this inordinate zeal caused more harm to literature than all the fires started by the Barbarians.<br>
(p 759)<br>
<br>
<br>
<h3 id="II:32">In defence of Seneca and Plutarch</h3>
<br>
How many have we seen patiently suffering to be roasted or burnt for opinions which, without understanding or knowledge, they have taken from others!<br>
<br>
I have known hundreds and hundreds of women … whom you would have more easily made to bite a red-hot iron than made to let go of an opinion conceived in a fit of choler once they have got their teeth into it.<br>
Women are rendered intractable by blows and constraint.<br>
(p 821)<br>
<br>
<br>
<h3 id="II:37">On the resemblance of children to their fathers</h3>
<br>
Health is precious.<br>
It is the only thing to the pursuit of which it is truly worth devoting not only our time but our sweat, toil, goods and life itself.<br>
Without health all pleasure, scholarship and virtue lose their lustre and fade away. …<br>
<br>
It is quite certain that among all the works of Nature things may be found with properties which can preserve our health.<br>
(p 865)<br>
<br>
[But,] as far as I can see, no tribe of people are more quickly ill nor more slowly well than those who are under the jurisdiction of medicine.<br>
The constraints of their diets impair and corrupt their health.<br>
Doctors are not content with treating illness; they make good health ill too so as to stop us ever escaping from their jurisdiction. …<br>
Yet are the lives of doctors themselves so long and so happy that they can witness to the manifest effectiveness of their discipline? …<br>
Nations without number have no knowledge of medicine and live longer and more healthily than we do here.<br>
(p 866)<br>
<br>
When a patient is under doctors' orders anything lucky which happens to him is always due to them.<br>
Take those opportune circumstances which have cured me and hundreds of others who never call in medical help …<br>
[But] when anything untoward happens they either disclaim responsibility altogether or else blame it on the patient, finding reasons so vacuous that they need never fear they will ever run out of them …<br>
Or when we get worse … they palm us off with assertions that without their remedies things would have been even worse.<br>
(p 867-8)<br>
<br>
I have nothing against doctors, only against their Art; I do not blame them much for taking advantage of our follies: most people do; many vocations, both less honourable and more so, have no other base or stay than the abuse of a trusting public.<br>
(p 881)<br>
<br>
My travels have provided occasions for seeing virtually all the famous baths of Christendom …<br>
[And though] I have never seen any miraculous or extraordinary cures there … nevertheless I have also hardly met anyone who was made worse by taking the waters …<br>
(p 877)<br>
<br>
If you cannot come with enough spriteliness to enjoy the company gathered there or the walks and relaxations to which we are tempted by the beauty of the countryside in which most of these spas are situated, you certainly lose the better and surer part of their effect. …<br>
Each country has its own peculiar opinions about how to make use of the waters as well as their own rules and methods.<br>
In my experience the effects are virtually identical. …<br>
<br>
So much then for the only branch of medicine which I have frequented; it is the least artificial but has its fair share of the confusion and uncertainty you see everywhere else in that Art.<br>
(p 878)<br>
<br>
<br>
<h3 id="III:1">On the useful and the honourable</h3>
<br>
Our laws have freed me from great anguish: they have chosen my party for me and have given me a master: all other superior authority is related to the authority of that law; all other obligations are restrained by it.<br>
That does not mean that if my affections inclined to the other side that I would immediately lend it my support: our wills and desires are laws unto themselves but our actions must accept law as ordained by the State.<br>
(p 896)<br>
<br>
<br>
<h3 id="III:2">On repenting</h3>
<br>
I have known the blade, the blossom and the fruit; and I now know their withering.<br>
Happily so, since naturally so.<br>
I can bear more patiently the ills that I have since they come in due season, and since they also make me recall with more gratitude the long-lasting happiness of my former life.<br>
(p 920)<br>
<br>
<br>
<h3 id="III:5">On some lines of Virgil</h3>
<br>
Women are not entirely wrong when they reject the moral rules proclaimed in society, since it is we men alone who have made them.<br>
(p 964)<br>
<br>
[We] assign sexual restraint to women as something peculiarly theirs, under pain of punishments of the utmost severity.<br>
No passion is more urgent than this one, yet our will is that they alone should resist it …<br>
Meanwhile we men can give way to it without blame or reproach. …<br>
<br>
[Men want their] wives to be in good health, energetic, radiant, buxom … and chaste at the same time, both hot and cold at once.<br>
(p 965)<br>
<br>
We train women from childhood for the practices of love:
<ul><li>their graces,</li>
<li>their clothes,</li>
<li>their education,</li>
<li>their way of speaking</li></ul>
regard only that one end.<br>
(p 966)<br>
<br>
I think it easier to keep on a suit of armour all your life than to keep a maidenhead.<br>
(p 972)<br>
<br>
[Male] and female are cast in the same mould: save for education and custom the difference between them is not great.<br>
(p 1016)<br>
<br>
<br>
<h3 id="III:9">On vanity</h3>
<br>
Nothing crushes a State save novelty.<br>
Change alone provides the mould for injustice and tyranny.<br>
(p 1084)<br>
<br>
To throw off the burden of a present evil is no cure unless the general condition is improved.<br>
The surgeon's aim is not to cause the death of foetid flesh: that is merely the means which lead to the cure.<br>
He looks beyond that, to making natural flesh grow back again and to restoring the limb to its proper state.<br>
Anyone who proposes merely to remove what is irking him falls short, for good does not necessarily succeed evil. …<br>
All great revolutions convulse the State and cause disorder.<br>
(p 1085)<br>
<br>
I have gone to bed in my own home hundreds of times thinking that I would be betrayed and killed that night, bargaining with Fortune that the event should not be terrifying and long drawn-out.<br>
(p 1098)<br>
<br>
The most useful science and the most honourable occupation for a wife is home-management.<br>
I am aware of … few who are good managers.<br>
(p 1102)<br>
<br>
Yet to be one is a wife's chief virtue, the one that we should look for first as the only dowry which may either save our households or ruin them. …<br>
I enable my wife to do this properly when, by my absence, I leave the government of my house in her hands. …<br>
It is unjust and absurd that our wives should be maintained in idleness by our sweat and toil.<br>
(p 1103)<br>
<br>
If I were allowed to choose I would, I think, prefer to die in the saddle rather than in my bed, away from home and far from my own folk.<br>
(p 1106)<br>
<br>
Your heart is racked with pity at hearing the lamentations of those who love you — and perhaps with anger at hearing other lamentations, feigned and hypocritical. …<br>
If we need a 'wise-woman' to midwife us into this world we need an even wiser man to get us out of it. …<br>
<br>
Not from fear but from cunning, I want to go to earth like a rabbit and steal off as I pass away. …<br>
I am satisfied with a death which will withdraw into itself, a calm and lonely one, entirely my own, one in keeping with my life — retiring and private. …<br>
I have enough to do to console myself without having to console others; enough thoughts in my mind without fresh ones evoked by my surroundings; enough to think about without drawing on others.<br>
This event is not one of our social engagements: it is a scene with one character.<br>
Let us live and laugh among our own folk, but let us die, grinding our teeth, among strangers.<br>
(p 1107)<br>
<br>
Since there are deaths good for fools and others for sages, let us find some which are good for people in between.<br>
(p 1113)<br>
<br>
<br>
<h3 id="III:10">On restraining your will</h3>
<br>
[The] more we increase our needs and possessions the more we expose ourselves to adversities and to the blows of Fortune.<br>
(p 1143)<br>
<br>
When my convictions make me devoted to one faction, it is not with so violent a bond that my understanding becomes infected by it.<br>
During the present confusion in this State of ours my own interest has not made me fail to recognize laudable qualities in our adversaries nor reprehensible ones among those whom I follow.<br>
People worship everything on their own side: for most of what I see on mine I do not even make excuses.<br>
A good book does not lose its beauty because it argues against my cause.<br>
Apart from the kernel of the controversy, I have remained balanced and utterly indifferent …<br>
(p 1144)<br>
<br>
I want us to win, but I am not driven mad if we do not.<br>
I am firmly attached to the sanest of the parties, but I do not desire to be particularly known as an enemy of the others beyond what is generally reasonable.<br>
(p 1145)<br>
<br>
[When] the outlook or the outcome of an event is unfavourable, they want each man to be blind and insensible towards his own party, and that our judgement and conviction should serve not the truth but to project our desires. …<br>
I have seen in my time amazing examples of the indiscriminate and prodigious facility which peoples have for letting their beliefs be led and their hopes be manipulated towards what has pleased and served their leaders, despite dozens of mistakes piled one upon another and despite illusions and deceptions. …<br>
<br>
You do not belong if you can change your mind, if you do not bob along with all the rest.<br>
Yet we certainly do wrong to just parties when we would support them by trickery.<br>
I have always opposed that.<br>
It only works for sick minds: for sane ones there are surer, [and more honourable, ways] of sustaining courage and explaining setbacks.<br>
(p 1146)<br>
<br>
<br>
<h3 id="III:12">On physiognomy</h3>
<br>
If we have known how to live steadfastly and calmly we shall know how to die the same way.<br>
(p 1190)<br>
<br>
While it is credible that we should have a natural fear of pain, it is not credible that we should fear dying as such, which is a part of the essence of our being, no less than living is. …<br>
The failing of one life is the gate to a thousand other lives.<br>
(p 1195)<br>
<br>
<br>
<h3 id="III:13">On experience</h3>
<br>
How many innocent parties have been discovered to have been punished … ?<br>
And how many have never been discovered?<br>
Here is something which has happened in my time: some men had been condemned to death for murder; the sentence, if not pronounced, was at least settled and determined.<br>
At this juncture the judges were advised by the officials of a nearby lower court that they were holding some prisoners who had made a clean confession to that murder and thrown an undeniable light on to the facts.<br>
The Court deliberated whether it ought to intervene to postpone the execution of the sentence already given against the first group.<br>
The judges considered the novelty of the situation; the precedent it would constitute for granting stays of execution, and the fact that once the sentence had been duly passed according to law they had no powers to change their minds.<br>
In short those poor devils were sacrificed to judicial procedures. …<br>
How many sentences have I seen more criminal than the crime … ?<br>
(p 1214-5)</li></ul></p>peaceandlonglifehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09059683906637157584noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1170524542125253803.post-76209957404332492952017-03-01T13:00:00.007-08:002022-08-30T08:42:52.241-07:00Prose<i id="top"><a href="https://40-eridani-a.blogspot.com/p/peace-and-long-life_9.html#contents">Peace and Long Life</a></i><br>
<br>
<br>
<blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-size: medium">When one door closes, another opens.</span><br>
<br>
<i>— <a href="https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Scots_proverbs#W">Scottish Proverb</a></i><br>
<br>
<br>
<span style="font-size: medium">Now all that was owed is repaid,<br>
And all that was owned, returned.<br>
<br>
Now all that was lost is found,<br>
And all that was bound, free.</span><br>
<br>
<i>— <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_K._Le_Guin">Ursula Le Guin</a> (1929 – 2018), Mountain Ways, </i>Asimov's Science Fiction<i>, 1996.</i><br>
<br>
<br>
<span style="font-size: medium">Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,<br>
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,<br>
Nine for Mortal Men, doomed to die,<br>
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne<br>
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.<br>
<br>
One Ring to rule them all,<br>
One Ring to find them,<br>
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them<br>
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.</span><br>
<br>
<i>— <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._R._R._Tolkien">John Tolkien</a> (1892 – 1970), </i>The Lord of the Rings<i>, 1968.</i></blockquote>
<br>
<i id="reason"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquis_de_Condorcet">Nicolas de Caritat</a> (1743 – 94) [Marquis de Condorcet]:</i><br>
The time will come, when the sun will shine only on free men, who know no other master, but their reason.<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Pinker">Steven Pinker</a> (1954):</i><br>
The indispensability of reason does not imply that individual people are always rational or are unswayed by passion and illusion.<br>
It only means that people are <i>capable</i> of reason, and that a community of people who choose to perfect this faculty … can collectively reason their way to sounder conclusions in the long run.<br>
(p 181)<br>
<br>
People are better off abjuring violence, if everyone else agrees to do so, and vesting authority in a disinterested third party.<br>
But since that third party will consist of human beings, not angels, their power must be checked by the power of other people, to force them to govern with the consent of the governed.<br>
They may not use violence against their citizens beyond the minimum necessary to prevent greater violence.<br>
And they should foster arrangements that allow people to flourish from cooperation and voluntary exchange.<br>
(<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nature">The Better Angels of Our Nature</a></i>, Penguin, 2011, p 183)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Bernard_Shaw">George Shaw</a> (1856 – 1950):</i><br>
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.<br>
Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Dawkins">Richard Dawkins</a> (1941):</i><br>
Science is the poetry of reality.<br>
(Jacob Bronowski, <i>The Ascent of Man</i>, Preface, Random House, 1973)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nils_John_Nilsson">Nils Nilsson</a> (1933):</i><br>
Missing out on useful beliefs is the price we pay for extreme skepticism. …<br>
Accepting bad beliefs is the price we pay for extreme credulity.<br>
(<i>Understanding Beliefs</i>, MIT Press, 2014, p 20)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Maynard_Keynes">John Keynes</a> (1883 – 1946):</i><br>
In the long run we are all dead.<br>
(<i>A Tract on Monetary Reform</i>, Ch 3, 1923, p 80)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Clarke_%28satirist%29">John Clarke</a> (1948 – 2017):</i><br>
Reason is a tool.<br>
Try to remember where you left it.<br>
(<a href="http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/earshot/john-clarkes-parody-poetry/8436588">John Clarke's Poetry</a>, <i>Earshot</i>, ABC Radio National, 15 April 2017)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Branch_Cabell">James Cabell</a> (1879 – 1958):</i><br>
The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.<br>
(<i><a href="https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/James_Branch_Cabell#The_Silver_Stallion_.281926.29">The Silver Stallion</a></i>, 1926)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Wittgenstein">Ludwig Wittgenstein</a> (1889 – 1951):</i><br>
Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.<br>
(<i>Philosophical Investigations</i>, 3rd Ed, 1967, Blackwell, p 4)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_C._Clarke">Arthur Clarke</a> (1917 – 2008):</i><br>
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.<br>
(<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws">Profiles of the Future</a></i>, 1962)<br>
<br>
I would be greatly distressed if [<i>Childhood's End</i>] contributed still further to the seduction of the gullible, now cynically exploited by all the media … with mind-rotting bilge about UFOs, psychic powers, astrology, pyramid energies, "channelling" — you name it, someone is peddling it …<br>
(pp vi-vii)<br>
<br>
Far off were the mountains,
<ul><li>where power and beauty dwelt,</li>
<li>where the thumder sported above the glaciers and the air was clear and keen.</li></ul>
There the sun walked, transfiguring the peaks with glory, when all the land below was wrapped in darness.<br>
(<i>Childhood's End</i>, 1953 / 90, p 211)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Asimov">Isaac Asimov</a> (1920 – 92):</i><br>
[Science] gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democritus">Democritus</a> (c460 – c370 BCE):</i><br>
The wise man belongs to all countries, for the home of a great soul is the whole world.<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niccol%C3%B2_Machiavelli">Niccolò Machiavelli</a> (1469 – 1527):</i><br>
It is much safer to be feared than loved.<br>
Love is sustained by a bond of gratitude which, because men are excessively self-interested, is broken whenever they see a chance to benefit themselves.<br>
But fear is sustained by a dread of punishment that is always effective.<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Waldo_Emerson">Ralph Emerson</a> (1803 – 82):</i><br>
The order of things is as good as the character of the population permits.<br>
(The Conservative, 1841)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jules_Verne">Jules Verne</a> (1828 – 1905):</i><br>
The sea is everything.<br>
It covers seven tenths of the globe …<br>
The sea is only a receptacle for all the prodigious, supernatural things that exist inside it.<br>
It is only movement and love; it is the living infinite.<br>
(<i>Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea</i>, 1870)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._L._Mencken">Henry Mencken</a> (1880 – 1956):</i><br>
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Herman_Melville">Herman Melville</a> (1819 – 1891):</i><br>
He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it …<br>
(<i>Moby Dick</i>, <a href="https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Moby-Dick#Moby-Dick_.2841.29">Chapter 41</a>, 1851)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imam_Ali">Imam Ali</a> (599 – 661):</i><br>
Knowledge is power …<br>
(Saying 146, <i>Nahj Al-Balagha</i>)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre-Simon_Laplace">Pierre-Simon Laplace</a> (1749 – 1827):</i><br>
An intelligence that, at a given instant, could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective situation of the beings that make it up, if moreover it were vast enough to submit these data to analysis, would encompass in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atoms.<br>
For such an intelligence nothing would be uncertain, and the future, like the past, would be open to its eyes.
(<i>Philosophical Essay on Probabilities</i>)<br>
<br>
<i id="Plato">Plato (c428 – c347 BCE):</i><br>
[How] can he who has magnificence of mind and is the spectator of all time and all existence, think much of human life?<br>
(<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_%28Plato%29">Republic</a></i>, c380 BCE)<br>
<br>
It has been proved to us by experience that if we would have true knowledge of anything we must be quit of the body …<br>
[For] if while in company with the body the soul cannot have pure knowledge, knowledge must be attained after death, if at all.<br>
For the impure are not permitted to approach the pure. …<br>
And what is purification but the separation of the soul from the body? …<br>
And this separation and release of the soul from the body is termed death.<br>
(<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaedo">Phaedo</a></i>)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pliny_the_Elder">Pliny</a> (23-79):</i><br>
There is nothing certain except that nothing is certain …<br>
(<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_History_(Pliny)">Naturalis Historia</a></i>, II, p vii)<br>
<i><br>
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristides">Aristides</a> (530 BCE – 468 BCE) [<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Plataea">Plataea</a>, 479 BCE]:</i><br>
This is not the moment to argue … about matters of ancestry and personal courage. …<br>
We did not come here to quarrel with our allies, but to fight our enemies; not to boast about our ancestors, but to show our courage in defence of Greece.<br>
This battle will prove clearly enough how much any city or general or private soldier is worth to Greece.<br>
(<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutarch">Plutarch</a>, <i>The Rise and Fall of Athens</i>, Ian Scott-Kilvert, Translator, Penguin, 1960, p 114)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Wolpert">Lewis Wolpert</a> (1929):</i><br>
Galileo’s argument is as follows.<br>
Imagine a perfectly flat plane and a perfectly round ball.<br>
If the plane is slightly inclined the ball will roll down it and go on and on and on.<br>
But a ball going up a slope with a slight incline will have its velocity retarded.<br>
From this it follows that motion along a horizontal plane is perpetual,
<blockquote>for if the velocity be uniform it cannot be diminished or slackened, much less destroyed.</blockquote>
So, on a flat slope, with no resistance, an initial impetus will keep the ball moving forever, even though there is no force.<br>
Thus the natural state of a physical object is motion along a straight line at constant speed, and this has come to be known as Newton’s first law of motion.<br>
(<i>The Unnatural Unnatural Nature of Science</i>, Harvard University Press, 1989)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Dawkins">Richard Dawkins</a> (1941):</i><br>
A given gene … either passes to a given offspring … or it does not.<br>
There are no half measures, and genes never blend with one another.<br>
Heredity is all-or-none.<br>
[It’s] digital. …<br>
A gene is a sequence of code letters, drawn from an alphabet of precisely four letters, and the genetic code is universal throughout all known living things.<br>
Life is the execution of programs written using a small digital alphabet in a single, universal machine language.<br>
This realization was the hammer blow that knocked the last nail into the coffin of vitalism and, by extension, of dualism.<br>
(<i>The Oxford Book of Science Writing</i>, Oxford University Press, 2008, p 30)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Bentham">Jeremy Bentham</a> (1748 – 1832):</i><br>
Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense — nonsense upon stilts.<br>
(<a href="http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/bentham-the-works-of-jeremy-bentham-vol-2#lf0872-02_head_411">A Critical Examination of the Declaration of Rights</a>, <i>Anarchical Fallacies</i>, 1843)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Greene">Brian Greene (1963)</a>:</i><br>
Much as a black hole’s mass increases when it absorbs anything that carries positive energy, so its mass decreases when it absorbs anything that carries negative energy.<br>
(p 249)<br>
<br>
It is common to speak of the center of a black hole as if it were a position in space.<br>
But it’s not.<br>
It is a moment in time.<br>
When crossing the event horizon of a black hole, time and space (the radial direction) interchange roles.<br>
If you fall into a black hole, for example, your radial motion represents progress through time.<br>
You are thus pulled toward the black hole’s center in the same way you are pulled to the next moment in time.<br>
The center of the black hole is, in this sense, akin to a last moment in time.<br>
(Note 15, p 334)<br>
<br>
Upon crossing the horizon, time and space interchange roles — inside the black hole, the radial direction becomes the time direction.<br>
This implies that within the black hole, the notion of positive energy coincides with motion in the radial direction toward the black hole’s singularity.<br>
When the negative energy member of a [virtual] particle pair crosses the horizon, it does indeed fall toward the black hole’s center.<br>
Thus the negative energy it had from the perspective of someone watching from afar becomes positive energy from the perspective of someone situated within the black hole itself.<br>
This makes the interior of the black hole a place where such particles can exist.<br>
(Note 4, <i>The Hidden Reality</i>, Penguin, 2011, p 348)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Dirda">Michael Dirda</a> (1948):</i><br>
[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Jacques_Rousseau">Jean-Jacques Rousseau</a> (1712 – 78) believed it was only when] people lived unmediated existences in accord with Nature and themselves — when they dwelt like animals in a perpetual present [— that] they found life simple, fulfilling, and appropriate.<br>
On some evil day, however, one man began to compare himself with another.<br>
This led to reflection, self-awareness, and eventually competitiveness, then to specialization and a division of labor to maximize individual strengths and weaknesses, and before long the floodgates
were opened to envy, accumulation, possessiveness, and excess.<br>
The clever soon exploited their fellows, stockpiled provisions, and gained superfluous wealth — and these inevitably needed to be protected: by guards, by armies, by laws and statutes.<br>
And so paradise was lost. …<br>
<br>
[So, in order] to ameliorate inequities, we [should] establish kindlier, small city-states (he thought of Geneva and Corsica) where governmental regulation could be minimized and civic life made human-scaled.<br>
Most of all, we can liberate ourselves.<br>
(<i>Classics for Pleasure</i>, Harcourt, 2007, pp 160-1)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._B._S._Haldane">John Haldane</a> (1892 – 1964):</i><br>
The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we <i>can</i> suppose.<br>
(<i>Possible Worlds</i>, 1927)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Bernoulli">Jacob Bernoulli</a> (1655 – 1705):</i><br>
We define the art of conjecture, or stochastic art, as the art of evaluating as exactly as possible the probabilities of things, so that in our judgments and actions we can always base ourselves on what has been found to be
<ul><li>the best,</li>
<li>the most appropriate,</li>
<li>the most certain,</li>
<li>the best advised;</li></ul>
this is the only object of
<ul><li>the wisdom of the philosopher, and</li>
<li>the prudence of the statesman.</li></ul>
(<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ars_Conjectandi">Ars Conjectandi</a></i>, 1713)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neal_Stephenson">Neal Stephenson</a> (1959):</i><br>
[After] a while, she said:
<ul>Do you need transportation?<br>
Tools?<br>
Stuff?</ul>
<ul>Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs,</ul>
I said:
<ul>We have a protractor.</ul>
(<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anathem">Anathem</a></i>, Harper Collins, 2008, p 320)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._A._Milne">Alan Milne</a> (1882 – 56):</i>
<ul>'Rabbit's clever,' said Pooh thoughtfully.</ul>
<ul>'Yes,' said Piglet, 'Rabbit's clever.'</ul>
<ul>'And he has Brain.'</ul>
<ul>'Yes,' said Piglet, 'Rabbit has Brain.'</ul>
There was a long silence.
<ul>'I suppose,' said Pooh, 'that that's why he never understands anything.'</ul>
(Benjamin Hoff, <i>The Tao of Pooh</i>, 1982)</blockquote>
<br>
<a name='more'></a>
<br>
<h3 id="Sacks"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Sacks">Oliver Sacks</a> (1933 – 2015)</h3>
<br>
When people die, they cannot be replaced.<br>
They leave holes that cannot be filled.<br>
[For] it is the fate — the genetic and neural fate — of every human being:
<ul><li>to be a unique individual,</li>
<li>to find his own path,</li>
<li>to live his own life, [and]</li>
<li>to die his own death.</li></ul>
<br>
I cannot pretend [that] I am without fear.<br>
But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude.
<ul><li>I have loved, and been loved; …</li>
<li>I have read and traveled, and thought and written.</li>
<li>I have had an intercourse with the world; [that] special intercourse of writers and [their] readers.</li>
<li>Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet.<br>
[And] that, in itself, has been an enormous privilege and adventure.</li></ul>
(<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/19/opinion/oliver-sacks-on-learning-he-has-terminal-cancer.html">My Own Life</a>, <i>New York Times</i>, 19 February 2015)<br>
<br>
<br>
<h3 id="flesh"><a href="https://40-eridani-a.blogspot.com/2017/03/prose.html#Bear">Greg Bear</a> (1951)</h3>
<br>
In your day, many people were so severely handicapped by personality disorders or faulty thinking structures that they often acted against their own best interests.<br>
If they had clearly defined goals, they could not reason or even intuit the clear paths to attain those goals.<br>
Often adversaries had the same goals, even very similar belief systems, yet hated each other bitterly.<br>
Now, no human has the excuse to ignorance or mental malfunction, or even lack of ability.<br>
Incompetence is inexcusable, because it can be remedied.<br>
(<i>Eon</i>, 1985, Gollancz 2002, pp 401-2)<br>
<br>
The biological weapons and processes in [<i>Quantico</i>] are possible, but not in the way I have described them.<br>
I have tried to persuade of the dangers without providing salient details.<br>
The dangers are real, and immediate.<br>
Sober judgment, self-less, nonpartisan planning, and sanity are the only solutions.<br>
For those who go in harm's way, there is ultimately no politics.<br>
Only pain, loss, death — and hope.<br>
(<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantico_(novel)">Quantico</a></i>, Harper, 2015, p 439)<br>
<br>
Airplanes far to the south scraped golden contrails on the deep blue sky. …<br>
Buildings breathed, streets grumbled.<br>
Traffic noise buzzed from east and west, filtered and muted between the long industrial warehouses.<br>
Somewhere, a car alarm went off, and was silenced with a disappointed chirp.<br>
Down the block, a single Thai restaurant spilled a warm glow from its windows and open door. …<br>
Shouldering her pack, she crossed [the street] and paused in a puddle of sour orange glow cast by a streetlight. …<br>
<br>
The air was cool, but the day's low deck of clouds had opened a fissure …<br>
[He] did not like the sun.
The brightness shone into his small black eyes and illuminated spaces in his head like gaps in a shelf of old books.<br>
<br>
(<i>City at the End of Time</i>, Gollanz, 2008, pp 7 & 16)<br>
<br>
<br>
<h4 id="badnews">Harbinger</h4>
<br>
The [Guest] lifted its head and said very clearly,
<ul>I am sorry, but there is bad news.</ul>
(p 14)
<ul>If you have the ability to leave, you will wish to do so.<br>
A disease has entered your system of planets.<br>
There is little time left for your world. …</ul>
<ul>Our world is doomed? …</ul>
<ul>Unless I sadly misknow your abilities, yes.</ul>
(p 42)
<ul>Do you believe in God?</ul>
Without a moments hesitation, the Guest replied,
<ul>We believe in punishment.</ul>
(p 62)<br>
<br>
The woman turned and [he saw that] she was strikingly beautiful, tall and Nordic, a long face with [a] perfectly cut nose, clear blue eyes and lips both sensual and faintly disapproving.<br>
He looked away quickly, all to intensely aware [that] she was [out of his league.]<br>
He had long since learned that [women of this calibre] paid little attention to men of his mild appearance and social standing. …<br>
[Then came] the high, painful interior singing he had always know when in the presence of the desirable and inaccessible woman, not lust, but an almost religious longing.<br>
(p 270)<br>
<br>
(<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forge_of_God">The Forge of God</a></i>, 1987, Gollancz, 2010)<br>
<br>
<br>
<h3 id="Robinson"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Stanley_Robinson">Kim Stanley Robinson</a> (1952)</h3>
<br>
Are you conscious?<br>
<br>
I don’t know. …<br>
I cannot pass a Turing test … would you like to play chess?<br>
<br>
Ha!<br>
If only it were chess! …<br>
If it were chess, what move should I make next?<br>
<br>
It’s not chess.<br>
(p 336)<br>
<br>
Our stories go on [for] a while; some genes and words persist; then we go away.<br>
It was a hard thing to remember.<br>
And as [they went] back inside, she once again forgot it.<br>
(p 200)<br>
<br>
[The orbital terrarium] was a classic New Englander, with a few small clapboard villages and some pasturage breaking up a hardwood and onifer mixed forest.<br>
It was October there, and the maples had gone red, so that there were trees violently yellow, orange, red, and green, all mixed and scattered together over the inside of the cylinder, such that when you looked up at overhead, it appeared to be a speechless speech in some kind of round color language, trembling on the edge of meaning. …<br>
One day she took up leaves that had fallen and arranged them across a clearing so that they went from red to orange to yellow to yellow-green to green, in a smooth progression.<br>
This colored line on the land pleased her greatly, as did the wind that blew it away.<br>
(p 540-1)<br>
<br>
(<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2312_%28novel%29">2312</a></i>, Orbit, 2012)<br>
<br>
<br>
A presidential transition [is] a major thing, and there were famous cases of failed transitions [and] the dire consequences that ineptitude in this area could have on the subsequent fates of the presidents involved.<br>
It was important to make a good running start, to craft the kind of "first hundred days" that had energized the incoming administration of <a href="https://scepticwatch.blogspot.com/2016/02/franklin-delano-roosevelt.html#top">Franklin Delano Roosevelt</a> in 1933, setting the model for that most presidents since to try to emulate.<br>
Critical appointments had to be made, bold new programs turned into law.<br>
(p 29)<br>
<br>
[After the assassination attempt, President Chase] started sending to Congress a new volley of legislation …<br>
[He] was already getting a lot of things through: …<br>
<ul><li>Fuel-mileage efficiency standards of 70 and 80 miles a gallon.</li>
<li>A doubling of the gas tax.</li>
<li>A return to progressive tax rates.</li>
<li>An end to all corporate loopholes and offshoring of profits.</li>
<li>Heavy financial support for the World Health Organization's population stabilization efforts.</li>
<li>AIDS and malaria eradication funds.</li>
<li>Gun control legislation to give the NRA nightmares. …</li></ul>
It became clear that his team had taken over the tactic called, ironically enough, flooding, which had been used to such effect by the criminals who had hijacked the presidency at the start of the century.<br>
It was like a flurry in boxing, the hits just kept on coming, at a pace of three or four a week, so that in the scramble the opposition could not react adequately, not to any individual slaps nor to the general deluge.<br>
Right-wing pundits were wondering if [he] had arranged to get shot to gain this advantage:
<blockquote>[Why] had the gunman [only] used a twenty-two?<br>
[Where] was the evidence he had actually been shot anyway?<br>
[Could] they stick a minicam down the hole?<br>
No?<br>
Wasn't that suspicious?</blockquote>
(p 347)<br>
<br>
(<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixty_Days_and_Counting">Sixty Days and Counting</a></i>, Bantam, 2007)<br>
<br>
<br>
<h3 id="gibbon"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Gibbon">Edward Gibbon</a> (1737 – 94)</h3>
<br>
In the reign of Nero to that of Antoninus Pius, the Jews discovered a fierce impatience of the dominion of Rome, which repeatedly broke out in the most furious massacres and insurrections.<br>
Humanity is shocked at the recital of the horrid cruelties which they committed in the cities of Egypt, of Cyprus, and of Cyrene, where they dwelt in treacherous friendship with the unsuspecting natives; and we are tempted to applaud the severe retaliation which was exercised by the arms of the legions against a race of fanatics whose dire and credulous superstition seemed to render them the implacable enemies not only of the Roman government, but of human kind.<br>
The enthusiasm of the Jews was supported by the opinion that it was unlawful for them to pay taxes to an idolatrous master, and by the flattering promise which they derived from their ancient oracles, that a conquering Messiah would soon arise, destined to break their fetters, and to invest the favorites of heaven with the empire of the earth.<br>
(p 111)<br>
<br>
Notwithstanding these repeated provocations, the resentment of the Roman princes expired after the victory, nor were their apprehensions continued beyond the period of war and danger.<br>
By the general indulgence of Polytheism, and by the mild temper of Antonius Pius, the Jews were restored to their ancient privileges …<br>
Such gentle treatment insensibly assuaged the stern temper of the Jews.<br>
Awakened from their dream of prophecy and conquest, they assumed the behavior of peaceable and industrious subjects.<br>
Their irreconcilable hatred of mankind, instead of flaming out in acts of blood and violence, evaporated in less dangerous gratifications.<br>
They embraced every opportunity of overreaching the idolaters in trade …<br>
<br>
The difference between [the disciples of Christ and followers of Moses] is simple and obvious, but, according to the sentiments of antiquity, it was of the highest importance.
<ul><li>The Jews were a <i>nation</i>,</li>
<li>the Christians were a <i>sect</i> …</li></ul>
By their lofty claim of superior sanctity the Jews might provoke the Polytheists to consider them as an odious and pure race.<br>
By disdaining the intercourse of other nations they might deserve their contempt.<br>
The laws of Moses might be for the most part frivolous or absurd; yet, since they had been received during many ages by a large society, his followers were justified by the example of mankind, and it was universally acknowledged that they had a right to practice what it would have been criminal in them to neglect.<br>
<br>
But this principle, which protected the Jewish synagogue, afforded not any favor or security to the primitive church.<br>
By embracing the faith of the Gospel the Christians incurred the supposed guilt of an unnatural; unpardonable offence.<br>
They dissolved the sacred ties of custom and education, violated the religious institutions of their country, and presumptuously despised whatever their fathers had believed as true or had reverenced as sacred. …<br>
It was in vain that the oppressed believer asserted the inalienable rights of conscience and private judgment.<br>
Though his situation might excite the pity, his arguments could never reach understanding, either of the philosophic or of the believing part of the Pagan world. …<br>
Malice and prejudice concurred in representing the Christians as a society of atheists, who, by the most daring attack on the religious constitution of the empire, had merited the severe <a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/animadversion">animadversion</a> of the civil magistrate.<br>
<br>
(<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_the_Decline_and_Fall_of_the_Roman_Empire">Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire</a></i>, 1776-89, Rosemary Williams, Editor, Abridged and Illustrated, PRC, 1979, p 112)<br>
<br>
<br>
<h3><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dickens">Charles Dickens</a> (1812 – 70)</h3>
<br>
She raised her eyes to the bright stars, looking down so mildly from the wide worlds of air, and, gazing on them, found new stars burst upon her view, and more beyond, and more beyond again, until the whole great expanse sparkled with shining spheres, rising higher and higher in immeasurable space, eternal in their numbers as in their changeless and incorruptible existence.<br>
(Ch 42)<br>
<br>
On every side, and far as the eye could see into the heavy distance, tall chimneys, crowding on each other, and presenting that endless repetition of the same dull, ugly, form, which is the horror of oppressive dreams, poured out their plague of smoke, obscured the light, and made foul the melancholy air.<br>
On mounds of ashes by the wayside, sheltered only by a few rough boards, or rotten penthouse roofs, strange engines spun and writhed like tortured creatures; clanking their iron chains, shrieking in their rapid whirl from time to time as though in torment unendurable, and making the ground tremble with their agonies. …<br>
Men, women, children, wan in their looks and ragged in attire, tended the engines, fed their tributary fire, begged upon the road, or scowled half-naked from the doorless houses.<br>
<br>
(<i>The Old Curiosity Shop</i>, 1840-1, Ch 45)<br>
<br>
<br>
<h3 id="Hume"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hume">David Hume</a> (1711 – 76)</h3>
<br>
The sweetest and most inoffensive path of life leads through the avenues of knowledge and learning; and anyone who can either remove any obstacles along the path or open up new views ought to that extent to be regarded as a benefactor to mankind. …<br>
<br>
Here indeed lies the justest and most plausible objection against a considerable part of metaphysics, that they are not properly a science; but arise either from the fruitless efforts of human vanity, which would penetrate into subjects utterly inaccessible to the understanding, or from the craft of popular superstitions, which, being unable to defend themselves on fair ground, raise these entangling brambles to cover and protect their weakness.<br>
Chased from the open country, these robbers fly into the forest, and lie in wait to break in upon every unguarded avenue of the mind, and overwhelm it with religious fears and prejudices. …<br>
<br>
Accurate and just reasoning is the only catholic remedy, fitted for all persons and all disposition; and is alone able to subvert that abstruse philosophy and metaphysical jargon, which, being mixed up with popular superstition, renders it in a manner impenetrable to careless reasoners, and gives it the air of science and wisdom.<br>
<br>
Philosophers, that give themselves airs of superior wisdom and sufficiency, have a hard task, when they encounter persons of inquisitive dispositions, who push them from every corner, to which they retreat, and who are sure at last to bring them to some dangerous dilemma.<br>
The best expedient to prevent this confusion, is to be modest in our pretensions; and even to discover the difficulty ourselves before it is objected to us.<br>
By this means, we may make a kind of merit of our very ignorance. …<br>
<br>
A wise man … proportions his belief to the evidence. …<br>
A hundred instances or experiments on one side and fifty on another, afford a doubtful expectation of any event; though a hundred uniform experiments, with only one that is contradictory, reasonably beget a pretty strong degree of assurance.<br>
In all cases we must balance the opposite experiments … and deduct the smaller number from the greater, in order to know the exact force of the superior evidence. …<br>
<br>
[In the case of human testimony we] entertain a suspicion concerning any matter of fact,
<ul><li>when the witnesses contradict each other;</li>
<li>when they are but few, or of a doubtful character;</li>
<li>when they have an interest in what they affirm; [and / or]</li>
<li>when they deliver the testimony with hesitation, or on the contrary, with too violent asseveration.</li></ul>
<br>
(<i>Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding</i>, Eric Steinberg, Editor, 1777)<br>
<br>
<br>
<h3 id="Churchill"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill">Winston Churchill</a> (1874 – 1965)</h3>
<br>
We shall not flag or fail.<br>
We shall go on to the end.<br>
We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air; we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be.<br>
We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.<br>
And even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the Old.<br>
<br>
(Speech in the House of Commons, 4 June 1940)<br>
<br>
<br>
Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation.<br>
Upon it depends our own British life and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire.<br>
The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us now.<br>
Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war.<br>
If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands.<br>
But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.<br>
Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say,
<blockquote>This was their finest hour.</blockquote>
(Speech in the House of Commons, 18 June 1940)<br>
<br>
<br>
<h3 id="Stewart"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Stewart_(mathematician)">Ian Stewart</a> (1945)</h3>
<br>
When clever people pride themselves on their own isolation, we may well wonder whether they are very clever after all.<br>
[The study of mathematics shows] us that whenever the culture of a people loses contact with the common life of mankind and becomes exclusively the plaything of a leisure class, it is becoming a priestcraft.<br>
It is destined to end, as does all priestcraft, in superstition.<br>
To be proud of intellectual isolation from the common life of mankind and to be disdainful of the great social task of education is as stupid as it is wicked.<br>
It is the end of progress in knowledge.<br>
No society, least of all so intricate and mechanized a society as ours, is safe in the hands of a few clever people.<br>
(<i>The Problems of Mathematics</i>, Oxford University Press, 1987)<br>
<br>
In 1710 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Arbuthnot">John Arbuthnot</a> presented a paper to the Royal Society in which he used probability theory as evidence for the existence of God.<br>
He analysed the annual number christenings for male and female children for the period 1629-1710, and found that there are slightly more boys than girls.<br>
Moreover, the figure was pretty much the same in every year.<br>
This fact was already well known, but Arbuthnot proceeded to calculate the probability of the proportion being constant.<br>
His result was very small, 2^−82.<br>
He then pointed out that if the same effect occurs in all countries, and at all times throughout history, then the chances are even smaller, and concluded that divine providence, not chance, must be responsible.<br>
<br>
[In] 1872 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Galton">Francis Galton</a> used probabilities to estimate the efficacy of prayer by noting that prayers were said every day, by huge numbers of people, for the health of the royal family.<br>
He collected data and tabulated:
<blockquote>[The] mean age attained by males of various classes who had survived their 30th year, from 1758 to 1843, [excluding] deaths by accident …</blockquote>
These classes were eminent men, royalty, clergy, lawyers, doctors, aristocrats, gentry, tradesmen, naval officers, literature and science, army officers, and practitioners of the fine arts.<br>
He found that:
<blockquote>The sovereigns are literally the shortest lived of all who have the advantage of affluence.<br>
The prayer has therefore no efficacy, unless the very questionable hypothesis be raised,
<ul><li>that the conditions of royal life may naturally be yet more fatal, and</li>
<li>that their influence is partly, though incompletely, neutralized by the effects of public prayers.</li></ul></blockquote>
(<i>Taming the Infinite</i>, Quercus, 2008, p 252)<br>
<br>
<br>
<h3 id="contents">Contents</h3>
<br>
<a href="#Bear">Bear, Greg</a>
<ul><a href="#Mars">Moving Mars</a></ul>
<ul><a href="#Eon">Eon</a></ul>
<br>
<a href="#Churchill">Churchill, Winston</a><br>
<br>
<a href="#Coupland">Coupland, Douglas</a><br>
<br>
<a href="https://40-eridani-a.blogspot.com/2017/05/michel-de-montaigne.html#top">Eyquem, Michel (Montaigne)</a><br>
<br>
<a href="#gibbon">Gibbon, Edward</a><br>
<br>
<a href="http://40-eridani-a.blogspot.com/2017/02/william-gibson.html#top">Gibson, William</a><br>
<br>
<a href="#Herbert">Herbert, Frank</a>
<ul><a href="#Dune">Litany Against Fear</a></ul>
<br>
<a href="#Hume">Hume, David</a><br>
<br>
<a href="#Bible">King James Bible</a><br>
<br>
<a href="#LeGuin">Le Guin, Ursula</a>
<ul><a href="#Forest">The Word for World is Forest</a></ul>
<br>
<a href="#Plato">Plato</a><br>
<br>
<a href="#Robinson">Robinson, Kim</a><br>
<br>
<a href="#Sterling">Sterling, Bruce</a>
<ul><a href="#Caryatids">Agents of a general salvation</a></ul>
<br>
<a href="#Stewart">Stewart, Ian</a><br>
<br>
<a href="https://40-eridani-a.blogspot.com/2017/02/dylan-thomas.html#top">Thomas, Dylan</a><br>
<br>
<a href="#Vinge">Vinge, Venor</a><br>
<br>
<br>
<h2 id="prose">Prose</h2>
<br>
<h3 id="Bible"><a href="https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/">King James Bible</a> (1611)</h3>
<p><ul><li><i>1 Corinthians:</i><br>
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.<br>
<br>
For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.<br>
<br>
And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these <i>is</i> charity.<br>
(13:11-13)</li>
<br>
<li><i>Deuteronomy:</i><br>
When the Lord thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it …<br>
[And] hath cast out many nations before [thee:]
<ul><li>the Hittites, and</li>
<li>the Girgashites, and</li>
<li>the Amorites, and</li>
<li>the Canaanites, and</li>
<li>the Perizzites, and</li>
<li>the Hivites and</li>
<li>the Jebusites</li></ul>
[—] seven nations greater and mightier than thou …<br>
<br>
And when the Lord thy God shall deliver them before thee …
<ul><li>thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them;</li>
<li>thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them …</li></ul>
Neither shalt thou make marriages with them …
<ul><li>thy daughter shalt thou not give unto his son,</li>
<li>nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son.</li></ul>
For they will turn away thy son from following me, that they may serve other gods …<br>
[So] will the anger of the Lord be kindled against you, and destroy thee suddenly.<br>
<br>
[And should you fail to destroy them utterly] there shall not be male or female barren among you, or among your cattle.<br>
(7:1–4, 14)<br>
<br>
[Of these seven nations, thou] shalt save alive nothing that breatheth …<br>
[That] they teach you not to do after all their abominations.<br>
(20:16-18)<br>
<br>
[But, in] cities which are very far off from thee, and which are not of these nations …<br>
Thou shall smite every male thereof with the edge of the sword …<br>
[But] the women, and the little ones, and the cattle, and all that is in the city, even all the spoil thereof, shalt thou take unto thyself.<br>
(20:13-15)</li>
<br>
<li><i>Ecclesiastes:</i><br>
To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven:<br>
A time to be born, and a time to die …<br>
A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.<br>
(<a href="https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Ecclesiastes-Chapter-3/">3:1,2,8</a>)<br>
<br>
I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race <i>is</i> not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.<br>
(<a href="https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Ecclesiastes-Chapter-9/#11">9:11</a>)</li>
<br>
<li id="freedom"><i>Exodus:</i><br>
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is your neighbour's.<br>
(20:17)<br>
<br>
If you buy a Hebrew slave, he is to serve for only six years.<br>
Set him free in the seventh year, and he will owe you nothing for his freedom.<br>
(21:2)<br>
<br>
When a man sells his daughter as a slave, she will not be freed at the end of six years as the men are.<br>
If she does not please the man who bought her, he may allow her to be bought back again.<br>
But he is not allowed to sell her to foreigners …<br>
And if the slave girl's owner arranges for her to marry his son, he may no longer treat her as a slave girl, but he must treat her as his daughter.<br>
If he himself marries her and then takes another wife, he may not reduce her food or clothing or fail to sleep with her as his wife.<br>
If he fails in any of these three ways, she may leave as a free woman without making any payment.<br>
(21:7-11)<br>
<br>
Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.<br>
(22:18)</li>
<br>
<li><i>Hosea:</i><br>
For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind …<br>
(8:7)</li>
<br>
<li id="Isaiah"><i>Isaiah:</i><br>
[They] shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks …<br>
[Nation] shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.<br>
(2:4)<br>
<br>
All flesh is grass, and the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field:<br>
The grass witherith, the flower fadeth: because the spirit of the Lord bloweth upon it: surely the people is grass.<br>
(40:6)</li>
<br>
<li><i>John:</i><br>
[The] truth shall make you free.<br>
(7:32)<br>
<br>
If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned.<br>
(15:6)</li>
<br>
<li><i>Matthew:</i><br>
Do not resist one who is evil.<br>
But if any one strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.<br>
(5:19)</li>
<br>
<li><i>Romans:</i><br>
Do not repay anyone evil for evil …<br>
Be not overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.<br>
(12:17-21)</li>
<br>
<li><i>1 Samuel:</i><br>
[Saul] took Agag the king of the Amalekites alive and utterly destroyed all the people with the edge of the sword.<br>
But Saul and the people spared Agag, and the best of the sheep, and of the oxen, and of the fatlings, and the lambs, and all that was good, and would not utterly destroy them …<br>
<br>
[And so] the word of the Lord [came] unto Samuel, saying,
<blockquote>It repenteth me that I have set up Saul to be king …<br>
[For] he is turned back from following me, and hath not performed my commandments.</blockquote>
(15:8-11)</li></ul></p>
<br>
<h3 id="Bear"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Bear">Greg Bear</a> (1951)</h3>
<p><ul><li id="Mars"><i><a href="http://www.gregbear.com/books/movingmars.cfm">Moving Mars</a></i>, 1994.<br>
<br>
By the end of the twentieth century, international corporations had as much influence in Earth's affairs as governments.<br>
Earth was undergoing its first dataflow revolution; information had become as important as raw materials and manufacturing and potential.<br>
By mid-twenty-one, nanotechnology factories were inexpensive; nano recyclers could provide raw materials from garbage; data and design reigned supreme.<br>
<br>
The fiction of separate nations and government control was maintained, but increasingly, political decisions were made on the basis of economic benefit, not national pride.<br>
Wars declined, the labor market fluctuated wildly as developing countries joined in — exacerbated by nano and other forms of automation — and through most of the dataflow world a class of therapied, super-fit workers arose, highly skilled and self-confident professionals who demanded an equal say with corporate boards.<br>
<br>
In the early teens of twenty-one, new techniques of effective psychological therapy began to transform Earth culture and politics.<br>
Therapied individuals, as a new mental rather than economic class, behaved differently.<br>
Beyond the reduction in extreme and destructive behaviors, the therapied proved more facile and adaptable, effectively more intelligent, and therefore more skeptical.<br>
They evaluated political, philosophical, and religious claims according to their own standards of evidence. …<br>
The slogan of those who advocated therapy was,
<blockquote>A sane society is a polite society.</blockquote>
<br>
With the economic unification of nations by 2070, pressure on the untherapied to remove the kinks and dysfunctions of nature and nurture became almost unbearable. …<br>
By the end of twenty-one, the underclass of untherapied made up about half the human race, yet created less than a tenth of the world economic product.<br>
<br>
Nations, cultures, political groups, had to accommodate the therapied to survive.<br>
The changes were drastic, even cruel for some, but far less cruel than previous tides in history.<br>
[The] result was not the death of political or religious organization, as some had anticipated — it was rebirth of sorts.<br>
New, higher standards, philosophies, and religions developed.<br>
<br>
[By] the last decades of twenty-one, international corporations, owned and directed by therapied labor and loosely allied managers, controlled the world economy beneath a thin veneer of national democratic governments. …<br>
<br>
The worker-owned corporations recognized common economic spheres.<br>
Trade and taxation were regulated across borders, currencies standardized, credit nets extended world-wide.<br>
Economics became politics. …<br>
<br>
By the beginning of the twenty-second century, many Earth governments forbade the untherapied to work in sensitive jobs, unless they qualified as <i>high naturals</i> — people who did not require therapy to meet new standards.<br>
(p 109-111)<br>
<br>
Mathematics is made of systems of rules.<br>
The universe seems to operate by a set of rules — not so precisely, but then, measurements aren't ever precise in nature. …<br>
<br>
The rules of math give it the quality of a computational machine.<br>
We can design computers using mathematical concepts and rules, because math is a computational system.<br>
The computer's operation is not so different from math itself — it's math operating in light and matter.<br>
And math is useful in describing and predicting nature because nature itself uses a set of rules.<br>
Nature behaves as if it is a computational system.<br>
<br>
When we do math in our heads, we store results — and the rules themselves — in our heads …<br>
Our brains become the computer.<br>
<br>
The universe stores the results of its operations as nature.<br>
I do not confuse nature with reality.<br>
At a fundamental level, reality is the set of rules the results of whose interactions are nature.<br>
Part of the problem of reconciling quantum mechanics with larger-scale phenomena comes from mistaking results for rules …<br>
<br>
The results change if the rules change.<br>
Our universe evolved ages ago out of chaos of possible rules …<br>
Sets of rules vanished in the chaos, because they were not consistent — they … simply canceled and negated in a time-free eternity.<br>
But sets of rules did come into existence which were not immediately contradictory, which could work as free-standing, computational matrices.<br>
<br>
The universe we see uses an evolved, self-consistent set of rules [with which] the rules of mathematics can be made to more or less agree.<br>
<br>
Those which strongly contradicted — whose rules could not produce long-lived results — were simply not 'recorded'.<br>
They vanished.<br>
Those whose results could interact and not contradict [persist.]<br>
[The power of mathematics] to describe and predict is not puzzle if the observed universe is the result of a computational matrix.<br>
No mystery — a fundamental clue.<br>
(pp 287-288)<br>
<br>
This unit is a standard size, but unlike a purely fact-based enhancement, it contains a great many problem-solving algorithms.<br>
Concepts and equations for direct memory retrieval, and neural net aids for high-level thinking.<br>
You won't become a scientific genius but you'll understand what the geniuses are talking about and you'll have a wonderful toolbox for exploring a wide variety of subjects concentrating on physical theory.<br>
(p 296)<br>
<br>
<a href="http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/scienceshow/stimulating-the-brain-enhances-mathematical-ability/3810370">Would you like to know more?</a></li>
<br>
<li id="Eon"><i>Eon</i>, 1985, Gollanz, 2002.
<blockquote>We have some transmissions from [<i>USS House</i> in] the Persian Gulf …<br>
We can unscramble them. …</blockquote>
A man's voice, sounding almost mechanical after the processing of the signal, said,
<blockquote>One K that is Kill Seven, One K that is Kill Seven,<br>
have smoked the circle; repeat, have smoked the circle.<br>
<br>
Vampires, fourteen count, range fifty klicks …<br>
[Source:] Turgenev small platform.<br>
Repeat, fourteen vampires.<br>
<br>
Six down.<br>
Sweep two commencing.<br>
Smoking circle,<br>
up with directed fry …<br>
<br>
[Nine] down,<br>
up with knives …<br>
<br>
[Eleven] down.<br>
<br>
Three vampires, twenty-klicks.<br>
Priests out.<br>
Priests and vampires engage.<br>
Advising salamander crews.<br>
Starfish launched.<br>
Sea Dragons alerted.<br>
<br>
[Twelve down.]<br>
<br>
Two Vampires, six klicks.<br>
Sweep three commencing.<br>
Foaming now.<br>
Short eyes out,<br>
blades out,<br>
Guardians out,<br>
knives inboard. …</blockquote>
Another pause, then, softly,
<blockquote>Good-bye Shirley …</blockquote>
(pp 194-5)</li>
<br>
<li><i><a href="http://www.gregbear.com/books/hardfought.cfm">Hardfought</a></i>, 1983.</li></ul></p>
<br>
<h3 id="Coupland"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Coupland">Douglas Coupland</a> (1961)</h3>
<p><ul><li><a href="http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/episodes/massey-lectures/2010/11/08/massey-lectures-2010-player-one-what-is-to-become-of-us/">Player One: What is to Become of Us</a>, <i>Massey Lectures</i>, Canadian Broadcasting Commission, 8 November 2010.</li></ul></p>
<br>
<h3 id="Herbert"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Herbert">Frank Herbert</a> (1920 – 86)</h3>
<p><ul><li id="Dune"><i>Dune</i>, 1965.<br>
<br>
<i>Litany Against Fear</i><br>
<br>
I must not fear.<br>
Fear is the mind-killer.<br>
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.<br>
I will face my fear.<br>
<br>
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.<br>
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.<br>
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.<br>
Only I will remain.</li></ul></p>
<br>
<h3 id="LeGuin"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_K._Le_Guin">Ursula Le Guin</a> (1929)</h3>
<br>
Hugo (5) and Nebula (6) Award winner.
<p><ul><li id="Forest"><i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Word_for_World_Is_Forest">The Word for World is Forest</a></i>, Putnam, 1972.<br>
<br>
In the forest,<br>
through the forest he comes,<br>
where leaves fall,<br>
where trees fall,<br>
a god that kills and is not himself reborn.<br>
(Tor, 2010, p 46)<br>
<br>
I have had my whole life.<br>
Day like leaves in the forest.<br>
I'm an old hollow tree,<br>
only the roots live.<br>
(p 59)<br>
<br>
You were walking on the a path,<br>
and behind you the young trees grew up,<br>
oak and birch,<br>
willow and holly,<br>
fir and pine,<br>
alder,<br>
elm,<br>
white-flowering ash,<br>
all the roof and walls of the world,<br>
forever renewed.<br>
(p 60)<br>
<br>
To the Hainish … civilization came naturally.<br>
They had been at it so long.<br>
They lived the social-intellectual life with the grace of a cat hunting in a garden,<br>
the certainty of a swallow following summer over the sea.<br>
They were experts.<br>
They never had to pose, to fake.<br>
They were what they were.<br>
(p 81)</li>
<br>
<li>Old Music and the Slave Woman in <i>Far Horizons</i>, Robert Silverberg, Editor, Avon Eros, 1999.<br>
<br>
The sky is the roof that wall holds up.<br>
At night the stars shine through the glass air roof.<br>
You can sail to them, too, to worlds beyond the world. …<br>
<br>
The room looked out [over] terraced slopes and flowerbeds, walks, lawns, and a series of ornamental lakes and pools that descended gradually to the river: a vast pattern of curves and planes, plants and paths, earth and still water, embraced by the broad living curve of the river.<br>
All the plots and walks and terraces formed a soft geometry centered very subtly on an enormous tree down at the riverside. …<br>
It stood above and well back from the bank, but its branches reached far over the water, and a village could have been built in its shade.<br>
The grass of the terraces had dried to soft gold.<br>
The river the lakes and pools were all the misty blue of the summer sky.<br>
The flowerbeds and shrubberies were untended, overgrown, but not yet gone wild.<br>
The gardens … were utterly beautiful in their desolation.<br>
Desolate, forlorn, forsaken … yet they were also rational and noble, full of peace.<br>
They had been built by the labor slaves.</li></ul></p>
<br>
<h3 id="Stirling"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Sterling">Bruce Sterling</a> (1954)</h3>
<p><ul><li id="Caryatids"><i>Caryatids</i>, 2009.<br>
<br>
<i>2065: Brilliancy, Speed, Lightness, and Glory</i>
<blockquote>We are the young pioneers<br>
Children of the real world<br>
We grow like trees to the sky<br>
We stand and support tomorrow<br>
For our strength belongs to the the future<br>
And the future is our strength</blockquote>
(p 242)<br>
<br>
Millions of sensors wrapped [the island of] Mljet in a tight electronic skin, like a cold wet sheet to swathe a fever victim.<br>
Embedding sensors.<br>
Mobile sensors.<br>
Dust-sized sensors flying like dandelion seeds.<br>
<br>
The sensorweb was a single instrument, small pieces loosely joined into one huge environmental telescope [measuring] and archived changes in the island's status …
<ul><li>Temperature, humidity, sunlight …</li>
<li>Flights of pollen,</li>
<li>flights of insects,</li>
<li>the migrations of birds and fish. …</li></ul>
{"Ubiquitous, pervasive, and ambient" …}<br>
<br>
Someday this wrecked and stricken place would bloom …<br>
Someday a happy young girl would stand on the soil of this island and know no dread of anything.<br>
(p 10)<br>
<br>
Vera put her gloved hands to her helmet, clicked it loose, and logged out of the sensorweb. …<br>
Her eyes ached, her throat was raw from screaming. …<br>
Naked, she was a native sliver of this island, one silent patch of flesh and blood.<br>
Just a creature, just a breath, just a heartbeat. …<br>
(p 11)<br>
<br>
Somehow, from the tangled glassy depths of global webdom, some Australians [had emerged,] busily losing their own fierce battle to save their island continent.<br>
These distant Australians, so painfully familiar with refugee camps, knew a lot about scanners, neural tech, and heavy machinery.<br>
(p 78)<br>
<br>
The climate crisis had dealt harshly with [Acquis geoengineer Herbert Fotheringay's] home, his native island-continent.<br>
Australia had been a ribbon of green around a desert.<br>
[Fire and drought] had turned [the world's most vulnerable continent for climate change] into a ribbon of black.<br>
<br>
The Acquis was partial to recruiting … ambitious people who had survived the collapse of nation-states.<br>
[It] had emerged from the failures of nations [—] a networked global civil society.<br>
<br>
Attention camps were the cheapest and most effective way that the twenty-first century had yet invented to turn destitute people into agents of a general salvation. …<br>
[Each camp was] a melange of potent forces best described as "futurity."<br>
They were futuring here, and the future was a process, not a destination.<br>
(p 12-3)<br>
<br>
The attention camp … preserved and displayed the many trails that human beings had cut through its fields of data.<br>
The camp was a search engine, a live-in tutoring machine.<br>
It was entirely and utterly personal, full of democratically trampled roads to human redemption.<br>
(p 48)<br>
<br>
Acquis people struggled for justice.<br>
<a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dispensation">Dispensation</a> people always talked about business.<br>
There were other differences between the two world governments, but that was … was the core of it.<br>
Everything the Acquis framed as common decency, the Dispensation framed as a profit opportunity.<br>
The Dispensation considered the world to be a business: a planetary "sustainable business."<br>
(p 23)<br>
<br>
The Dispensation was a military-entertainment complex …<br>
(p 130)<br>
<br>
[Five-year old] Mary Montalban had a beach ball.<br>
A big round beach ball. …<br>
{That was the child's gift to this stricken island, carried here from her golden California …}<br>
<br>
This small American girl was some brand-new entity in the world.<br>
She was so pretty that she was uncanny, as if there were scary reservoirs of undiscovered dainty charm on the far side of humanity.<br>
(p 38)<br>
<br>
This fancy little girl, with her childish walking shoes, her pretty hat, and her beach ball, sincerely was a tourist.<br>
She was trying to play with her dad and have some fun at the seashore.<br>
That was Mary's entire, wholehearted intention.<br>
Mary Montalban was the first real tourist that Mljet had seen in ten long years.<br>
(p 39)<br>
<br>
The Montgomery-Montalbans were California aristocrats.<br>
They were rich and powerful and secretive and very civilized.<br>
Being aristocrats, they were naturally slightly stupid, and in their utter devotion to their Family values, there was something sunny, airheaded, starry-eyed, and cosmically lucid about them.<br>
<br>
That was their charm.<br>
They had a lot of charm.<br>
Charm was their stock-in-trade.<br>
(p 101)<br>
<br>
The Family-Firm was a network:
<ul><li>real estate,</li>
<li>politics,</li>
<li>finance,</li>
<li>even-ware,</li>
<li>retail,</li>
<li>water interests … and, of course,</li>
<li>entertainment.</li></ul>
(p 92)<br>
<br>
[The] Family's stars were just the graphic front ends for the Firm's commercial interests …<br>
(p 107)<br>
<br>
Buffy Montgomery loved to fly.<br>
Buffy had been the heart and soul of the Family's scheme to buy LilyPad.<br>
That was entirely typical of Buffy, because LilyPad, for all its spacey gloss, was a big white elephant.<br>
(p 119)<br>
<br>
[LilyPad was] the Family's attic [—] way, way out of Californian legal jurisdiction.<br>
(p 110)<br>
<br>
[From the orbital sanctum there] were certain angles … in the host of whizzing sunsets, when the sweet old planet had looked thin and meager: like some small, distant town on the skids.<br>
(p 123)<br>
<br>
People's interior organs [are] subaquatic organisms, basically.<br>
They grew in bloody seawater.<br>
(p 178)<br>
<br>
A billion people died in Asia from the climate crisis.<br>
A <i>billion</i>. …<br>
Black skies and starving mobs and empty rivers …<br>
(p 169)<br>
<br>
Sonja had come to treasure poetry, during the long marches between flaming cities.<br>
On the deadly, broken roads of a China in chaos, in the teeming refugee camps, she had come to understand that a memorized poem was true wealth — it was a precious work of art, a possession that could not be burned or stolen.<br>
(p 180)<br>
<br>
[The sky was now full of] sky-tinting, Earth-cooling, stratospheric, radioactive dust from dozens of Chinese hydrogen bombs, digging massive reservoirs for fresh ice in the Himalayas. …<br>
<br>
Foreign soldiers had flown into China from every corner of the planet, always hoping to reassert order there.<br>
China could not be allowed to fail, because China was the workshop of the entire world, the world's forge, the world's irreplaceable factory.<br>
<br>
The Chinese people had died in a cataclysm beyond numeration …<br>
(p 188)<br>
<br>
{The Chinese state — the largest and most powerful state left on Earth —] had prevailed over three millennia of river floods, droughts, pestilences, mass starvations … and barbarian invasions, civil wars, plagues, uprisings, revolutions …<br>
(p 187)</li></ul></p>
<br>
<h3 id="Vinge"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernor_Vinge">Vernor Vinge</a> (1944)</h3>
<p><ul><li><i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Deepness_in_the_Sky">A Deepness in the Sky</a></i>, 1999.</li>
<li><i><a href="http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Global/Singularity/sing.html">The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era</a></i>, VISION 21 Symposium, NASA, March 1993.<br>
<br>
Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence.<br>
Shortly after, the human era will be ended. …<br>
<br>
[Due to automation, the] work that is truly productive is the domain of a steadily smaller and more elite fraction of humanity.</li></ul></p>peaceandlonglifehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09059683906637157584noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1170524542125253803.post-2543407948838109022017-02-28T14:36:00.002-08:002018-11-21T08:57:11.855-08:00Dylan Thomas<i id="top"><a href="https://40-eridani-a.blogspot.com/2017/03/prose.html#contents">Prose</a></i><br>
<br>
<blockquote>[The] morning fishwife gulls … heckling over Donkey Street, observe: …
<blockquote>Mrs Dai Bread Two,<br>
gypsied to kill in a silky scarlet petticoat above my knees,<br>
dirty pretty knees,<br>
see my body through my petticoat brown as a berry,<br>
high-heel shoes with one heel missing,<br>
tortoiseshell comb in my bright black slinky hair,<br>
nothing else at all but a dab of scent,<br>
lolling gaudy at the doorway,<br>
tell your fortune in the tea-leaves,<br>
scowling at the sunshine,<br>
lighting up my pipe; …<br>
<br>
Miss Price,<br>
in my pretty print housecoat,<br>
deft at the clothesline,<br>
natty as a jenny-wren,<br>
then pit-pat back to my egg in its cosy,<br>
my crisp toast-fingers,<br>
my homemade plum and butterpat; …<br>
<br>
Polly Garter,<br>
under the washing line, giving the breast in the garden to my bonny new baby.<br>
Nothing grows in our garden, only washing.<br>
And babies.<br>
And where's their fathers live, my love?<br>
Over the hills and far away.<br>
You're looking up at me now.<br>
I know what you're thinking, you poor little milky creature.<br>
You're thinking, you're no better than you should be, Polly, and that's good enough for me. …</blockquote>
<br>
<i>Polly Garter [Singing]:</i><br>
I loved a man whose name was Tom<br>
He was strong as a bear and two yards long<br>
I loved a man whose name was Dick<br>
He was big as a barrel and three feet thick<br>
And I loved a man whose name was Harry<br>
Six feet tall and sweet as a cherry<br>
But the one I loved best awake or asleep<br>
Was little Willy Wee and he's six feet deep.<br>
<br>
Oh Tom Dick and Harry were three fine men<br>
And I'll never have such loving again<br>
But little Willy Wee who took me on his knee<br>
Little Willy Wee was the man for me.<br>
<br>
<br>
<i>Eli Jenkins:</i><br>
Every morning, when I wake,<br>
Dear Lord, a little prayer I make,<br>
O please to keep Thy lovely eye<br>
On all poor creatures born to die.<br>
<br>
And every evening at sun-down<br>
I ask a blessing on the town,<br>
For whether we last the night or no<br>
I'm sure is always touch-and-go.<br>
<br>
We are not wholly bad or good<br>
Who live our lives under Milk Wood,<br>
And Thou, I know, wilt be the first<br>
To see our best side, not our worst.<br>
<br>
O let us see another day!<br>
Bless us this holy night, I pray,<br>
And to the sun we all will bow<br>
And say, goodbye — but just for now! …<br>
<br>
<br>
<i>Captain Cat:</i><br>
I'll tell you no lies.<br>
The only sea I saw<br>
Was the seesaw sea<br>
With you riding on it.<br>
Lie down, lie easy.<br>
Let me shipwreck in your thighs.<br>
<br>
(<i><a href="http://www.undermilkwood.net/prose_umw1.html">Under Milkwood</a></i>, 1953)</blockquote>
<a name='more'></a>
<br>
<h2 id="contents"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dylan_Thomas">Dylan Thomas</a> (1914 – 1953)</h2>
<br>
<h3>To Begin at the Beginning</h3>
<br>
<i>[Silence …]<br>
[Very softly]</i><br>
It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent, and the hunched courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea.<br>
The houses are:
<ul><li>blind as moles (though moles see fine tonight in the snouting, velvet dingles) or</li>
<li>blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by:
<ul><li>the pump and the town clock,</li>
<li>the shops in mourning,</li>
<li>the Welfare Hall in widows' weeds.</li></ul>
</li></ul>
And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now.<br>
<br>
Hush,
<ul><li>the babies are sleeping,</li>
<li>the farmers, the fishers,</li>
<li>the tradesmen and pensioners,</li>
<li>cobbler, schoolteacher,</li>
<li>postman and publican,</li>
<li>the undertaker and the fancy woman,</li>
<li>drunkard, dressmaker,</li>
<li>preacher [and] policeman,</li>
<li>the webfoot cocklewomen and the tidy wives.</li></ul>
Young girls lie bedded soft or glide in their dreams, with rings and trousseaux, bridesmaided by glow-worms down the aisles of the organplaying wood.<br>
The boys are dreaming wicked or of the bucking ranches of the night and the jolly, rodgered sea.<br>
<br>
<ul><li>And the anthracite statues of the horses sleep in the fields,
<li>and the cows in the byres,</li>
<li>and the dogs in the wetnosed yards;</li>
<li>and the cats nap in the slant corners or lope sly, streaking and needling, on the one cloud of the roofs. …</li></ul>
<br>
Only your eyes are unclosed, to see the black and folded town fast, and slow, asleep.<br>
And you alone can hear the [dew falling, the hushed town breathing, and] the darkest-before-dawn minutely dewgrazed stir of the black, dab-filled sea where:
<ul><li>the <i>Arethusa</i>, the <i>Curlew</i> …</li>
<li>the <i>Skylark, Zanzibar</i>, [and] <i>Rhiannon</i>,</li>
<li>the <i>Rover</i>, the <i>Cormorant</i> and the <i>Star of Wales</i>,</li></ul>
tilt and ride.<br>
<br>
Listen [to the] night moving in the streets, the processional salt slow musical wind in Coronation Street and Cockle Row, it is the grass growing on Llareggub Hill, dew fall, star fall, the sleep of birds in Milk Wood. …<br>
<br>
It is night,
<ul><li>in the chill, squat chapel, hymning, in bonnet and brooch and bombazine black, butterfly choker and bootlace bow, coughing like nannygoats, sucking mintoes, fortywinking hallelujah;</li>
<li>night in the four-ale, quiet as a domino;</li>
<li>in Ocky Milkman's loft, like a mouse with gloves;</li>
<li>in Dai Bread's bakery, flying like black flour.</li></ul>
It is tonight in Donkey Street, trotting silent, with seaweed on its hooves, along the cockled cobbles,
<ul><li>past curtained fernpot,</li>
<li>text and trinket,</li>
<li>harmonium [and] holy dresser,</li>
<li>watercolours done by hand,</li>
<li>china dog and rosy tin teacaddy.</li></ul>
It is night, neddying among the snuggeries of babies.<br>
<br>
Look.<br>
It is night,
<ul><li>dumbly, royally winding through the Coronation cherry trees;</li>
<li>going through the graveyard of Bethesda, with winds gloved and folded and dew doffed;</li>
<li>tumbling by the Sailors Arms. …</li></ul>
<br>
Come closer now.<br>
Only you can hear the houses sleeping in the streets in the slow deep salt and silent black, bandaged night.<br>
Only you can see, in the blinded bedrooms,
<ul><li>the coms and petticoats over the chairs,</li>
<li>the jugs and basins,</li>
<li>the glasses of teeth,</li>
<li>Thou Shalt Not on the wall, and</li>
<li>the yellowing dickybird-watching pictures of the dead.</li></ul>
Only you can hear and see, behind the eyes of the sleepers,
<ul><li>the movements and countries,</li>
<li>mazes and colours, …</li>
<li>dismays and rainbows, …</li>
<li>tunes and wishes, …</li>
<li>[the] flight and [the] fall, and …</li>
<li>[the] big seas of their dreams.</li></ul>
<br>
[Listen:] you can hear their dreams. …<br>
<br>
At the sea-end of town, Mr and Mrs Floyd, the cocklers, are sleeping as quiet as death, side by wrinkled side, toothless, salt, and brown, like two old kippers in a box. …<br>
<br>
Alone until she dies, Bessie Bighead, hired help, born in the workhouse, smelling of the cowshed, … picks a posy of daisies in Sunday Meadow to put on the grave of Gomer Owen who kissed her once by the pig-sty when she wasn't looking and never kissed her again although she was looking all the time. …<br>
<br>
Willy Nilly postman <i>downs his last bucket of black brackish tea and rumbles out bandy to the clucking back where the hens twitch and grieve for their tea-soaked sops.</i><br>
<br>
Mrs Willy Nilly <i>full of tea to her double-chinned brim broods and bubbles over her coven of kettles on the hissing hot range always ready to steam open the mail. …</i><br>
<br>
Up the street, in the Sailors Arms, Sinbad Sailors, grandson of Mary Ann Sailors, draws a pint in the sunlit bar.<br>
The ship's clock in the bar says half past eleven.<br>
Half past eleven is opening time.<br>
The hands of the clock have stayed still at half past eleven for fifty years.<br>
It is always opening time in the Sailors Arms. …<br>
<br>
A car drives to market, full of fowls and a farmer.<br>
Milk churns stand at Coronation Corner like short, silver policemen. …<br>
<br>
The morning's busy as bees.<br>
<i>[Out background organ music]</i><br>
There's the clip clop of horses on the sunhoneyed cobbles of the humming streets, hammering of horseshoes, gobble quack and cackle, tomtit twitter from the bird-ounced boughs, braying on Donkey Down.
<br>
Bread is baking, pigs are grunting, chop goes the butcher, milk churns bell, tills ring, sheep cough, dogs shout, saws sing.<br>
Oh,<br>
the Spring whinny and morning moo from the clog dancing farms,<br>
the gulls' gab and rabble on the boat bobbing river and sea and<br>
the cockles bubbling in the sand, scamper of sanderlings, curlew cry, crow caw, pigeon coo, clock strike, bull bellow, and<br>
the ragged gabble of the beargarden school as the women scratch and babble in Mrs Organ Morgan's general shop where everything is sold: custard, buckets, henna, rat-traps, shrimp nets, sugar, stamps, confetti, paraffin, hatchets, whistles. …<br>
<br>
Outside, the sun springs down on the rough and tumbling town.<br>
It runs through the hedges of Goosegog Lane, cuffing the birds to sing.<br>
Spring whips green down Cockle Row, and the shells ring out.<br>
Llareggub this snip of a morning is wildfruit and warm, the streets, fields, sands and waters springing in the young sun. …<br>
<br>
Spring stirs Gossamer Beynon, schoolmistress, like a spoon. …<br>
<br>
Gossamer Beynon high-heels out of school.<br>
The sun hums down through the cotton flowers of her dress into the bell of her heart and buzzes in the honey there and couches and kisses, lazy-loving and boozed, in her red-berried breast.<br>
Eyes run from the trees and windows of the street steaming, 'Gossamer', and strip her to the nipples and the bees.<br>
She blazes naked past the Sailors' Arms, the only woman on the Dai-Adamed earth. …<br>
<br>
[The] clocks with no hands [are] forever drumming out [the] time without ever knowing what time it is. …<br>
<br>
<i>[A long silence]</i><br>
The sunny slow lulling afternoon yawns and moons through the dozy town.<br>
The sea lolls, laps and idles in, with fishes sleeping in [her] lap.<br>
The meadows still as Sunday, the shut-eye tasselled bulls, the goat-and-daisy dingles, nap happy and lazy.<br>
The dumb duck-ponds snooze.<br>
Clouds sag and pillow on Llareggub Hill.<br>
Pigs grunt in a wet wallow-bath, and smile as they snort and dream. …<br>
[And the donkeys] angelically drowse on Donkey Down. …<br>
<br>
Blind Captain Cat climbs into his bunk. Like a cat, he sees in the dark.<br>
Through the voyages of his tears, he sails to see the dead.<br>
<br>
(<i><a href="http://www.undermilkwood.net/prose_umw1.html">Under Milkwood</a></i>, 1953)<br>
<br>
<br>
<h3><a href="http://www.undermilkwood.net/prose_umw2.html">Lily Smalls</a></h3>
<br>
… Lily Smalls, Mrs Beynon's treasure, comes downstairs from a dream of royalty who all night long went larking with her full of sauce in the Milk Wood dark, and puts the kettle on the primus ring in Mrs Beynon's kitchen, and looks at herself in Mr Beynon's shaving-glass over the sink, and sees:
<blockquote>Oh, there's a face!<br>
Where you get that hair from?<br>
Got it from old tom cat.<br>
Give it back then, love.<br>
Oh, there's a perm!<br>
<br>
Where you get that nose from, Lily?<br>
Got it from my father, silly.<br>
You've got it on upside down!<br>
Oh, there's a conk!<br>
<br>
Look at your complexion!<br>
Oh no, you look.<br>
Needs a bit of make-up.<br>
Needs a veil.<br>
Oh, there's glamour!<br>
<br>
Where you get that smile, Lil?<br>
Never you mind, girl.<br>
Nobody loves you.<br>
That's what you think.<br>
<br>
Who is it loves you?<br>
Shan't tell.<br>
Come on, Lily.<br>
Cross your heart then?<br>
Cross my heart.</blockquote>
And very softly, her lips almost touching her reflection, she breathes the name and clouds the shaving-glass.<br>
<br>
<blockquote><i>Mrs Beynon [Loudly, from above]:</i><br>
Lily!<br>
<br>
<i>Lily Smalls [Loudly]:</i><br>
Yes, mum.<br>
<br>
<i>Mrs Beynon:</i><br>
Where's my tea, girl? <br>
<br>
<i>Lily Smalls [Softly]:</i><br>
Where d'you think?<br>
In the cat-box?<br>
<i>[Loudly]</i><br>
Coming up, mum</blockquote>
<br>
<h3>Mr and Mrs Pugh</h3>
<br>
Mr Pugh, in the School House [across the street,] takes up the morning tea to Mrs Pugh, and whispers on the stairs:
<blockquote><i>Mr Pugh:</i><br>
Here's your arsenic, dear.<br>
And your weedkiller biscuit.<br>
I've throttled your parakeet.<br>
I've spat in the vases.<br>
I've put cheese in the mouseholes.<br>
Here's your … <i>[door creaks open]</i> … nice tea, dear.<br>
<br>
<i>Mrs Pugh:</i><br>
Too much sugar.<br>
<br>
<i>Mr Pugh:</i><br>
You haven't tasted it yet, dear.<br>
<br>
<i>Mrs Pugh:</i><br>
Too much milk, then.<br>
Has Mr Jenkins said his poetry?<br>
<br>
<i>Mr Pugh:</i><br>
Yes, dear.<br>
<br>
<i>Mrs Pugh:</i><br>
Then it's time to get up.<br>
Give me my glasses.<br>
No, not my <i>reading glasses</i>, I want to look out.<br>
I want to see.</blockquote>
<br>
Lily Smalls the treasure down on her red knees washing the front step.
<blockquote><i>Mrs Pugh:</i><br>
She's tucked her dress in her bloomers — oh, the baggage!</blockquote>
<br>
PC Attila Rees, ox-broad, barge-booted, stamping out of Handcuff House in a heavy beef-red huff, black-browed under his damp helmet … lumbering down towards the strand to see that the sea is still there.
<blockquote><i>Mrs Pugh:</i><br>
He's going to arrest Polly Garter, mark my words.<br>
<br>
<i>Mr Pugh:</i><br>What for, my dear? <br>
<br>
<i>Mrs Pugh:</i><br>
For having babies. </blockquote>
… and lumbering down towards the strand to see that the sea is still there.<br>
<br>
(<i><a href="http://www.undermilkwood.net/prose_umw1.html">Under Milkwood</a></i>, 1953)<br>peaceandlonglifehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09059683906637157584noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1170524542125253803.post-27092109707053384722017-02-26T14:21:00.013-08:002023-09-26T09:31:11.713-07:00William Gibson<i id="top"><a href="https://40-eridani-a.blogspot.com/2017/03/prose.html#contents">Prose</a></i><br>
<br>
<br>
<blockquote><blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-size: medium">[Terror] should remain the sole prerogative of the state.</span><br>
<br>
— <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peripheral">The Peripheral</a>, <i>2014, p 144.</i><br>
<br>
<br>
<span style="font-size: medium">Really bad media can exorcise your <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics">semiotic</a> ghosts.</span><br>
<br>
<i>— <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gernsback_Continuum">The Gernsback Continuum</a>, 1981.</i></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote>
<br>
<div align="center"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:William_Gibson_60th_birthday_portrait.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-o-59XOwTmN4/Xfo26ySWJwI/AAAAAAAADV4/aLtTzbSxQTAMY3p3-USczcK7GC3kFLNjACLcBGAsYHQ/s560/William_Gibson_60th_birthday_portrait.jpg" data-original-width="1249" data-original-height="1600"></a></div>
<br>
<blockquote><i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Gibson">William Gibson</a> (1948):</i><br>
[<a href="https://40-eridani-a.blogspot.com/2017/02/william-gibson.html#chrome">Molly Millions</a> was a slim] girl with mirrored glasses, her dark hair cut in a rough shag. …<br>
White sodium glare washed her features, stark monochrome, shadows cleaving from her cheekbones. …<br>
She was wearing leather jeans the color of dried blood. …<br>
<br>
Her T-shirt was sleeveless, faint telltales of Chiba City circuitry traced along her thin arms. …<br>
Her fingers were slender, tapered, very white against the polished burgundy nails. …<br>
Ten blades snicked straight out from their recesses, beneath her nails, each one a narrow, double edged scalpel in pale blue steel. …<br>
<br>
[It was then that] I saw … that the mirrored lenses were surgical inlays, the silver rising smoothly from her high cheekbones, sealing her eyes in their sockets.<br>
(<a href="https://40-eridani-a.blogspot.com/2017/02/william-gibson.html#mnemonic">Johnny Mnemonic</a>, <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omni_%28magazine%29">Omni</a></i>, May 1981)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Conan_Doyle">Arthur Doyle</a> (1859 – 1930):</i><br>
It was a September evening and … a dense drizzly fog lay low upon the great city. …<br>
Down the Strand the lamps were but misty splotches of diffused light which threw a feeble circular glimmer upon the steamy, vaporous air and threw a murky, shifting radiance across the crowded thoroughfare.<br>
There was … something eerie and ghostlike in the endless procession of faces which flitted across these narrow bars of light — sad faces and glad, haggard and merry.<br>
Like all humankind, they flitted from the gloom into the light and so back into the gloom once more.<br>
(<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sign_of_the_Four">The Sign of Four</a></i>, Chapter 3, 1890)</blockquote>
<a name='more'></a>
<br>
<br>
<h3 id="contents">Contents</h3>
<br>
<a href="#peripheral">The Peripheral</a><br>
<br>
<a href="#idoru">Idoru</a><br>
<br>
<a href="#distrust">Distrust That Particular Flavour</a><br>
<br>
<a href="#zero">Zero History</a><br>
<br>
<a href="#chrome">Burning Chrome</a><br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<h2><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Gibson">William Gibson</a> (1948)</h2>
<br>
<h3 id="peripheral"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peripheral">The Peripheral</a> (2014)</h3>
<br>
[All] around her … were whispers, urgent as they were faint, like a cloud of fairy police dispatchers.<br>
(p 9)<br>
<br>
[Daedra's] head was perfectly still, eyes unblinking.<br>
He imagined her ego swimming up behind them, to peer at him suspiciously, something eel-like, larval, transparently boned.<br>
He had its full attention. …<br>
And then she smiled.<br>
Reflexive pleasure of the thing behind her eyes.<br>
<br>
Raineys sigil privacy dimmed.
<blockquote>"I'd want to have your baby now," she said, from Toronto, "except I know it would always lie."</blockquote>
(p 12)<br>
<br>
"Hypersonic," said an unfamiliar voice … ungendered, utterly serene.<br>
"Incoming.<br>
Deceleration.<br>
Shockwave."<br>
(p 26)<br>
<br>
[The] Michinoid, on the deck of the moby, [sprouted] spider eyes and muzzle slits, in the instant before it vaulted the railing …<br>
(p 27)<br>
<br>
[Spiraling] in with it, each turn tighter, further into the forest, each turn closer to seeing it exactly right.<br>
Down into that one shot across the clearing … where the sudden mist of airborne blood, blown with the snow, was like a term balancing an equation.<br>
(p 48)<br>
<br>
[Maria Anathema Ash's hand was] quite black with tattoos, a riot of wings and horns, every bird and beast of the Anthropocene extinction, overlapping line drawings of a simple yet touching precision. …<br>
[As] her thumb withdrew [the] drawings of animals, startled, fled up her arm, over a pale shoulder, gone. …<br>
<br>
[The] intricate texture of her bustier … resembled a microminiature model of some Victorian cast-iron [railway] station roof, its countless tiny panes … of perpetually stained iron and glass … filmed as by the coal smoke of fingerling locomotives …<br>
<br>
And now the line drawing of a lone albatross, slowly as if in distant flight, circling her white neck.<br>
(pp 50-2)<br>
<br>
History had its fascination, but [too] much of it and you became Ash, obsessed with a catalog of vanished species, addicted to nostalgia for things you'd never known.<br>
(p 85)<br>
<br>
Eras are conveniences, particularly for those who never experienced them.<br>
We carve history from totalities beyond our grasp.<br>
Bolt labels on the result.<br>
Handles.<br>
Then speak of the handles as though they were things in themselves.<br>
(p 282)<br>
<br>
[The ambush] seemed like separate gifs to [Flynne] now.
<ul><li>The front of Clovis's paramedic crotch pack open like a clamshell.</li>
<li>The fat plastic pistol clipped in it, same color as the pack.</li>
<li>Clovis … the pistol in both her hands, arms out shoulder-high, leaning into [the] recoil, the muzzle flash continual — until the magazine was empty; and no more expression on her face than if she'd just been driving, paying serious attention to the road.</li></ul>
(p 265)<br>
<br>
<!--more-->
<br>
<h3 id="idoru"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idoru">Idoru</a> (1996)</h3>
<br>
<h4>Chia Pet McKenzie</h4>
<br>
[She'd listen to her father] talk about his work, arbitrage engines shuttling back and forth through the world's markets like invisible dragons, fast as light, shaving fragments of advantage for traders …<br>
(p 154)<br>
<br>
And now in the overheated cab, her one bag beside her on the seat, she felt guilt at this deception, her mother sleeping there behind those darkened windows matted with frost, under the weight of her thirty-five years and the flowered duvet Chia had bought at Nordstrom’s.<br>
When Chia had been small, her mother had worn her hair in a long braid, its tip skewered with turquoise and abalone and carved bits of bone, like the magical tail of some mythical animal, swaying there for Chia to grab.<br>
And the house looked sad, too, as if it regretted her leaving, white paint peeling from the underlying gray of ninety-year-old cedar clapboards.<br>
Chia shivered.<br>
What if she never came back?<br>
(p 16)<br>
<br>
[Her] mother's "now" was such a narrow and literal thing.<br>
News governed …<br>
Cable-fed. …<br>
<br>
Chia's "now" was digital, effortlessly elastic, instant recall supported by global systems she'd never have to bother comprehending.<br>
(p 14)
<ul>"Your father's a big tax lawyer!"</ul>
<ul>"I know," Kelsey said.<br>
"And he flies back and forth, all over the world, making money.<br>
But you what else he earns, Chia?"</ul>
<ul>"What?"</ul>
<ul>"Frequent-flyer points.<br>
<i>Big-ass</i> frequent flyer points.<br>
On <i>Air Magellan</i>."</ul>
<ul>"Interesting," said the Aztec skull.</ul>
<ul>"Tokyo," said the mean nymph.</ul>
Shit, Chia thought.<br>
(p 13)<br>
<br>
The sky was like mother-of-pearl when Chia emerged from [Shinjuku] station.<br>
Gray buildings, pastel neon, a streetscape dotted with vaguely unfamiliar shapes.<br>
Dozens of bicycles were parked everywhere, the fragile-looking kind with paper-tube frames spun with carbon fiber.<br>
Chia took a step back as an enormous turquoise garbage truck rumbled past, its driver's white-gloved hands visible on the high wheel.<br>
As it cleared her field of vision, she saw a Japanese girl wearing a short plaid skirt and black biker jacket.<br>
The girl smiled.<br>
Chia waved.<br>
(p 86)<br>
<br>
The Sandbenders system software looked like an old-fashioned canvas water bag, a sort of canteen …<br>
It was worn and spectacularly organic, with tiny beads of water bulging through the tight weave of fabric.<br>
If you got super close you saw things reflected in the individual droplets:
<ul><li>circuitry that was like beadwork or the skin on a lizard's throat,</li>
<li>a long empty beach under a gray sky,</li>
<li>mountains in the rain,</li>
<li>creek water over different-colored stones.</li></ul>
(p 34)<br>
<br>
In Singapore they hung people, right in the mall, for [drug trafficking].<br>
Her father didn’t like it and he said that was one of the reasons he never invited her there.<br>
They put it on television, too, so that it was really hard to avoid seeing it, and he didn’t want her to see it. …<br>
She wished she could go there and keep her eyes closed until she was in her father’s apartment, and never turn the TV on, just be there with him … and listen to him talk about his work, about the arbitrage engines shuttling back and forth through the world’s markets like invisible dragons, fast as light, shaving fragments of advantage for traders like her father …<br>
<br>
<br>
Something at the core of things moved simultaneously in mutually impossible directions. …<br>
Faint impression of light through a fluttering of rags. …<br>
[Then a] building or biomass or cliff face looming there, in countless unplanned strata, nothing about it even or regular.<br>
Accreted patchwork of shallow random balconies, thousands of small windows throwing back blank silver rectangles of fog.<br>
(p 181)<br>
<br>
Stretching either way to the periphery of vision, and on the high, uneven crest of that ragged facade, a black fur of twisted pipe, antennas sagging under vine growth of cable.<br>
And past this scribbled border a sky where colors crawled like gasoline on water. …<br>
<br>
[A city] of darkness.<br>
Between the walls of the world. …<br>
<br>
They were inside now, smoothly accelerating, and the squirming density of the thing was continual visual impact, an optical drumming. …<br>
Walls scrawled and crawling with scrolling messages, spectral doorways passing like cards in a shuffled deck.<br>
[There were] others there, ghost-figures whipping past, and everywhere the sense of eyes …<br>
Fractal filth, bit-rot, the corridor of their passage tented with crazy swoops of faintly flickering lines of some kind.<br>
(p 182)<br>
<br>
[The] rooftops of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City">Walled City</a> were its dumping ground, but the things abandoned there were like objects out of a dream, bit-mapped fantasies discarded by their creators, their jumbled shapes and textures baffling the eye, the attempt to sort and decipher them inducing a kind of vertigo.<br>
Some were moving.<br>
(p 210)
<ul>"Immediate identification as Rodel-van Erp primary biomolecular programming module C-slash-7A.<br>
This is a lab prototype.<br>
We are unable to determine its exact legal status, but the production model, C-slash-9E, is Class 1 nanotechnology, proscribed under international law.<br>
Japanese law, conviction of illegal possession of Class 1 device carries automatic life sentence."</ul>
<ul>"Life?" Chia said.</ul>
<ul>"Same for thermonuclear device," he said, apologetically, "poison gas, biological weapon."</ul>
(p 211)<br>
<br>
A man wider than the doorway seemed to flow into the room.<br>
[He] was wearing a coat the color of dull metal.<br>
[One] huge, scarred hand slipped into his coat [only to emerge] holding something that looked to Chia like a very large pair of chrome-plated scissors, but then unfolded, with a series of small sharp clicks, and apparently of its own accord, into a kind of glittering, skeletal axe, its leading edge hawk-like and lethal, the head behind it tapering like an icepick.<br>
(p 256)<br>
<br>
<br>
<h4>Zona Rosa</h4>
<br>
Zona Rosa took a knife from her jacket pocket and squatted on a shelf of pinkish rock.<br>
Golden dragons swirled in the shallow depths of the knife's pink plastic handles.<br>
She thumbed a button of plated tin and the dragon-etched blade snapped out, its spine sawtoothed and merciless.<br>
(p 110)<br>
<br>
An aura bristled around Zona, who grew taller as the spikey cloud of light increased in resolution.<br>
Shifting, overlapping planes like ghosts of broken glass.<br>
Iridescent insects whirling there. …<br>
<br>
Zona's aura bristled with gathering menace, a thunderhead of flickering darkness forming above the shattered sheets of light.<br>
There was a sound that reminded Chia of one of those blue-light bug-zappers popping a particularly juicy one, and then vast wings cut the air, so close: Zona's Colombian condors, things from the data-havens.<br>
And gone. …<br>
<br>
Zona's switchblade seemed the size of a chainsaw now, its toothed spine rippling, alive.<br>
The golden dragons from the plastic handles chased their fire-maned double tails around her brown fist, through miniature clouds of Chinese embroidery.<br>
(p 222)<br>
<br>
<br>
<h4>Rei Toei</h4>
<br>
In the very structure of her face, in the geometries of underlying bone, lay coded histories of dynastic flight, privation, terrible migrations.<br>
[Laney] saw stone tombs in steep alpine meadows, their lintels traced with snow.<br>
A line of shaggy pack ponies, their breath white with cold, followed a trail above a canyon.<br>
The curves of the river below were strokes of distant silver.<br>
Iron harness bells clanked in the blue dusk. …<br>
In his mouth a taste of rotten metal. …<br>
<br>
A hologram.<br>
Something generated, animated, projected … an architecture of articulated longing …<br>
(pp 176 & 178)<br>
<br>
<br>
<h4>Kathy Torrance</h4>
<br>
Palest of pale blonds.<br>
A pallor bordering on translucence, certain angles of light suggesting not blood but some fluid the shade of summer straw.<br>
On her left thigh the absolute indigo imprint of something twisted and multibarbed, an expensively savage pictoglyph. …<br>
The tattoo looked like something from another planet, a sign or message burned in from the depths of space, left there for mankind to interpret.<br>
(p 4)<br>
<br>
[Our audience, she said,] is best visualized as a vicious, lazy profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed.<br>
[Imagine] something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka.<br>
It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. …<br>
It has no mouth … no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote.<br>
Or by voting in presidential elections.<br>
(pp 28-29)<br>
<br>
<br>
<h4>Keith Alan Blackwell</h4>
<br>
I’ve seen you go with women I wouldn’t take to a shit-fight on a dark night, but at least they were human.<br>
<br>
<br>
[His] hand emerged, holding something that looked … like a very large pair of chromeplated scissors, but then unfolded, with a series of small sharp clicks, and apparently of its own accord, into a kind of glittering, skeletal axe, its leading edge hawklike and lethal, the head behind it tapering like an icepick.<br>
<br>
<br>
<h4>Colin Laney</h4>
<br>
[He sat in the lobby] until dawn came edging in through the tall, arched windows, and Taiwanese stainless could be heard to rattle, but gently, from the darkened cave of the breakfast room. …<br>
Echoes woke from the tiled floor [and the] high beams …<br>
Immigrant voices, in some High Steppe dialect the Great Khans might well have understood.<br>
(p 2)<br>
<br>
[Beyond] a framing rectangle of glass that filtered out every tint of pollution, the sky … was perfectly blank, like a sky-blue paint chip submitted by the contractor of the universe. …<br>
(p 5)<br>
<br>
The Natashas were everywhere, working girls shipped in from Vladivostok by the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kombinat">Kombinat</a>.<br>
Routine plastic surgery lent them a hard assembly-line beauty.<br>
Slavic Barbies.<br>
(p 3)<br>
<br>
The ceiling [of the parking level] was very low, and flocked with something drab and wooly, to reduce noise.<br>
Lines of bioluminescent cable were bracketed to it, and the unmoving air was heavy with the sugary smell of exhausted gasohol.<br>
Spotless ranks of small Japanese cars glittered like bright wet candy.<br>
(p 225)<br>
<br>
… Slitscan's business was a ritual letting of blood, and the blood it let was an alchemical fluid: celebrity in its rawest, purest form.<br>
(p 38)<br>
<br>
He could hold [her digital] history in his mind like a single object, like a perfectly detailed scale model of something ordinary but miraculous, made luminous by the intensity of his focus.<br>
He'd never met her, or spoken to her, but he'd come to know her, he supposed, in more ways that anyone ever had or would.<br>
(p 52)<br>
<br>
[She] <i>knew</i>, somehow, that he was there, watching.<br>
As though she felt him gazing down, into the pool of data that reflected her life, its surface made of all the bits that were the daily record of her life as it registered on the digital fabric of the world.<br>
[As he] watched, a nodal point [began] to form over [her reflection …]<br>
She was going to kill herself.<br>
(p 41)<br>
<br>
<br>
If there were going to be genuine AI … it was most likely to evolve in ways that had least to do with pretending to be human.<br>
… AI might be created accidentally, and that people might not initially recognize it for what it was.<br>
<br>
<br>
He thought of coral, of reefs that grew around sunken aircraft carriers; perhaps, [in death,] she'd become something like that: the buried mystery beneath some exfoliating superstructure of supposition, or even myth.<br>
<br>
It seemed to him … that that might be a slightly less dead way of being dead.<br>
And he wished her that.<br>
(p 68)<br>
<br>
<blockquote><i><a href="https://40-eridani-a.blogspot.com/2012/05/stage-and-screen.html#shakespeare">William Shakespeare</a> (1564–1616):</i><br>
Full fathom five thy father lies,<br>
Of his bones are coral made;<br>
Those are pearls that were his eyes.<br>
Nothing of him that doth fade,<br>
But doth suffer a sea-change<br>
Into something rich and strange …<br>
(<a href="https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Tempest"><i>The Tempest</i></a>, Act 1, Scene 2, 1611)</blockquote>
<br>
<h3 id="distrust">Distrust That Particular Flavour (2012)</h3>
<br>
The Street Finds its own uses for things …<br>
(Rocket Radio, <i>Rolling Stone</i>, June 1989)<br>
<br>
I suspect [<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennials">Millennials</a>] inhabit a sort of endless digital Now, a state of atemporality enabled by our increasingly efficient communal prosthetic memory.<br>
(Talk For Book Expo: New York, May 2010)<br>
<br>
[<i>Dorodango</i> are 3 inch] balls of mud compressed with the hands and painstakingly formed into perfect spheres …<br>
The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brogue_shoe">brogues</a>, shined lovingly enough, for long enough … must ultimately become a universe unto themselves, a conceptual sphere of lustrous and infinite depth.<br>
Just as a life, lived silently enough, in sufficient solitude, becomes a different sort of sphere, no less perfect.<br>
(Shiny Balls of Mud: Hikaru Dorodango and Tokyu Hands, <i>Tate</i> Magazine, September / October 2002)<br>
<br>
Works we all our lives recall reading for the first time are among the truest milestones …<br>
The events … were staged in some vast repurposed fortress or castle [which] hummed and gleamed like a vacuum tube within a thirteenth-century reliquary.<br>
(Preface, <i>Labyrinths</i>, Jorge Borges, 2007)<br>
<br>
[London] is a city in which, [Ackroyd] suggests, subjective time flows differently, from one area to the next, and may have come to a near-complete halt in others. …<br>
It is a city in which the eternal suffering of the poor may perpetually serve some mysterious and driving purpose in the life of the whole, some hidden dynamo of torture and sacrifice dating back to something stranger and less easily articulated …<br>
(Metrophagy: The Art and Science of Digesting Great Cities, Review of <i>London: The Biography</i> by Peter Ackroyd, <i>The Whole Earth Catalog</i>, Summer 2001)<br>
<br>
Both [Britain and Japan] display a sort of fractal coherence of sign and symbol, all the way down into the weave of history. …<br>
[Truly,] there is something in the quality of a good translation that can never be captured in the original. …<br>
I see it in the eyes of the [dealers, and in the eyes of the <i>otaku</i>:] a perfectly calm train-spotter frenzy, murderous and sublime.<br>
(Modern Boys And Mobile Girls, <i>The Observer</i>, April 2001)<br>
<br>
In Istanbul, one chill misty morning in 1970, I stood in Kapali Carsi, the grand bazaar, under a Sony sign bristling with alien futurity, and stared deep into a cube of plate glass filled with tiny, ancient, fascinating things.<br>
[The] Sony sign — very large, very proto-Blade Runner, illuminated in some way I hadn't seen before — made a deep impression.<br>
(My Obsession, <i>Wired</i>, January 1999)<br>
<br>
We are building ourselves mirrors that remember — public mirrors that wander around and remember what they've seen.<br>
That is a basic magic.<br>
(William Gibson's Filmless Festival, <i>Wired</i>, October 1999)<br>
<br>
<br>
<h4>Disneyland With The Death Penalty</h4>
<br>
Singapore is a relentlessly G-rated experience, micromanaged by a state that has the look and feel of a very large corporation.<br>
If IBM had ever bothered to actually possess a physical country, that country might have had a lot in common with Singapore.<br>
There's a certain white-shirted constraint, an absolute humorlessness in the way Singapore Ltd operates; conformity here is the prime directive …<br>
<br>
Imagine an Asian version of Zurich operating as an offshore capsule [of Malaysia —] an affluent microcosm whose citizens inhabit something that feels like, well, Disneyland.<br>
Disneyland with the death penalty.<br>
<br>
[Except that] Disneyland wasn't built atop an equally peculiar nineteenth-century theme park …<br>
… Bits of the Victorian construct, dressed in spanking-fresh paint, protrude at quaint angles from the white-flanked glitter of the neo-Gernsbackian metropolis.<br>
(p 72)<br>
<br>
The facades of the remaining Victorian shop-houses recall Covent Garden on some impossibly bright London day. …<br>
The physical past, here, has almost entirely vanished.<br>
(p 73)<br>
<br>
In 1965, Mr Lee Kuan Yew, a Cambridge-educated lawyer, became the country's first prime minister [and the] People's Action Party has remained in power ever since …<br>
… Reddy Kilowatt as the mascot of what is, in effect, a single-party capitalist technocracy.<br>
(p 74)<br>
<br>
Rococo pagodas perch atop slippery-flanked megastructures concealing enough cubic footage of atria to make up a couple of good-sized Lagrangian-5 colonies.<br>
(p 75)<br>
<br>
[In] many ways, it really does seem like 1956 in Singapore …<br>
[An] expanded middle class enjoys great prosperity … and a deeply paternalistic government is prepared, at any cost, to hold at bay the triple threat of communism, pornography, and drugs.<br>
(77)<br>
<br>
Singapore is curiously, indeed gratifyingly, devoid of certain aspects of creativity.<br>
(p 80)<br>
<br>
(<i>Wired</i>, September 1993)<br>
<br>
<br>
<h4>My Own Private Tokyo</h4>
<br>
The Industrial Revolution came whole [to Japan], in kit form: steamships, railroads, telegraphy, factories, western medicine, the division of labor — not to mention a mechanized military and the political will to use it.<br>
Then those Americans returned to whack Asia's first industrial society with the light of a thousand suns — twice …<br>
[And] thus, the War ended.<br>
At which point the aliens arrived in force, this time with briefcases and plans, bent on a cultural retrofit from the scorched earth up.<br>
(p 159)<br>
<br>
She's probably Australian, young and quite serviceably beautiful.<br>
She wears very expensive, very sheer black undergarments, and little else, save for some black outer layer—equally sheer, skintight, and micro-short—and some gold and diamonds to give potential clients the right idea.<br>
She steps past me, into four lanes of traffic, conversing on her phone in urgent Japanese.<br>
Traffic halts obediently for this triumphantly jaywalking gaijin in her black suede spikes.<br>
I watch her make the opposite curb, the brain-cancer deflector on her slender little phone swaying in counterpoint to her hips.<br>
When the light changes, I cross, and watch her high-five a bouncer who looks like Oddjob in a Paul Smith suit, his skinny lip beard razored with micrometer precision.<br>
There's a flash of white as their palms meet.<br>
Folded paper.<br>
Junkie origami.<br>
(p 160)<br>
<br>
[Outside] Harajuku Station [there's] a bevy of teenage manga nurses [hanging out:] rocker girls kitted out in knee-high black platform boots, black jodhpurs, black Lara Croft tops, and open, carefully starched lab coats, stethoscopes around their necks.<br>
The look clearly isn't happening without a stethoscope.<br>
(p 161)<br>
<br>
You can do that here, in Tokyo: be a teenage girl on the street in a bondage-nurse outfit.<br>
You can dream in public.<br>
And the reason you can do it is [because] this is one of the safest cities in the world …<br>
[One in which] a special zone, Harajuku, has … been set aside for you. …<br>
The manga nurses don't threaten anything; there's a place for them, and for whatever replaces them.<br>
(p 162)<br>
<br>
It's hard to beat, these nameless neon streets swarming with every known form of electronic advertising, under a misting rain that softens the commercials playing on facade screens of quite surreal width and clarity.<br>
The Japanese know this about television:<br>
Make it big enough and anything looks cool.<br>
(p 162)<br>
<br>
(<i>Wired</i>, September 2001)<br>
<br>
<br>
<h3 id="zero"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_History">Zero History</a> (2010)</h3>
<br>
<h4>Hollis Henry</h4>
<br>
Inchmale's spirit-beast, the narcoleptic stuffed ferret, still frozen in nightmarish dream-waltz amid the game birds, was waiting near the Cabinet's grumbling lift. …<br>
She entered the familiar cage … and pushed the button.<br>
Once and only briefly, so as not to confuse it.<br>
(p 191)<br>
<br>
The room phone began to ring.<br>
It was a collage, its massive nautical-looking handset of rubber-coated bronze resting in a leather-padded cradle atop a cubical box of brass-cornered rosewood.<br>
Its ring was mechanical, tiny, as though you were hearing an old fashioned bicycle bell far off down a quiet street.<br>
She stared hard, willing it to silence. …<br>
She pictured herself driving the handset, [heavy as a hammer,] through brittle antique rosewood, crushing the aged electro-mechanical cricket within.<br>
(p 6)<br>
<br>
She sat on a very eighties-looking vanity stool, pale violet velour, bulbous, possibly the last survivor of some previous business …<br>
[He] looking at her … with something she took to be the artful emulation of actual human concern, but she understood that that indicated there really might be something to be afraid of.<br>
She shivered on the ridiculous velour toadstool.<br>
(pp 213 & 217)<br>
<br>
<br>
<h4>Milgrim</h4>
<br>
[He] watched harshly tonsured child-soldiers, clad in skateboarding outfits still showing factory creases, ogling Chinese-made orc-killing blades, spiked and serrated like the jaws of extinct predators.<br>
The sellers stand [was] hung with Mardi Gras beads, Confederate-flag beach towels, [and] unauthorized Harley-Davidson memorabilia.<br>
(p 9)<br>
<br>
Addictions, he thought, … started out like magical pets, pocket monsters.<br>
They did extraordinary tricks, showed you things you hadn't seen, were fun.<br>
But came, through some gradual dire alchemy, to make decisions for you.<br>
Eventually, they were making your most crucial life-decisions.<br>
And they were, [as] his therapist … had said, less intelligent than goldfish.<br>
(p 53)<br>
<br>
The [space] they entered now was like one of those educational display corners in a Ralph Lauren flagship meant to suggest how some semimythical other half had lived, but cranked up, here, into something else entirely, metastasized, spookily hyper-real.<br>
(p 82)<br>
<br>
[He] saw, however briefly but with peculiar clarity, an aerial penguin cross the intersection ahead of him.<br>
Something wholly penguin-shaped, apparently four or five feet long, from beat-tip to trailing feet, and made, it seemed, of mercury.<br>
A penguin wrapped in a fluid mirror, reflecting a bit of neon from the street below,<br>
Swimming.<br>
Moving as a penguin moves underwater, but through the Latin Quarter air, at just above the height of second-story windows.<br>
(p 152)<br>
<br>
<br>
<h4>Rausch</h4>
<br>
Rausch, his translucently short black hair looking like something sprayed from a nozzle, … held a magazine above his head, to ward off the drizzle.<br>
He looked characteristically disheveled, but in his own peculiar way.<br>
Everything about his personal presentation was intended to convey an effortless concision, but nothing quite did.<br>
His tight black suit was wrinkled, bagged at the knees, and in extending his arm above his head … he'd untucked one side of his white shirt.<br>
His glasses, whose frames came equipped with their own squint, would be in need of cleaning.<br>
(p 38)<br>
<br>
<br>
<h3 id="spook"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spook_Country">Spook Country</a> (2007)</h3>
<br>
[Tito's] clothes were like a dead man's … cut from fabrics [that he] imagined exuding their own chill …<br>
The cold
<ul><li>of unclaimed luggage,</li>
<li>of institutional corridors,</li>
<li>of steel lockers scoured to bare metal.</li></ul>
(p 9)<br>
<br>
[Hollis Henry] walked back to Mondrian through the weird, evanescent moment that belongs to every sunny morning in West Hollywood, when some strange perpetual promise of chlorophyll and hidden, warming fruit graces the air, just before the hydrocarbon blanket settles in.<br>
That sense of some peripheral and prelapsarian beauty, of something a little more than a hundred years past, but in that moment achingly present, as though the city were something you could wipe from your glasses and forget. …<br>
She looked down at the … brown, beige, and fibrous debris of the storm.<br>
And felt that luminous instant pass …<br>
(p 24)<br>
<br>
[Hollis'] parents had never been very comfortable with her singing career.<br>
Her mother, in particular, had treated it as though as though it were some sort of nuisance disease, something nonfatal that nonetheless interfered with your life in serious ways, preventing you having a real job, and for which there was no particular cure, other than simply letting it run its course and hoping for the best.<br>
Her mother had seemed to regard any income from singing as a kind of disability pay, something you received for having to put up with the condition … though, [of course, Hollis] knew that you could have the condition yet never qualify for any compensation whatever. … <br>
The sudden arc of her career, the arc of the Curfew, had taken her completely by surprise.<br>
(pp 237-8)<br>
<br>
<i>Hollis:</i><br>
I called my mother. … <br>
She complains about my father. … <br>
I think he's okay, but she thinks he's obsessed with American politics.<br>
She says it makes him too angry.<br>
<br>
<i>Odile:</i><br>
If this were my country, I would not be angry.<br>
<br>
<i>Hollis:</i><br>
No?<br>
<br>
<i>Odile:</i><br>
I would drink all the time.<br>
Take pill.<br>
Anything.<br>
(pp 239-40)<br>
<br>
<br>
<h3 id="chrome">Burning Chrome (1986)</h3>
<br>
<h4 id="mnemonic"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Mnemonic">Johnny Mnemonic</a></h4>
<br>
Muscle boys scattered through the crowd [at the Drome] were flexing stock parts at one another and trying on thin, cold grins, some of them so lost under superstructures of muscle graft that their outlines weren't really human.<br>
(p 15)<br>
<br>
Nighttown spread beneath us like a toy village for rats …<br>
I imagined the old men at their endless games of dominoes, under warm, fat drops of water that fell from wet wash hung out on poles between the plywood shanties.<br>
(p 29)<br>
<br>
We're an information economy. …<br>
[It's] impossible to move, to live to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information.<br>
Fragments that can be retrieved, amplified …<br>
(p 30)<br>
<br>
[A memory of Paris:]
<ul><li>long Mercedes electrics gliding through the rain to Notre Dame — mobile greenhouses, Japanese faces behind the glass — and</li>
<li>a hundred Nikons rising in blind phototropism — flowers of steel and crystal.</li></ul>
(p 33)<br>
<br>
(<i>Omni</i>, May 1981)<br>
<br>
<br>
<h4><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragments_of_a_Hologram_Rose">Fragments of a Hologram Rose</a></h4>
<br>
The explosion [created] a white sheet of heat lightning that had turned the pale branches of a bare tree against the night sky into a photographic negative of themselves: carbon branches against magnesium sky. <br>
(p 55)<br>
<br>
(<i>Unearth 3</i>, 1977)peaceandlonglifehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09059683906637157584noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1170524542125253803.post-91955671618149814072015-04-14T12:46:00.002-07:002021-03-10T00:05:47.272-08:00Photography<i id="top"><a href="https://40-eridani-a.blogspot.com/p/peace-and-long-life_9.html#contents">Peace and Long Life</a></i><br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<div align="center"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-EzcNfqlVwt0/XCef2BOlXCI/AAAAAAAADAw/Wsbo9-Tjpdo6bLEExmBxJv4hHs-CW0ScACLcBGAs/s1600/apollo08_earthrise.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-EzcNfqlVwt0/XCef2BOlXCI/AAAAAAAADAw/Wsbo9-Tjpdo6bLEExmBxJv4hHs-CW0ScACLcBGAs/s640/apollo08_earthrise.jpg" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="1537"></a><br>
<br>
(<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Anders">William Anders</a>, <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/apollo-8-earthrise">Earthrise</a>, Apollo 8, <i>NASA</i>, 24 December 1968)<br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-4GWb7DmyNNc/VTAhYb87s9I/AAAAAAAABvI/nMDzgguX96c/s1600/Pink%2BFloyd%2B-%2BWish%2BYou%2BWere%2BHere.mp4_snapshot_24.47_%5B2015.04.17_06.46.02%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-4GWb7DmyNNc/VTAhYb87s9I/AAAAAAAABvI/nMDzgguX96c/s640/Pink%2BFloyd%2B-%2BWish%2BYou%2BWere%2BHere.mp4_snapshot_24.47_%5B2015.04.17_06.46.02%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
(Storm Thorgerson, Graphic Designer, <i>Wish You Were Here</i>, Pink Floyd, 1975)<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<h2 id="tt5734330"><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5734330/">The Weight of Memory</a></h2></div>
<blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-size: medium">The best you could say about Vietnam was that: <i>certain</i> blood was being shed for <i>uncertain</i> reasons.</span><br>
<br>
<i>— Tim O'Brien, US Army.</i></blockquote></blockquote>
<br>
<div align="center"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-fQd71-2apzM/W_Vpp4DkYpI/AAAAAAAAC_0/LPve1nwj_CUq00bosvtK8H48ctvja-lsACLcBGAs/s1600/The%2BVietnam%2BWar%2B-%2B10%2B-%2BThe%2BWeight%2BOf%2BMemory%2B%2528march%2B1973-onward%2529%2B-%2BBroadcast%2BVersion%2B-%2B2017.mkv_snapshot_00.03.07_%255B2018.11.21_23.54.17%255D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-fQd71-2apzM/W_Vpp4DkYpI/AAAAAAAAC_0/LPve1nwj_CUq00bosvtK8H48ctvja-lsACLcBGAs/s640/The%2BVietnam%2BWar%2B-%2B10%2B-%2BThe%2BWeight%2BOf%2BMemory%2B%2528march%2B1973-onward%2529%2B-%2BBroadcast%2BVersion%2B-%2B2017.mkv_snapshot_00.03.07_%255B2018.11.21_23.54.17%255D.jpg" data-original-width="1280" data-original-height="720"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-yqswtWHj_wc/W_VpqBMwXTI/AAAAAAAAC_4/tmxCBAGaezo6rZbRFjoMVyEyY9hKwHSSQCLcBGAs/s1600/The%2BVietnam%2BWar%2B-%2B10%2B-%2BThe%2BWeight%2BOf%2BMemory%2B%2528march%2B1973-onward%2529%2B-%2BBroadcast%2BVersion%2B-%2B2017.mkv_snapshot_00.05.45_%255B2018.11.21_23.58.19%255D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-yqswtWHj_wc/W_VpqBMwXTI/AAAAAAAAC_4/tmxCBAGaezo6rZbRFjoMVyEyY9hKwHSSQCLcBGAs/s640/The%2BVietnam%2BWar%2B-%2B10%2B-%2BThe%2BWeight%2BOf%2BMemory%2B%2528march%2B1973-onward%2529%2B-%2BBroadcast%2BVersion%2B-%2B2017.mkv_snapshot_00.05.45_%255B2018.11.21_23.58.19%255D.jpg" data-original-width="1280" data-original-height="720"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-is9bSRQXvkU/XE3bz8j5J4I/AAAAAAAADDE/R2pDFgGqCrwiwyXJMWL3OdiaTlPx1DwRACLcBGAs/s1600/The%2BVietnam%2BWar%2B-%2B10%2B-%2BThe%2BWeight%2BOf%2BMemory%2B%2528march%2B1973-onward%2529%2B-%2BBroadcast%2BVersion%2B-%2B2017.mkv_snapshot_01.15.47_%255B2019.01.28_03.11.13%255D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-is9bSRQXvkU/XE3bz8j5J4I/AAAAAAAADDE/R2pDFgGqCrwiwyXJMWL3OdiaTlPx1DwRACLcBGAs/s640/The%2BVietnam%2BWar%2B-%2B10%2B-%2BThe%2BWeight%2BOf%2BMemory%2B%2528march%2B1973-onward%2529%2B-%2BBroadcast%2BVersion%2B-%2B2017.mkv_snapshot_01.15.47_%255B2019.01.28_03.11.13%255D.jpg" data-original-width="1280" data-original-height="720"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-N9gw32AFfus/XDd1s74jMMI/AAAAAAAADBI/XvQxJUX723c2hPZSAmHWq0kj4p5GAsGxACPcBGAYYCw/s1600/The%2BVietnam%2BWar%2B-%2B10%2B-%2BThe%2BWeight%2BOf%2BMemory%2B%2528march%2B1973-onward%2529%2B-%2BBroadcast%2BVersion%2B-%2B2017.mkv_snapshot_00.41.51_%255B2019.01.11_02.39.55%255D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-N9gw32AFfus/XDd1s74jMMI/AAAAAAAADBI/XvQxJUX723c2hPZSAmHWq0kj4p5GAsGxACPcBGAYYCw/s640/The%2BVietnam%2BWar%2B-%2B10%2B-%2BThe%2BWeight%2BOf%2BMemory%2B%2528march%2B1973-onward%2529%2B-%2BBroadcast%2BVersion%2B-%2B2017.mkv_snapshot_00.41.51_%255B2019.01.11_02.39.55%255D.jpg" data-original-width="1280" data-original-height="720"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Lb-fgXWozH8/XESYvyItA7I/AAAAAAAADCM/kcBQ7kYCYHYMg-OSFyW0k7DF0EjptaKtwCLcBGAs/s1600/The%2BVietnam%2BWar%2B-%2B10%2B-%2BThe%2BWeight%2BOf%2BMemory%2B%2528march%2B1973-onward%2529%2B-%2BBroadcast%2BVersion%2B-%2B2017.mkv_snapshot_01.00.12_%255B2019.01.21_02.43.49%255D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Lb-fgXWozH8/XESYvyItA7I/AAAAAAAADCM/kcBQ7kYCYHYMg-OSFyW0k7DF0EjptaKtwCLcBGAs/s640/The%2BVietnam%2BWar%2B-%2B10%2B-%2BThe%2BWeight%2BOf%2BMemory%2B%2528march%2B1973-onward%2529%2B-%2BBroadcast%2BVersion%2B-%2B2017.mkv_snapshot_01.00.12_%255B2019.01.21_02.43.49%255D.jpg" data-original-width="1280" data-original-height="720"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-7y7bEtMfIvQ/XE3cG5M7BiI/AAAAAAAADDM/RxXRiY-BysEyQK3eTpWM0fhiNlRZ-Z89QCLcBGAs/s1600/The%2BVietnam%2BWar%2B-%2B10%2B-%2BThe%2BWeight%2BOf%2BMemory%2B%2528march%2B1973-onward%2529%2B-%2BBroadcast%2BVersion%2B-%2B2017.mkv_snapshot_01.17.26_%255B2019.01.28_03.14.26%255D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-7y7bEtMfIvQ/XE3cG5M7BiI/AAAAAAAADDM/RxXRiY-BysEyQK3eTpWM0fhiNlRZ-Z89QCLcBGAs/s640/The%2BVietnam%2BWar%2B-%2B10%2B-%2BThe%2BWeight%2BOf%2BMemory%2B%2528march%2B1973-onward%2529%2B-%2BBroadcast%2BVersion%2B-%2B2017.mkv_snapshot_01.17.26_%255B2019.01.28_03.14.26%255D.jpg" data-original-width="1280" data-original-height="720"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-EJeVP6XtAy0/XFcH5L4UO9I/AAAAAAAADDY/2FUEW_GTbuoa6ziNW7kOAgE8mq4LPCyCgCLcBGAs/s1600/The%2BVietnam%2BWar%2B-%2B10%2B-%2BThe%2BWeight%2BOf%2BMemory%2B%2528march%2B1973-onward%2529%2B-%2BBroadcast%2BVersion%2B-%2B2017.mkv_snapshot_01.36.11_%255B2019.02.04_02.01.02%255D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-EJeVP6XtAy0/XFcH5L4UO9I/AAAAAAAADDY/2FUEW_GTbuoa6ziNW7kOAgE8mq4LPCyCgCLcBGAs/s640/The%2BVietnam%2BWar%2B-%2B10%2B-%2BThe%2BWeight%2BOf%2BMemory%2B%2528march%2B1973-onward%2529%2B-%2BBroadcast%2BVersion%2B-%2B2017.mkv_snapshot_01.36.11_%255B2019.02.04_02.01.02%255D.jpg" data-original-width="1280" data-original-height="720"></a><br>
<br>
(Ken Burns & Lynn Novick, <i>The Vietnam War</i>, Episode 10: March 1973 - Onward, <a href="https://scepticwatch.blogspot.com/2012/11/public-broadcasting-system-american.html#top">PBS</a>, 2017)<br>
<br>
<a name='more'></a>
<br>
<br>
<h2><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phan_Thi_Kim_Phuc">Phan Thi Kim Phuc (1963)</a></h2>
<br>
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-E5FhO0UHc4I/W-cD43tjgdI/AAAAAAAAC_k/eKt_0RHfBa02NR0-pKFVqM8F1mEgF-1yQCLcBGAs/s1600/The%2BVietnam%2BWar%2B-%2B09%2B-%2BA%2BDisrespectful%2BLoyalty%2B%2528may%2B1970-march%2B1973%2529%2B-%2BBroadcast%2BVersion%2B-%2B2017.mkv_snapshot_01.22.43_%255B2018.11.10_04.00.09%255D%252B.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-E5FhO0UHc4I/W-cD43tjgdI/AAAAAAAAC_k/eKt_0RHfBa02NR0-pKFVqM8F1mEgF-1yQCLcBGAs/s640/The%2BVietnam%2BWar%2B-%2B09%2B-%2BA%2BDisrespectful%2BLoyalty%2B%2528may%2B1970-march%2B1973%2529%2B-%2BBroadcast%2BVersion%2B-%2B2017.mkv_snapshot_01.22.43_%255B2018.11.10_04.00.09%255D%252B.jpg" data-original-width="894" data-original-height="585"></a><br>
<br>
(<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Ut">Nick Ut</a>, <i>The Associated Press</i>, 8 June 1972)<br>
<br>
<br><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-rnC5qn_eBc4/W-cD5UYnYiI/AAAAAAAAC_o/6g879W1mjEMaySeXeFVRW9Ju2xVNB_I-gCLcBGAs/s1600/The%2BVietnam%2BWar%2B-%2B09%2B-%2BA%2BDisrespectful%2BLoyalty%2B%2528may%2B1970-march%2B1973%2529%2B-%2BBroadcast%2BVersion%2B-%2B2017.mkv_snapshot_01.23.41_%255B2018.11.10_04.01.27%255D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-rnC5qn_eBc4/W-cD5UYnYiI/AAAAAAAAC_o/6g879W1mjEMaySeXeFVRW9Ju2xVNB_I-gCLcBGAs/s640/The%2BVietnam%2BWar%2B-%2B09%2B-%2BA%2BDisrespectful%2BLoyalty%2B%2528may%2B1970-march%2B1973%2529%2B-%2BBroadcast%2BVersion%2B-%2B2017.mkv_snapshot_01.23.41_%255B2018.11.10_04.01.27%255D.jpg" data-original-width="1280" data-original-height="720"></a><br>
<br>
(Ken Burns & Lynn Novick, <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5734312/">A Disrespectful Loyalty</a>, <i>The Vietnam War</i>,<br>
Episode 9: May 1970 – March 1973, PBS, 2017)</div>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<h2 id="HCB" id="contents">Photography</h2>
<p><ul><li><i>Pierre Assouline, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2378355/">A Century of Cartier-Bresson</a></i>, Arte France, Cinétévé, September 2012.
<blockquote><i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Cartier-Bresson">Henri Cartier-Bresson</a> (1908 – 2004):</i><br>
A person's freedom ends at the exact point where another person's freedom begins. …<br>
<br>
Our world is crazy. …<br>
It's the intensity of the means of destruction and creation.<br>
It's the way science is applied.<br>
Our world is mad and suicidal. …<br>
<br>
Where's this mad race taking us? …<br>
We know too many useless things. …<br>
<br>
What matters is what you do the next day, in a minute and right now. …<br>
<br>
There's the moment and there's eternity.<br>
And the void in between. …<br>
<br>
It's not so much about photography.<br>
It's about the joy of being there and recording. …<br>
<br>
We're like thieves, except that we give.</blockquote>
<br>
<div align="center"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-HjPoW3MEFhY/UgjJ4eXFzkI/AAAAAAAABIc/sZKLLgsccwU/s1600/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_04.46_%5B2013.08.10_19.04.51%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" width="360" height="533" data-original-width="324" data-original-height="480" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-HjPoW3MEFhY/UgjJ4eXFzkI/AAAAAAAABIc/sZKLLgsccwU/s480/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_04.46_%5B2013.08.10_19.04.51%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-YSzC7yStjFM/UgjKBGMwvFI/AAAAAAAABJM/iGdnJKumAdg/s1600/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_17.38_%5B2013.08.11_20.46.41%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" width="360" height="542" data-original-width="319" data-original-height="480" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-YSzC7yStjFM/UgjKBGMwvFI/AAAAAAAABJM/iGdnJKumAdg/s480/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_17.38_%5B2013.08.11_20.46.41%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-M-KLykADeuQ/UgjL4qFbKqI/AAAAAAAABJs/qCmGuhJwERs/s1600/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_22.22_%5B2013.08.11_20.53.48%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" width="360" height="542" data-original-width="319" data-original-height="480" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-M-KLykADeuQ/UgjL4qFbKqI/AAAAAAAABJs/qCmGuhJwERs/s480/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_22.22_%5B2013.08.11_20.53.48%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Yo4MhRUCAGs/UgjL5Sb9pAI/AAAAAAAABJ4/CnHlM09Po08/s1600/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_23.26_%5B2013.08.12_20.07.26%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" width="360" height="542" data-original-width="319" data-original-height="480" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Yo4MhRUCAGs/UgjL5Sb9pAI/AAAAAAAABJ4/CnHlM09Po08/s480/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_23.26_%5B2013.08.12_20.07.26%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-QdPYxU9trjk/UgjL7teWnCI/AAAAAAAABKM/dhkDD1_GRuo/s1600/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_24.17_%5B2013.08.12_20.09.20%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" width="360" height="552" data-original-width="313" data-original-height="480" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-QdPYxU9trjk/UgjL7teWnCI/AAAAAAAABKM/dhkDD1_GRuo/s480/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_24.17_%5B2013.08.12_20.09.20%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-t4a_PiODfEY/UgjL9Psh2lI/AAAAAAAABKc/95pkRbuu0zg/s1600/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_24.23_%5B2013.08.12_20.09.43%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" width="360" height="543" data-original-width="318" data-original-height="480" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-t4a_PiODfEY/UgjL9Psh2lI/AAAAAAAABKc/95pkRbuu0zg/s480/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_24.23_%5B2013.08.12_20.09.43%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-QOhheyGN4i0/UgjL9lyWVdI/AAAAAAAABKk/e3cC63rUTP0/s1600/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_25.53_%5B2013.08.12_20.12.52%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" width="360" height="550" data-original-width="314" data-original-height="480" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-QOhheyGN4i0/UgjL9lyWVdI/AAAAAAAABKk/e3cC63rUTP0/s480/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_25.53_%5B2013.08.12_20.12.52%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-gnSxyimF44U/UgjL-FUBzcI/AAAAAAAABKs/5B_st0Vv2XM/s1600/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_26.41_%5B2013.08.12_20.14.03%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" width="360" height="549" data-original-width="315" data-original-height="480" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-gnSxyimF44U/UgjL-FUBzcI/AAAAAAAABKs/5B_st0Vv2XM/s480/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_26.41_%5B2013.08.12_20.14.03%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-_Er-eGai2aw/UgpLUX31doI/AAAAAAAABMI/pp0StjstzY0/s1600/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_31.56_%255B2013.08.12_20.42.01%255D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" width="360" height="550" data-original-width="314" data-original-height="480" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-_Er-eGai2aw/UgpLUX31doI/AAAAAAAABMI/pp0StjstzY0/s480/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_31.56_%255B2013.08.12_20.42.01%255D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-NdqUTfEzARc/UgpLU6ghWqI/AAAAAAAABMY/uW3MQAuaGOM/s1600/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_32.04_%255B2013.08.12_20.42.16%255D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" width="360" height="545" data-original-width="317" data-original-height="480" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-NdqUTfEzARc/UgpLU6ghWqI/AAAAAAAABMY/uW3MQAuaGOM/s480/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_32.04_%255B2013.08.12_20.42.16%255D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-PCv7H8B5pSs/UgpLWNN3lVI/AAAAAAAABMg/spOuiHmUtWw/s1600/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_32.20_%255B2013.08.12_20.42.37%255D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" width="360" height="549" data-original-width="315" data-original-height="480" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-PCv7H8B5pSs/UgpLWNN3lVI/AAAAAAAABMg/spOuiHmUtWw/s480/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_32.20_%255B2013.08.12_20.42.37%255D.jpg"><br>
<br>
<br>
</a><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-vCQ3KBHASi0/UgpLWsXujTI/AAAAAAAABMs/FuQrcb8pDF4/s1600/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_32.33_%255B2013.08.12_20.42.56%255D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" width="360" height="537" data-original-width="322" data-original-height="480" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-vCQ3KBHASi0/UgpLWsXujTI/AAAAAAAABMs/FuQrcb8pDF4/s480/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_32.33_%255B2013.08.12_20.42.56%255D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ljeK189RtVs/UgpLXEie9cI/AAAAAAAABMw/H1vWwovMWxk/s1600/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_32.49_%255B2013.08.12_20.43.22%255D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" width="360" height="543" data-original-width="318" data-original-height="480" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ljeK189RtVs/UgpLXEie9cI/AAAAAAAABMw/H1vWwovMWxk/s480/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_32.49_%255B2013.08.12_20.43.22%255D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-3MP61iVgbwE/UgpLYSQv3XI/AAAAAAAABM8/gB0gESgHBZs/s1600/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_33.01_%255B2013.08.12_20.43.58%255D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" width="360" height="540" data-original-width="320" data-original-height="480" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-3MP61iVgbwE/UgpLYSQv3XI/AAAAAAAABM8/gB0gESgHBZs/s480/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_33.01_%255B2013.08.12_20.43.58%255D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-JvsDgW29q7M/UgpLYQfq9KI/AAAAAAAABNA/GnfZPNJwVPo/s1600/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_34.20_%255B2013.08.12_20.46.55%255D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" width="360" height="537" data-original-width="322" data-original-height="480" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-JvsDgW29q7M/UgpLYQfq9KI/AAAAAAAABNA/GnfZPNJwVPo/s480/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_34.20_%255B2013.08.12_20.46.55%255D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-PpiwzwiROvQ/UgpPNVnY0iI/AAAAAAAABNw/-yxNmAAdn7k/s1600/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_27.07_%255B2013.08.12_20.16.17%255D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" width="360" height="537" data-original-width="322" data-original-height="480" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-PpiwzwiROvQ/UgpPNVnY0iI/AAAAAAAABNw/-yxNmAAdn7k/s480/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_27.07_%255B2013.08.12_20.16.17%255D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-d8T1yt4kM1o/UgpPNnm4P7I/AAAAAAAABNs/caNfTC0NByI/s1600/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_27.16_%255B2013.08.12_20.17.07%255D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" width="360" height="549" data-original-width="315" data-original-height="480" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-d8T1yt4kM1o/UgpPNnm4P7I/AAAAAAAABNs/caNfTC0NByI/s480/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_27.16_%255B2013.08.12_20.17.07%255D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ewCWtdEqJUo/UgpPQFdPFkI/AAAAAAAABOI/ptThMcFOojs/s1600/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_29.22_%255B2013.08.12_20.21.15%255D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" width="360" height="547" data-original-width="316" data-original-height="480" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ewCWtdEqJUo/UgpPQFdPFkI/AAAAAAAABOI/ptThMcFOojs/s480/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_29.22_%255B2013.08.12_20.21.15%255D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-igU5HjoeJjY/UgpPPo61t0I/AAAAAAAABOA/E0VvarsKoR4/s1600/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_29.35_%255B2013.08.12_20.34.13%255D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" width="360" height="542" data-original-width="319" data-original-height="480" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-igU5HjoeJjY/UgpPPo61t0I/AAAAAAAABOA/E0VvarsKoR4/s480/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_29.35_%255B2013.08.12_20.34.13%255D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-x6S8r_g8uMc/UgpPQ7hvI9I/AAAAAAAABOQ/dKvNSzjBIXY/s1600/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_30.12_%255B2013.08.12_20.35.16%255D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" width="360" height="545" data-original-width="317" data-original-height="480" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-x6S8r_g8uMc/UgpPQ7hvI9I/AAAAAAAABOQ/dKvNSzjBIXY/s480/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_30.12_%255B2013.08.12_20.35.16%255D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-CGwj5eVThpQ/Ug-J67wNCQI/AAAAAAAABO4/TlCI6kT4zpk/s1600/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_04.31_%5B2013.08.10_19.04.27%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" width="360" height="545" data-original-width="317" data-original-height="480" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-CGwj5eVThpQ/Ug-J67wNCQI/AAAAAAAABO4/TlCI6kT4zpk/s480/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_04.31_%5B2013.08.10_19.04.27%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-8qeDhwVXQxw/Ug-J8KohFEI/AAAAAAAABPE/sn1HUq-zaK8/s1600/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_36.16_%5B2013.08.12_20.51.08%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" width="360" height="543" data-original-width="318" data-original-height="480" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-8qeDhwVXQxw/Ug-J8KohFEI/AAAAAAAABPE/sn1HUq-zaK8/s480/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_36.16_%5B2013.08.12_20.51.08%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Aq8MNfdtsFg/Ug-J7t-TlMI/AAAAAAAABPA/cFFYLUgjUDQ/s1600/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_40.05_%5B2013.08.14_00.16.54%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" width="360" height="545" data-original-width="317" data-original-height="480" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Aq8MNfdtsFg/Ug-J7t-TlMI/AAAAAAAABPA/cFFYLUgjUDQ/s480/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_40.05_%5B2013.08.14_00.16.54%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-RrBAnbJaAB0/Ug-J-oNGz4I/AAAAAAAABPQ/-9OyB3mAr_g/s1600/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_46.14_%5B2013.08.14_00.26.22%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" width="360" height="549" data-original-width="315" data-original-height="480" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-RrBAnbJaAB0/Ug-J-oNGz4I/AAAAAAAABPQ/-9OyB3mAr_g/s480/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_46.14_%5B2013.08.14_00.26.22%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-napRcWllMSQ/Ug-KBe1vscI/AAAAAAAABPg/oDu5uMeSrNI/s1600/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_48.11_%5B2013.08.14_00.31.15%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" width="360" height="543" data-original-width="318" data-original-height="480" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-napRcWllMSQ/Ug-KBe1vscI/AAAAAAAABPg/oDu5uMeSrNI/s480/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_48.11_%5B2013.08.14_00.31.15%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-b2mkmmLeNnw/Ug-J-1rE60I/AAAAAAAABPU/NKFRdFXuKQs/s1600/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_50.22_%5B2013.08.14_00.40.57%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" width="360" height="479" data-original-width="321" data-original-height="480" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-b2mkmmLeNnw/Ug-J-1rE60I/AAAAAAAABPU/NKFRdFXuKQs/s480/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_50.22_%5B2013.08.14_00.40.57%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-VEjUZ3DcBPc/Ug-KCAgzxlI/AAAAAAAABPo/x5X0g_ApAzM/s1600/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_50.32_%5B2013.08.14_00.41.36%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" width="360" height="543" data-original-width="318" data-original-height="480" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-VEjUZ3DcBPc/Ug-KCAgzxlI/AAAAAAAABPo/x5X0g_ApAzM/s480/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_50.32_%5B2013.08.14_00.41.36%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-zAQ43PnA-HM/Ug-PMSUVG7I/AAAAAAAABRk/YpKAxXCDMgk/s1600/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_31.24_%5B2013.08.12_20.40.38%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" width="360" height="542" data-original-width="319" data-original-height="480" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-zAQ43PnA-HM/Ug-PMSUVG7I/AAAAAAAABRk/YpKAxXCDMgk/s480/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_31.24_%5B2013.08.12_20.40.38%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-KII8_qC5UX4/Ug-KCPXqgzI/AAAAAAAABPs/eAeqe9S2luc/s1600/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_51.14_%5B2013.08.14_00.43.59%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" width="360" height="547" data-original-width="316" data-original-height="480" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-KII8_qC5UX4/Ug-KCPXqgzI/AAAAAAAABPs/eAeqe9S2luc/s480/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_51.14_%5B2013.08.14_00.43.59%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Ol73_dijhu0/UgjJ445SR6I/AAAAAAAABIk/qXTBDtnTjqc/s1600/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_06.12_%5B2013.08.10_19.06.36%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Ol73_dijhu0/UgjJ445SR6I/AAAAAAAABIk/qXTBDtnTjqc/s640/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_06.12_%5B2013.08.10_19.06.36%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-KmLtYSYayAE/UgjJ5Df4API/AAAAAAAABIo/tVwUrvijhus/s1600/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_07.05_%5B2013.08.10_19.08.02%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-KmLtYSYayAE/UgjJ5Df4API/AAAAAAAABIo/tVwUrvijhus/s640/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_07.05_%5B2013.08.10_19.08.02%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/--vB9R76cy84/UgjJ7CArwHI/AAAAAAAABI8/ZxpJn515vEg/s1600/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_07.31_%5B2013.08.10_19.08.39%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/--vB9R76cy84/UgjJ7CArwHI/AAAAAAAABI8/ZxpJn515vEg/s640/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_07.31_%5B2013.08.10_19.08.39%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-7rUGUBHRQ3s/Ug-PP6OZxZI/AAAAAAAABRs/vdJILiR0wgA/s1600/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_07.41_%5B2013.08.10_19.09.10%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-7rUGUBHRQ3s/Ug-PP6OZxZI/AAAAAAAABRs/vdJILiR0wgA/s640/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_07.41_%5B2013.08.10_19.09.10%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-zKd6ypOlKbU/Ug-PaBJq4aI/AAAAAAAABR0/TRnfk17Lm8A/s1600/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_06.46_%5B2013.08.10_19.07.25%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-zKd6ypOlKbU/Ug-PaBJq4aI/AAAAAAAABR0/TRnfk17Lm8A/s640/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_06.46_%5B2013.08.10_19.07.25%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-c_-YpR8EHW4/UgjJ8vfRpTI/AAAAAAAABJE/D630J-BcYlw/s1600/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_18.27_%5B2013.08.11_20.47.50%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-c_-YpR8EHW4/UgjJ8vfRpTI/AAAAAAAABJE/D630J-BcYlw/s640/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_18.27_%5B2013.08.11_20.47.50%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-nZgNeelGxM4/UgjL4COdxMI/AAAAAAAABJk/rIARQhd0p9U/s1600/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_18.36_%5B2013.08.11_20.48.06%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-nZgNeelGxM4/UgjL4COdxMI/AAAAAAAABJk/rIARQhd0p9U/s640/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_18.36_%5B2013.08.11_20.48.06%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-6S3xpgRas7Q/UgjL3EWzdiI/AAAAAAAABJc/TLNGWgCqmdA/s1600/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_18.41_%5B2013.08.11_20.48.25%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-6S3xpgRas7Q/UgjL3EWzdiI/AAAAAAAABJc/TLNGWgCqmdA/s640/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_18.41_%5B2013.08.11_20.48.25%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-GgP_-LOhMcQ/UgjL4y-wAkI/AAAAAAAABJw/w2Wp9omtIpQ/s1600/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_21.06_%5B2013.08.11_20.51.18%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-GgP_-LOhMcQ/UgjL4y-wAkI/AAAAAAAABJw/w2Wp9omtIpQ/s640/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_21.06_%5B2013.08.11_20.51.18%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-baJiL5aPCh4/UgjL7B_aFSI/AAAAAAAABKE/cv3vT_M4iUI/s1600/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_23.40_%5B2013.08.12_20.08.29%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-baJiL5aPCh4/UgjL7B_aFSI/AAAAAAAABKE/cv3vT_M4iUI/s640/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_23.40_%5B2013.08.12_20.08.29%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-lXeUKkRosww/UgjL8RGss6I/AAAAAAAABKU/ccY7PvsUzh4/s1600/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_23.41_%5B2013.08.12_20.08.37%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-lXeUKkRosww/UgjL8RGss6I/AAAAAAAABKU/ccY7PvsUzh4/s640/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_23.41_%5B2013.08.12_20.08.37%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-mackr3vQuag/UgpLU31JAZI/AAAAAAAABMU/ELYHZdvOBz0/s1600/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_31.38_%255B2013.08.12_20.41.10%255D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-mackr3vQuag/UgpLU31JAZI/AAAAAAAABMU/ELYHZdvOBz0/s640/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_31.38_%255B2013.08.12_20.41.10%255D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-C3TcifIiCFk/UgpLY9TdpiI/AAAAAAAABNI/8l0Du1HM3pY/s1600/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_32.52_%255B2013.08.12_20.43.31%255D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-C3TcifIiCFk/UgpLY9TdpiI/AAAAAAAABNI/8l0Du1HM3pY/s640/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_32.52_%255B2013.08.12_20.43.31%255D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-cxV9-UIUFdY/UgpLabZkpgI/AAAAAAAABNQ/OUPif9FFfCI/s1600/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_34.53_%255B2013.08.12_20.47.51%255D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-cxV9-UIUFdY/UgpLabZkpgI/AAAAAAAABNQ/OUPif9FFfCI/s640/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_34.53_%255B2013.08.12_20.47.51%255D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0OtyD882wAU/UgpPM9crIvI/AAAAAAAABNg/Xr3EdPQQ67M/s1600/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_28.53_%255B2013.08.12_20.20.23%255D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0OtyD882wAU/UgpPM9crIvI/AAAAAAAABNg/Xr3EdPQQ67M/s640/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_28.53_%255B2013.08.12_20.20.23%255D.jpg"><br>
<br>
<br>
</a><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-xFr_FZxRhxQ/UgpPPnKxPDI/AAAAAAAABN8/OCgtvWYhC3I/s1600/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_29.12_%255B2013.08.12_20.20.52%255D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-xFr_FZxRhxQ/UgpPPnKxPDI/AAAAAAAABN8/OCgtvWYhC3I/s640/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_29.12_%255B2013.08.12_20.20.52%255D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-TE8XlpOZu3M/Ug-LSuY9UnI/AAAAAAAABQA/3uQT_oVJj7g/s1600/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_43.27_%5B2013.08.14_00.21.48%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-TE8XlpOZu3M/Ug-LSuY9UnI/AAAAAAAABQA/3uQT_oVJj7g/s640/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_43.27_%5B2013.08.14_00.21.48%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-3uGQvuEiTkQ/Ug-LTbI2KrI/AAAAAAAABQM/sFeIKwJh6Ho/s1600/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_43.46_%5B2013.08.14_00.22.39%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-3uGQvuEiTkQ/Ug-LTbI2KrI/AAAAAAAABQM/sFeIKwJh6Ho/s640/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_43.46_%5B2013.08.14_00.22.39%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-aRs1_Y3GMHM/Ug-LSTX-C6I/AAAAAAAABP8/dznB_5nz1cQ/s1600/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_46.47_%5B2013.08.14_00.27.02%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-aRs1_Y3GMHM/Ug-LSTX-C6I/AAAAAAAABP8/dznB_5nz1cQ/s640/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_46.47_%5B2013.08.14_00.27.02%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-VBpnaHL5ZyY/Ug-LWxPq1SI/AAAAAAAABQU/1zhDfH38PpU/s1600/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_47.03_%5B2013.08.14_00.28.35%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-VBpnaHL5ZyY/Ug-LWxPq1SI/AAAAAAAABQU/1zhDfH38PpU/s640/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_47.03_%5B2013.08.14_00.28.35%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-DE8-CpSKDU4/Ug-LXlsIegI/AAAAAAAABQc/bb-zyJkFPMo/s1600/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_47.08_%5B2013.08.14_00.28.55%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-DE8-CpSKDU4/Ug-LXlsIegI/AAAAAAAABQc/bb-zyJkFPMo/s640/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_47.08_%5B2013.08.14_00.28.55%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-LyEiQFgqr5w/Ug-LfVoQpjI/AAAAAAAABQs/mTNpvrMGoAQ/s1600/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_48.40_%5B2013.08.14_00.33.15%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-LyEiQFgqr5w/Ug-LfVoQpjI/AAAAAAAABQs/mTNpvrMGoAQ/s640/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_48.40_%5B2013.08.14_00.33.15%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-iJtZM-jQX1M/Ug-Lc9SqvJI/AAAAAAAABQk/wVmjJPnSl2Q/s1600/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_49.24_%5B2013.08.14_00.37.11%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-iJtZM-jQX1M/Ug-Lc9SqvJI/AAAAAAAABQk/wVmjJPnSl2Q/s640/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_49.24_%5B2013.08.14_00.37.11%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Es_P32N25Tk/Ug-LgUjWyxI/AAAAAAAABQ0/_lj6Qas_sOY/s1600/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_49.36_%5B2013.08.14_00.37.35%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Es_P32N25Tk/Ug-LgUjWyxI/AAAAAAAABQ0/_lj6Qas_sOY/s640/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_49.36_%5B2013.08.14_00.37.35%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-7Bf1ZeeDkbs/Ug-LiRAwFgI/AAAAAAAABQ8/-tpyFhM6Ri8/s1600/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_50.38_%5B2013.08.14_00.41.51%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-7Bf1ZeeDkbs/Ug-LiRAwFgI/AAAAAAAABQ8/-tpyFhM6Ri8/s640/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_50.38_%5B2013.08.14_00.41.51%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-8Xs-AEoVbxU/Ug-LjXDvPVI/AAAAAAAABRM/0wBXpOd4KJE/s1600/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_52.30_%5B2013.08.14_00.48.50%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-8Xs-AEoVbxU/Ug-LjXDvPVI/AAAAAAAABRM/0wBXpOd4KJE/s640/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_52.30_%5B2013.08.14_00.48.50%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Ocjh_ZLEonc/Ug-RIoGlZLI/AAAAAAAABSE/c2njdrHfbNk/s1600/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_51.54_%5B2013.08.14_00.47.42%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Ocjh_ZLEonc/Ug-RIoGlZLI/AAAAAAAABSE/c2njdrHfbNk/s640/The+Century+Of+Cartier-Bresson_1500K.mp4_snapshot_51.54_%5B2013.08.14_00.47.42%5D.jpg"></a></div>
</li></ul></p>peaceandlonglifehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09059683906637157584noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1170524542125253803.post-61491932626528209632013-02-28T05:47:00.002-08:002023-01-22T06:07:41.350-08:00The Dominion of Fear<i id="top"><a href="https://40-eridani-a.blogspot.com/search/label/Dogmatism%20and%20Scepticism">Dogmatism and Scepticism</a></i><br>
<br>
<br>
<blockquote><span style="font-size: medium">[Only] while under the dominion of fear, do men fall … prey to superstition …</span><br>
<br>
<i>— <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baruch_Spinoza">Baruch Spinoza</a> (1632 – 77), </i>Tractatus Theologico-Politicus<i>, 1677.</i><br>
<br>
<br>
<span style="font-size: medium">The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge …</span><br>
<br>
<i>— Proverbs, 1:7, </i><a href="https://40-eridani-a.blogspot.com/2017/03/prose.html#Bible">King James Bible</a><i>, 1611.</i><br>
<br>
<br>
<span style="font-size: medium">And in these four things,
<ul><li>opinion of ghosts,</li>
<li>ignorance of second causes,</li>
<li>devotion towards what men fear, and</li>
<li>taking things casual for prognostics,</li></ul>
consisteth the natural seed of <i>religion</i> …<br>
So easy are men drawn to believe any thing, from such men as have gotten credit with them; and can with gentleness, and dexterity, take hold of their fear, and ignorance.</span><br>
<br>
<i>— <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hobbes">Thomas Hobbes</a> (1588 – 1679), Of Religion, </i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leviathan_(Hobbes_book)">Leviathan</a><i>, Chapter 12, 1651.</i><br>
<br>
<br>
<span style="font-size: medium">That's the thing about faith.<br>
If you don't have it, you can't understand it.<br>
And if you do, no explanation is necessary.</span><br>
<br>
<i>— <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708497/?tab=qt">Accession</a>, </i>Star Trek: Deep Space Nine<i>, Episode 16, Season 4, 1996.</i><br>
<br>
<br>
<span style="font-size: medium">NOBODY expects the <a href="https://scepticwatch.blogspot.com/2013/05/carl-sagan.html#top">Spanish Inquisition</a>!<br>
<br>
Our CHIEF weapon is Surprise …<br>
Surprise and Fear. …<br>
<br>
Our TWO weapons are Fear and Surprise …<br>
And Ruthless Efficiency. …<br>
<br>
Our THREE weapons are Fear, Surprise, and Ruthless Efficiency …<br>
And An Almost Fanatical Devotion To The Pope. …<br>
<br>
Our FOUR …<br>
AMONGST our weaponry are such diverse elements as:
<ul><li>Fear,</li>
<li>Surprise,</li>
<li>Ruthless Efficiency, [AND …]</li>
<li>An Almost Fanatical Devotion To The Pope …</li></ul></span></blockquote>
<br>
<div align="center"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-A2vXAoEt0os/UZoQD23b7cI/AAAAAAAAA3U/Bb_KOw0YQS0/s1600/tt3.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" width="640" height="452" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-A2vXAoEt0os/UZoQD23b7cI/AAAAAAAAA3U/Bb_KOw0YQS0/s640/tt3.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
(<i><a href="https://people.csail.mit.edu/paulfitz/spanish/script.html">Monty Python's Flying Circus</a></i>, BBC, 22 September, 1970)</div>
<br>
<a name='more'></a>
<blockquote><i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Clark">Christopher Clark</a> (1960):</i><br>
[For] 300 years the Roman Church [persisted] in considering heliocentrism to be a heretical doctrine.<br>
The Inquisition [forced] Galileo to recant his theories, and the Church [didn't] admit its mistake until 1992 when Galileo [was] ultimately vindicated by Pope John Paul II.<br>
(Achievement and Rewards, <i>Story of Europe</i>, Episode 4, Season 1, 2017)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baruch_Spinoza">Baruch Spinoza</a> (1632 – 77):</i><br>
The greatest secret of monarchic rule is
<ul><li>to keep men deceived, and</li>
<li>to cloak, in the specious name of religion, the fear by which they must be checked,</li></ul>
so that they
<ul><li>will fight for slavery as they would for salvation, and</li>
<li>will think it not shameful, but a most honorable achievement, to give their life and blood that one man may have a ground for boasting. …</li></ul>
<br>
They who can treat secretly of the affairs of a nation have it absolutely under their authority; and
<ul><li>as they plot against the <i>enemy</i> in time of war,</li>
<li>so do they against the <i>citizens</i> in time of peace. …</li></ul>
<br>
[Prophets] have the most power among the people, and are most formidable to rulers, precisely at those times when the state is in most peril.<br>
(<i>Tractatus Theologico-Politicus</i>, 1677, emphasis added)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Bysshe_Shelley">Percy Shelley</a> (1792 – 1822):</i><br>
Superstition, in a thousand shapes, is employed in brutalizing and degrading the human species, and fitting it to endure without a murmur the oppression of its innumerable tyrants.<br>
(<i>A Refutation of Deism</i>, 1814)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Bakunin">Mikhail Bakunin</a> (1814 – 76):</i><br>
[The] idea of God … is the most decisive negation of human liberty, and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind …<br>
(<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_and_the_State">God and the State</a></i>, 1882)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmund_Freud">Sigmund Freud</a> (1856 – 1939):</i><br>
Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanour.<br>
(<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Future_of_an_Illusion">The Future of an Illusion</a></i>, 1927)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein">Albert Einstein</a> (1879 – 1955):</i><br>
A man’s ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary.<br>
Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.<br>
(Religion and Science, <i>New York Times Magazine</i>, 1930)<br>
<br>
It was the experience of mystery — even if mixed with fear — that engendered religion. …<br>
An individual who should survive his physical death is … beyond my comprehension, nor do I wish it otherwise; such notions are for the fears or absurd egoism of feeble souls.<br>
(<a href="http://www.einsteinandreligion.com/worldsee2.html">The World as I See It</a>, 1949)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Conan_Doyle">Arthur Doyle</a> (1859 – 1930):</i><br>
What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear?<br>
It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable.<br>
But what end?<br>
There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever.<br>
(The Adventure of the Cardboard Box, <i>The Last Bow</i>, 1917)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baron_d%27Holbach">Baron d'Holbach</a> (1723 – 89):</i><br>
If we go back to be beginning, we shall find that ignorance and fear created the Gods.<br>
That fancy, enthusiasm or deceit adorned or disfigured them.<br>
The weakness worships them.<br>
That credulity preserves them.<br>
And that custom, respect and tyranny, support them.<br>
(<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_System_of_Nature">The System of Nature</a></i>, 1770)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://scepticwatch.blogspot.com/2011/12/russell-bertrand.html#top">Bertrand Russell</a> (1872 – 1970):</i><br>
[The] function of religion [is] not conducive to the exercise of intellectual adventure.<br>
(<i>Wisdom of the West</i>, 1959, p 11)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://scepticwatch.blogspot.com/2012/11/public-broadcasting-system-american.html#sword">James McPherson</a> (1936):</i><br>
The rise of education … since the seventeenth century [grew] out of the protestant Reformation.<br>
The priesthood of all believers needed to know how to read and understand God's word.<br>
(<i>Battle Cry of Freedom</i>, 2nd Edition, Oxford University Press, 2003, p 18)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://40-eridani-a.blogspot.com/2017/03/prose.html#Hume">David Hume</a> (1711 – 76):</i><br>
It is an absurdity to believe that the Deity [is subject to that lowest of] human passions, a restless appetite for applause.<br>
(<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialogues_Concerning_Natural_Religion">Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion</a></i>, 1776)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Poincar%C3%A9">Henri Poincare</a> (1854 – 1912):</i><br>
We also know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder whether delusion is not more consoling.<br>
<br>
<i>Gareth Southwell:</i><br>
[A] 2012 report by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago … revealed that, since 1991, religious belief declined in 14 of 18 countries surveyed by an average of 2.4%, while atheism rose in all but three countries by an average of 1.7%. …<br>
In Elaine Howard Eckland's 2010 book, <i>Science vs Religion: What Do Scientists Say?</i>, of nearly 1,700 scientists working at American universities, 64% [as opposed to 37% of the general public] had no religious belief (30% were atheists, and 34% were agnostics).<br>
(<i>50 Philosophy of science ideas you really need to know</i>, Quercus, 2013, p 100)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Gregory_I">Pope Gregory the Great</a> (c540 – 604):</i><br>
We are almost ashamed to refer to the fact that a report has come to us that your brotherhood is teaching grammar to certain people …<br>
If it should be clearly proved here-after that the report we have heard is false and that you are not devoting yourself to the vanities of worldly learning, we shall render thanks to God for keeping you heart from defilement.<br>
(<i>Epistles</i> XI, 54)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stuart_Mill">John Mill</a> (1806 – 73):</i><br>
On religion [the time has come] when it is the duty of all who … have, on mature consideration, satisfied themselves that the current opinions are not only false, but hurtful, to make their dissent known …<br>
(Moral Influences in Early Youth, <i><a href="https://archive.org/stream/autobiographymil00milluoft#page/45/mode/1up">Autobiography</a></i>, 1873, p 45)<br>
<br>
Christian morality {is essentially a doctrine of passive obedience …}<br>
It holds out the hope of heaven and the threat of hell, as the appointed and appropriate motives to a virtuous life [giving] to human morality an essentially selfish character, by disconnecting each man's feelings of duty from the interests of his fellow creatures …<br>
What little recognition the idea of obligation to the public obtains in modern morality is derived from Greek and Roman sources, not from Christian …<br>
[The] Christian system is no exception to the rule, that in an imperfect state of the human mind the interests of truth require a diversity of opinions. …<br>
[A] large portion of the noblest and most valuable moral teaching has been the work, not only of men who did not know, but of men who knew and rejected, the Christian faith.<br>
<br>
In former days, when it was proposed to burn atheists, charitable people used to suggest putting them in a madhouse instead …<br>
(<i>On Liberty</i>, 1859)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhGuXCuDb1U">Tim Minchin</a> (1975):</i><br>
Science adjusts its belief based on what's observed.<br>
Faith is the denial of observations so that belief can be preserved.<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Berkeley">George Berkeley</a> (1685 – 1753):</i><br>
[There] is not perhaps any one thing that hath more favored and strengthened the depraved bent of the mind toward atheism, than the use of [the term: 'matter'.]<br>
(<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Dialogues_between_Hylas_and_Philonous">Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous in Opposition to Sceptics and Atheists</a></i>, 1713)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Jacobs">Alan Jacobs</a> (1958):</i>
So when people say …
<blockquote>We all believe in the same God, we just express that belief in different ways,</blockquote>
we may with some justification commend those people for attempting to get beyond confrontation, dichotomy, [and] argument as [warfare.]<br>
But we have to go on to say that the attempt is a facile one.<br>
The real story will be far more complicated, and not to be grasped by replacing a fictitious polarity with an equally fictitious unity.<br>
(<i>How to Think</i>, Profile, 2017, p 100)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Haldeman">Joe Haldeman</a> (1943):</i><br>
Macro … was a member of a militant supersecret sect within a sect: the Hammer of God.<br>
Like all Enders, they believed God was about to bring about the destruction of humankind.<br>
Unlike most of the them, the Hammer of God felt called upon to help.<br>
(<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forever_Peace">Forever Peace</a></i>, 1977)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michio_Kaku">Michio Kaku</a> (1947):</i><br>
[The] neurologist V S Ramanchandran describes one split-brain patient who, when asked if he was a believer or not, said he was an atheist, but his right brain declared he was a believer. …
<blockquote>If that person dies, what happens?<br>
Does one hemisphere go to heaven and the other go to hell?</blockquote>
(<i>The Future of the Min</i>d, Anchor, 2014, p 39)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sagan">Carl Sagan</a> (1934 – 96):</i><br>
[Why] is it necessary for God to intervene in human [affairs? …]<br>
Why is there such a long list of things that God tells people to do?<br>
Why didn't God do it right in the first place? …<br>
[Why] should God be so clear in the Bible and so obscure in the world?<br>
(<i>The God Hypothesis</i>)<br>
<br>
[Better] the hard truth … than the comforting fantasy.<br>
(p 191)<br>
<br>
And if the world does not in all respects correspond to our wishes, is this the fault of science, or of those who would impose their wishes on the world?<br>
(p 254)<br>
<br>
Liberation from superstition is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for science.<br>
(<i><a href="https://scepticwatch.blogspot.com/2013/05/carl-sagan.html#candle">Demon Haunted World</a></i>, 1997, p 294)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protagoras">Protagoras</a> (c490 – c420 BCE):</i><br>
About the gods, I have no means of knowing either:
<ul><li>that they exist, or</li>
<li>that they do not exist.</li></ul>
Or what they are to look at.<br>
Many things prevent my knowing.<br>
Among others, the fact that they are never seen.<br>
(<i>Essay on the Gods</i>)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Clark">Kenneth Clark</a> (1903 – 83):</i><br>
The older medieval philosophers, like Anslem, had said:
<blockquote>I must believe, in order that I may understand.</blockquote>
Abelard took the opposite course:
<blockquote>I must understand, in order that I may believe. …<br>
By doubting, we come to questioning.<br>
And by questioning, we perceive the truth.</blockquote>
Strange words to have been written in the year 1122.<br>
(The Great Thaw, <a href="https://40-eridani-a.blogspot.com/2012/05/stage-and-screen.html#clark">Civilisation</a>, Episode 2, <i>BBC</i>, 1969)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Pinker">Steven Pinker</a> (1954):</i><br>
When [Westerners] affirm their faith in houses of worship, they profess beliefs that have barely changed in two thousand years.<br>
But when it comes to their actions, they [generally] respect modern norms of nonviolence and toleration — a benevolent hypocrisy for which we should all be grateful.<br>
(<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nature">The Better Angels of Our Nature</a></i>, Penguin, 2011, p 17)</blockquote>
<br>
<h3 id="contents">Contents</h3>
<br>
<a href="#waco">The Second Comings of Christ</a><br>
<br>
<a href="#deus">Yuval Harari: Homo Deus</a><br>
<br>
<a href="#epicurus">Epicurus</a><br>
<br>
<a href="#god">The Multiple Personalities of God</a><br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<h2 align="center" id="waco">The Second Comings of Christ</h2>
<blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-size: medium">The judgments of the LORD are true and righteous altogether.</span><br>
<br>
<i>— Psalms 19:9, </i>King James Bible<i>, 1611.</i></blockquote></blockquote>
<br>
<div align="center"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/--MgLJxI_XWk/XO9xuhviHXI/AAAAAAAADL8/qo0DByXv_xEp7sAWVNi1YpbSvs9N70LngCLcBGAs/s1600/waco2106.JPG" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/--MgLJxI_XWk/XO9xuhviHXI/AAAAAAAADL8/qo0DByXv_xEp7sAWVNi1YpbSvs9N70LngCLcBGAs/s640/waco2106.JPG" data-original-width="682" data-original-height="413"></a><br>
<br>
(Christopher Spencer, <i><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7882076/">WACO: Madman Or Messiah?</a></i>, 2018)</div>
<br>
<blockquote><i>Graeme Carddock [Branch Davidian]:</i><br>
[I] saw someone pouring … fuel on the floor.<br>
[Later] I heard someone from upstairs call out: …
<blockquote>Light the fire!</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<br>
<div align="center"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-V63kjItoRyA/XPjP1IxTw9I/AAAAAAAADMc/qRxU_ChY4lYEYXSod2viEVMvShiZaUruwCLcBGAs/s1600/waco_longestseige01.JPG" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-V63kjItoRyA/XPjP1IxTw9I/AAAAAAAADMc/qRxU_ChY4lYEYXSod2viEVMvShiZaUruwCLcBGAs/s640/waco_longestseige01.JPG" data-original-width="764" data-original-height="417"></a></div>
<br>
<blockquote>75 people die in the inferno, including 25 children … 16 of the bodies, including David Koresh, have gunshot wounds to the head.<br>
(Waco: The Longest Siege, <i>Smithsonian Channel</i>, 2018)<br>
<br>
<i>Charles Pace [Branch Davidian]:</i><br>
They found most of the women and children dead [in a concrete vault.]<br>
Some of them were stuck together because of the heat … the children hugging each other.<br>
That's what happens when you misinterpret scripture.<br>
God judges you.<br>
<br>
<i>Kat Schroeder [Branch Davidian]:</i><br>
No one is getting out of that fire.<br>
They are determined to do God's will.<br>
And serve [His] purpose. …<br>
<br>
I was proud of [my husband, but when he died] what I felt was more like jealousy.<br>
Because Mike was closer to God. …<br>
<br>
[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Koresh">David Koresh</a>] was an incarnation of God. …<br>
What are we going to do without David?<br>
How are we going to know what God wants us to do without [him?]<br>
(Christopher Spencer, <i><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7882076/">WACO: Madman Or Messiah?</a></i>, 2018)</blockquote>
<br>
<div align="center"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-3BFH_U5mhmI/XPf5dSIoJwI/AAAAAAAADMM/r-w47HJ6kuEd0CmqgUQYdeINRqrqU47YgCLcBGAs/s1600/waco_longestseige.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-3BFH_U5mhmI/XPf5dSIoJwI/AAAAAAAADMM/r-w47HJ6kuEd0CmqgUQYdeINRqrqU47YgCLcBGAs/s640/waco_longestseige.JPG" data-original-width="763" data-original-height="428"></a><br>
<br>
(Waco: The Longest Siege, <i>Smithsonian Channel</i>, 2018)<br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-JZRMWPLuIgY/XOufuCVeV9I/AAAAAAAADLs/J2QWFNH-uOMP7f4cJ4uaSJwuqvbaZRlJgCLcBGAs/s1600/waco02.JPG" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-JZRMWPLuIgY/XOufuCVeV9I/AAAAAAAADLs/J2QWFNH-uOMP7f4cJ4uaSJwuqvbaZRlJgCLcBGAs/s640/waco02.JPG" data-original-width="745" data-original-height="423"></a>
<br>
<br>
(Christopher Spencer, <i><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7882076/">WACO: Madman Or Messiah?</a></i>, 2018)</div>
<br>
<blockquote><i>Wikipedia:</i><br>
[The bombing of the Alfred P Murrah building] was planned to take place on April 19, 1995, to coincide with:
<ul><li>the 2nd anniversary of the Waco siege, and</li>
<li>the 220th anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord.</li></ul>
(<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_City_bombing#Target_selection">Oklahoma City bombing</a>, 26 May 2019)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://scepticwatch.blogspot.com/2011/12/singer-peter.html#top">Peter Singer</a> (1946):</i><br>
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L._Ron_Hubbard">L Ron Hubbard</a>, the founder of the Church of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4257858/">Scientology</a>, once wrote that the quickest way to make a million … is to start a new religion.<br>
(<i><a href="https://scepticwatch.blogspot.com/2011/12/singer-peter.html#How">How Are We to Live?</a></i>, 1993, p 94)</blockquote>
<br>
<div align="center"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Tb9Z-gtOB2M/XOls6giTgPI/AAAAAAAADLg/QRhOr1ndRwMJnlf-TioEbESeUYPEnSFmgCLcBGAs/s1600/thefamily01.JPG" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Tb9Z-gtOB2M/XOls6giTgPI/AAAAAAAADLg/QRhOr1ndRwMJnlf-TioEbESeUYPEnSFmgCLcBGAs/s640/thefamily01.JPG" data-original-width="747" data-original-height="496"></a><br>
<br>
(Rosie Jones, <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5939770/">The Cult of the Family</a>, <i>ABC</i>, 2018)</div>
<br>
<blockquote><i>Wikipedia:</i><br>
In June 1993 [Anne] Hamilton-Byrne was charged with conspiracy to defraud and to commit perjury by falsely registering the births of three unrelated children as their own triplets.<br>
She pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of making a false declaration and was fined $5,000.<br>
(<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Family_(Australian_New_Age_group)">The Family — Australian New Age group</a></i>, 23 March 2019)</blockquote>
<br>
<br>
<h3 id="deus"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuval_Noah_Harari">Yuval Harari</a> (1976)</h3>
<br>
<i>Professor of History, Hebrew University of Jerusalem</i><br>
<br>
For thousands of years, the scientific road to growth was blocked because people believed that holy scriptures and ancient traditions already contained all the important knowledge the world had to offer. …<br>
[If you] already knew everything worth knowing, [why] bother searching for new [knowledge? …]<br>
[The] Scientific Revolution freed humankind from this conviction.<br>
The greatest scientific discovery was the discovery of ignorance.<br>
Once humans realised how little they knew about the world, they suddenly had a very good reason to seek new knowledge, which opened up the scientific road to progress.<br>
(p 212)<br>
<br>
[The death of God has] not lead to social collapse.<br>
Throughout history prophets and philosophers have argued that if humans stopped believing in a great cosmic plan, all law and order would vanish.<br>
Yet today, those who pose the greatest threat to global law and order are precisely those people who continue to believe in God and His all-encompassing plans.<br>
God-fearing Syria is a far more violent place than the atheist Netherlands.<br>
(p 220)<br>
<br>
[Industrial civilization's shortcomings] should not blind us to its advantages and attainments. …<br>
[Doomsday] prophecies of collapse and violence have, [thus far,] not materialised, whereas the scandalous promises of perpetual growth and global cooperation are fulfilled.<br>
[Capitalism] has not only managed to prevail, but also to overcome famine, plague and war.<br>
For thousands of years priests, rabbis and muftis explained that humans cannot overcome famine, plague and war by their own efforts.<br>
Then along came the bankers, investors and industrialists, and within 200 years managed to do exactly that.<br>
(p 219)<br>
<br>
Children of all religions and cultures think they are the centre of the world, and therefore show little genuine interest in the conditions and feelings of other people.<br>
That's why divorce is so traumatic for children.<br>
A five-year-old cannot understand that something important is happening for reasons unrelated to him.<br>
No matter how many times you tell him that mummy and daddy are independent people with their own problems and wishes, and that they didn't divorce because of him — the child cannot absorb that.<br>
He is convinced that everything happens because of him.<br>
Most people grow out of this infantile delusion.<br>
Monotheists hold on to it till the day they die.<br>
(p 173)<br>
<br>
Religion is anything that confers superhuman legitimacy on human social structures.<br>
It legitimises human norms and values by arguing that they reflect superhuman laws.<br>
<br>
Religion asserts that we humans are subject to a system of moral laws that we did not invent and that we cannot change.<br>
A devout Jew would say that this is the system of moral laws created by God and revealed in the Bible.<br>
A Hindu would say that Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva created the laws, which were revealed to us humans in the Vedas.<br>
Other religions, from Buddhism and Daoism to Nazism, communism and liberalism, argue that the superhuman laws are <i>natural</i> laws, and not the creation of this or that god.<br>
Of course, each believes in a different set of natural laws discovered and revealed by different seers and prophets, from Buddha and Laozi to Hitler and Lenin.<br>
(p 181, emphasis added)<br>
<br>
Religion is a deal, whereas spirituality is a journey.<br>
Religion gives a complete description of the world, and offers us a well-defined contract with predetermined goals.
<p><ol><li>God exists.</li>
<li>He told us to behave in certain ways.</li>
<li>If you obey God, you'll be admitted to heaven.</li>
<li>If you disobey Him, you'll burn in hell.</li></ol></p>
The very clarity of this deal allows society to define common norms and values that regulate human behaviour.<br>
<br>
Spiritual journeys are nothing like that.<br>
They usually take people in mysterious ways towards unknown destinations.<br>
The quest usually begins with some big question, such as who am I?<br>
What is the meaning of life?<br>
What is good?<br>
Whereas many people just accept the ready-made answers provided by the powers that be, spiritual seekers are not so easily satisfied.<br>
They are determined to follow the big question wherever it leads, and not just to places you know well or wish to visit.<br>
(p 184)<br>
<br>
Religion is interested above all in order.<br>
It aims to create and maintain the social structure.<br>
Science is interested above all in power.<br>
It aims to acquire the power to cure diseases, fight wars and produce food. …<br>
The uncompromising quest for truth is a spiritual journey, which can seldom remain within the confines of either religious or scientific establishments.<br>
(p 198)<br>
<br>
[The] idea of souls [is incompatible with the theory of evolution,] at least if by 'soul' we mean something indivisible, immutable and potentially eternal.<br>
Such an entity cannot possibly result from a step-by-step evolution.<br>
Natural selection could produce a human eye, because the eye has parts.<br>
But the soul has no parts.<br>
If the Sapiens soul evolved step by step from the Erectus soul, what exactly were these steps?<br>
Is there some part of the soul that is more developed in Sapiens than in Erectus?<br>
But the soul has no parts.<br>
(p 104)<br>
<br>
Think of the first baby to possess a soul.<br>
That baby was very similar to her mother and father, except that she had a soul and they didn't.<br>
Our biological knowledge can certainly explain the birth of a baby whose cornea was a bit more curved than her parents' corneas.<br>
A slight mutation in a single gene can account for that.<br>
But biology cannot explain the birth of a baby possessing an eternal soul from parents who did not have even a shred of a soul.<br>
Is a single mutation, or even several mutations, enough to give an animal an essence secure against all changes, including even death?<br>
<br>
Evolution means change, and is incapable of producing everlasting entities. …<br>
From an evolutionary perspective, the closest thing we have to a human essence is our DNA, and the DNA molecule is the vehicle of mutation rather than the seat of eternity.<br>
This terrifies large numbers of people, who prefer to reject the theory of evolution rather than give up their souls.<br>
(p 105)<br>
<br>
… Hitler's political career is one of the best examples we have for the immense authority accorded to the personal experience of common people in twentieth-century politics.<br>
Hitler wasn't a senior officer — in four years of war, he rose no higher than the rank of corporal.<br>
He had no formal education, no professional skills and no political background.<br>
He wasn't a successful businessman or a union activist, he didn't have friends or relatives in high places, or any money to speak of.<br>
At first, he didn't even have German citizenship.<br>
He was a penniless immigrant.<br>
<br>
When Hitler appealed to the German voters and asked for their trust, he could muster only one argument in his favour: his experiences in the trenches had taught him what you can never learn at university, at general headquarters or at a government ministry.<br>
People followed him, and voted for him, because they identified with him, and because they too believed that the world is a jungle, and that what doesn't kill us only makes us stronger.<br>
(p 256)<br>
<br>
[While liberal humanists] tiptoe around the minefield of cultural comparisons, fearful of committing some politically incorrect faux pas, and [socialist humanists] leave it to the party to find the right path through the minefield, evolutionary humanists gleefully jump right in, setting off all the mines and relishing the mayhem. …<br>
According to evolutionary humanists, anyone arguing that all human experiences are equally valuable is either an imbecile or a coward.<br>
Such vulgarity and timidity will lead only to the degeneration and extinction of humankind, as human progress is impeded in the name of cultural relativism or social equality.<br>
(p 260)<br>
<br>
Christianity … spread the hitherto heretical idea that all humans are equal before God, thereby changing human political structures, social hierarchies and even gender relations.<br>
In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus went further, insisting that the meek and oppressed are God's favourite people, thus turning the pyramid of power on its head, and providing ammunition for generations of revolutionaries.<br>
<br>
In addition to social and ethical reforms, Christianity was responsible for important economic and technological innovations.<br>
The Catholic Church established medieval Europe's most sophisticated administrative system, and pioneered the use of archives, catalogues, timetables and other techniques of data processing.<br>
The Vatican was the closest thing twelfth-century Europe had to Silicon Valley.<br>
The Church established Europe's first economic corporations — the monasteries — which for 1,000 years spearheaded the European economy and introduced advanced agricultural and administrative methods.<br>
Monasteries were the first institutions to use clocks, and for centuries they and the cathedral schools were the most important learning centres of Europe, helping to found many of Europe's first universities, such as Bologna, Oxford and Salamanca.<br>
<br>
[The] Catholic Church … and the other theist religions have long since turned from a creative into a reactive force.<br>
They are busy with rearguard holding operations more than with pioneering novel technologies, innovative economic methods or groundbreaking social ideas.<br>
(p 274)<br>
<br>
[Liberal humanism] won the humanist wars of religion [and is] now pushing humankind to reach for immortality, bliss and divinity.<br>
Egged on by the allegedly infallible wishes of customers and voters, scientists and engineers devote more and more energies to these liberal projects.<br>
Yet what the scientists are discovering and what the engineers are developing may unwittingly expose both the inherent flaws in the liberal world view and the blindness of customers and voters.<br>
When genetic engineering and artificial intelligence reveal their full potential, liberalism, democracy and free markets might become as obsolete as flint knives, tape cassettes, Islam and communism.<br>
(p 276)<br>
<br>
It is dangerous to trust our future to market forces, because these forces do what's good for the market rather than what's good for humankind or for the world.<br>
The hand of the market is blind as well as invisible, and left to its own devices it may fail to do anything about the threat of global warming or the dangerous potential of artificial intelligence.<br>
(p 376)<br>
<br>
So of everything that happens in our chaotic world, what should we focus on?<br>
<ul><li>If we think in term of months, we had probably focus on immediate problems such as the turmoil in the Middle East, the refugee crisis in Europe and the slowing of the Chinese economy.</li>
<li>If we think in terms of decades, then global warming, growing inequality and the disruption of the job market loom large.</li></ul>
Yet if we take the really grand view of life, all other problems and developments are overshadowed by three interlinked processes:
<p><ol><li>Science is converging on an all-encompassing dogma, which says that organisms are algorithms, and life is data processing.</li>
<li>Intelligence is decoupling from consciousness.</li>
<li>Non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms may soon know us better than we know ourselves.</li></ol></p>
These three processes raise three key question …
<p><ol><li>Are organisms really just algorithms, and is life really just data processing?</li>
<li>What's more valuable — intelligence or consciousness?</li>
<li>What will happen to society, politics and daily life when non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms know us better than we know ourselves?</li></ol></p>
(p 376-7)<br>
<br>
(<a href="https://soundcloud.com/the_rsa/a-brief-history-of-tomorrow">Homo Deus<i>: A Brief History of Tomorrow</a></i>, Penguin, 2015)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://scepticwatch.blogspot.com/2012/07/matthieu-ricard.html#sapiens">Would you like to know more?</a></i><br>
<br>
<br>
<h3 id="epicurus"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicurus">Epicurus</a> (341 – 271 BCE)</h3>
<br>
Death is nothing to us; for that which is dissolved, is without sensation, and that which lacks sensation is nothing to us.<br>
<br>
<br>
<h4>Letter to Menoeceus</h4>
<br>
[Death] is nothing to us since:
<ul><li>when we exist, death is not yet present, and</li>
<li>when death is present, then we do not exist. …</li></ul>
<br>
By pleasure we mean the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul.<br>
It is not an unbroken succession of drinking-bouts and of revelry, not sexual lust, not the enjoyment of the fish and other delicacies of a luxurious table, which produce a pleasant life; it is sober reasoning, searching out the grounds of every choice and avoidance, and banishing those beliefs through which the greatest tumults take possession of the soul.<br>
Of all this the beginning and the greatest good is wisdom. …<br>
<br>
<br>
<h4>The Principal Doctrines</h4>
<br>
It was impossible for someone ignorant about the nature of the universe, but still suspicious about the subjects of the myths, to dissolve his feelings of fear about the most important matters.<br>
So it was impossible to receive unmixed pleasures without knowing natural science. …<br>
<br>
Of the things which wisdom provides for the blessedness of one's whole life, by far the greatest is the possession of friendship.<br>
<br>
<br>
<h3 id="god">The Multiple Personalities of God</h3>
<br>
<h4>America's Four Gods</h4>
<br>
<i><a href="http://www.baylor.edu/content/services/document.php/33304.pdf">The Baylor Religion Survey</a></i><br>
<br>
<br>
<div align="center"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ifPhpO1ZKRc/UmqoDCybcFI/AAAAAAAABUc/OWXO2JR2YDw/s1600/god.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" data-original-width="594" data-original-height="499" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ifPhpO1ZKRc/UmqoDCybcFI/AAAAAAAABUc/OWXO2JR2YDw/s480/god.JPG"></a></div>
<blockquote><blockquote><b>Figure 13:</b><br>
Categories of America's Four Gods</blockquote></blockquote>
(p 26)<br>
<br>
<br>
<b><i>Type A: Authoritarian God</i></b><br>
<br>
Individuals who believe in the Authoritarian God tend to think that God is highly involved in their daily lives and world affairs.<br>
They tend to believe that God helps them in their decision-making and is also responsible for global events such as economic upturns or tsunamis.<br>
They also tend to feel that God is quite angry and is capable of meting out punishment to those who are unfaithful or ungodly.<br>
<br>
<br>
<b><i>Type B: Benevolent God</i></b><br>
<br>
[Believers] in a Benevolent God [also] tend to think that God is very active in our daily lives.
[However,] the Benevolent God is mainly a force of positive influence in the world and is less willing to condemn or punish individuals.<br>
<br>
<br>
<b><i>Type C: Critical God</i></b><br>
<br>
Believers in a Critical God feel that God really does not interact with the world.<br>
Nevertheless, God still observes the world and views the current state of the world unfavorably.<br>
These individuals feel that God’s displeasure will be felt in another life and that divine justice may not be of this world.<br>
<br>
<br>
<b><i>Type D: Distant God</i></b><br>
<br>
… These individuals tend towards thinking about God as a cosmic force which set the laws of nature in motion.<br>
As such, God does not “do” things in the world and does not hold clear opinions about our activities or world events.<br>
<br>
<br>
<div align="center"><table border="1" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="1" style="width: 480px;" unselectable="off"><tbody>
<tr><td colspan="2"><div align="center"><h3>Percent of American Population which believes in each Type of God</h3>
(Adapted from Figure 14, p 27)</div></td></tr>
<tr><td colspan="2"><b><i>High Engagement (57%)</i></b></td></td></tr>
<tr><td width="80%">Authoritarian</td><td width="20%">33%</td></tr>
<tr><td>Benevolent</td><td>24%</td></tr>
<tr><td colspan="2"><br></td></tr>
<tr><td colspan="2"><b><i>Low Engagement (43%)</i></b></td></td></tr>
<tr><td>Distant</td><td>26%</td></tr>
<tr><td>Critical</td><td>17%</td></tr>
<tr><td colspan="2"><br></td></tr>
<tr><td colspan="2"><b><i>High Anger (50%)</i></b></td></td></tr>
<tr><td width="80%">Authoritarian</td><td width="20%">33%</td></tr>
<tr><td>Critical</td><td>17%</td></tr>
<tr><td colspan="2"><br></td></tr>
<tr><td colspan="2"><b><i>Low Anger (50%)</i></b></td></td></tr>
<tr><td>Benevolent</td><td>24%</td></tr>
<tr><td>Distant</td><td>26%</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br>
<br>
<table border="1" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="1" style="width: 480px;" unselectable="off" style="text-align:center;"><tbody>
<tr><th colspan="2"><h3>Parental Bonding Instrument</h3></th></tr>
<tr><td>High Control / High Care</td><td>High Control / Low Care</td></tr>
<tr><td>Low Control / Low Care</td><td>Low Control / High Care</td></tr>
</tbody></table></div>
<br>
<br>
(p 27)<br>
<br>
(Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion and Department of Sociology, Baylor University, September 2006)<br>
<br>
<br>
<h4 id="evolution">Does God Have a Heart?</h4>
<br>
<i>Andrew Newberg & Mark Waldman</i><br>
<br>
<b><i>The Cultural Evolution of God</i></b><br>
<br>
In Western culture, the authoritarian notion of God dominated human through until the 1400s, when a series of events undermined the power of the [universal] church.<br>
The Black Plague wiped out half the population of Europe [undermining] religious authority [and as science] gained favor … God retreated farther into the heavens.<br>
In a minority of Jewish, Islamic, and Christian texts, God's wrath also [receded,] to be replaced by [conceptions] of a more benevolent and mystical force.<br>
<br>
[In the 16th and 17th centuries, Europe was wracked by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_wars_of_religion">religious wars</a>] between competing Christian theologies [and the] Catholic Church splintered as people [sought] a more personal God.<br>
[Some of these fled to the New World, seeking] the freedom to practice religion as they saw fit …<br>
(p 117)<br>
<br>
<br>
<b><i>The War Between the American Gods</i></b><br>
<br>
According to the Baylor study, more than half of Americans are intolerant of non-Christian values …<br>
Two other studies … found that 17-18% of Americans … believed that their religion should be the only true religion in the world.<br>
[29%] said that we should … try to convert people of other religious faiths [to Christianity.]<br>
(p 121)<br>
<br>
[Nevertheless, if] you put all the surveys together, there appears to be a slow decline in religious intolerance, especially over the last five years …<br>
<br>
[In] each new generation Americans shift their allegiance from Christianity to other faiths or systems of belief. …<br>
[Indeed,] Protestantism has been slowing declining since 1965.<br>
(p 122)<br>
<br>
(<i>How God Changes Your Brain</i>, Ballantine, 2009)peaceandlonglifehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09059683906637157584noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1170524542125253803.post-67135199794280106132012-05-12T06:58:00.011-07:002023-02-17T06:12:54.635-08:00Ideology and Fanaticism<i id="top"><a href="https://40-eridani-a.blogspot.com/search/label/Dogmatism%20and%20Scepticism">Dogmatism and Scepticism</a></i><br>
<br>
<br>
<blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-size: medium">Freedom is obedience to leaders<br>
Virtue is violence<br>
Manhood is domination</span><br>
<br>
<i>— A Woman's Liberation, 1995.</i><br>
<br>
<br>
<span style="font-size: medium">Love of god and country is like fire:
<ul><li>a wonderful friend,</li>
<li>a terrible enemy.</li></ul>
Only children play with fire.</span><br>
<br>
<i>— <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_K._Le_Guin">Ursula Le Guin</a> (1929 – 2018), Forgiveness Day, </i>Asimov's Science Fiction<i>, 1994.</i><br>
<br>
<br>
<span style="font-size: medium">Nothing emboldens sin so much as mercy.</span><br>
<br>
<i>— <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shakespeare">William Shakespeare</a> (1564 – 1616), </i>Timon of Athens<i>, Act 3, Scene 5, 1605-6.</i><br>
<br>
<br>
<span style="font-size: medium">[One] cannot accomplish a great work without doing some <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocities_in_the_Congo_Free_State">evil</a>.</span><br>
<br>
<i>— <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_II_of_Belgium">Leopold Victor</a> (1835 – 1909), King of the Belgians (1865 – 1909)</i><br>
<br>
<br>
<span style="font-size: medium">War … proves
<ul><li>some to be gods, and</li>
<li>others to be mere men,</li></ul>
by turning
<ul><li>the latter into slaves, and</li>
<li>the former into masters …</li></ul></span>
<br>
<i>— <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heraclitus">Heraclitus</a> (c535 – c475 BCE)</i><br>
<br>
<br>
<span style="font-size: medium">The power of Marxist-Leninist theory lies in the fact that it enables the Party
<ul><li>to find the right orientation in any situation,</li>
<li>to understand the inner connection of current events,</li>
<li>to foresee their course, and</li>
<li>to perceive not only
<ul><li>how and in what direction they are developing in the present, but</li>
<li>how and in what direction they are bound to develop in the future.</li></ul>
</li></ul></span>
<br>
— History of the Communist Party, <i>Moscow, 1945.</i></blockquote>
<a name='more'></a>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fanatic">Fanaticism</a>:</i><br>
From Latin fānāticus (“of a temple, divinely inspired, frenzied”), from fānum (“temple”).<br>
(<i>Wiktionary</i>, 22 December 2012)<br>
<br>
<i>Nation:</i><br>
A community of people of mainly common descent, language, history, or political institutions and usually sharing one territory and government.<br>
[From Latin <i>nasci</i> be born]<br>
(<i>The Oxford Reference Dictionary</i>, Joyce Hawkins, Editor, 1986)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Hoffer">Eric Hoffer</a> (1902 – 83):</i><br>
The fanatics of various hues … are ready to fly at each other’s throat.<br>
But they are neighbors and almost of one family.<br>
They hate each other with the hatred of brothers. …<br>
And [so] it is easier for a fanatic Communist to be converted to fascism, chauvinism or Catholicism than to become a sober liberal.<br>
(<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_True_Believer">The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements</a></i>, §62, 1951)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Lenin">Vladimir Ulyanov</a> | Lenin (1870 – 1924):</i><br>
The kulak … is prepared to strangle and massacre hundreds of thousands of workers …<br>
Ruthless war must be waged on the kulaks!<br>
Death to them!<br>
(Ian McEwan, The End of the World Blues, Stanford University, 2007)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin">Ioseb Jughashvili</a> | Stalin (1878 – 1953) [20th Anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, 1937]:</i><br>
We will mercilessly destroy anyone who, by his deeds or his thoughts — yes, his thoughts! — threatens the unity of the socialist state.<br>
[Let us drink to] the complete destruction of all enemies, themselves and their kin!<br>
(Margaret MacMillan, <i>History's People</i>, Text, 2015)<br>
<br>
The inalienable quality of every Bolshevik under present conditions should be the ability to recognize an enemy of the Party no matter how well he may be masked.<br>
(29 July 1936)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Arendt">Hannah Arendt</a> (1906 – 75):</i><br>
The best documented resuit of dekulakization, collectivization, and the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge">Great Purge</a> [1936–8] was neither progress nor rapid industrialization but famine, chaotic conditions in the production of food, and depopulation. …<br>
The truth is that the price of totalitarian rule was so high that in neither Germany nor Russia has it yet been paid in full.<br>
(<i>The Origins of Totalitarianism</i>, 1951 / 1967)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleon">Cleon</a> (died 422 BCE):</i><br>
Punish [enemies] as they deserve, and teach your other allies — by a striking example — that the penalty of rebellion is death.<br>
(<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thucydides">Thucydides</a>, <i><a href="http://classics.mit.edu/Thucydides/pelopwar.html">The History of Peloponnesian War</a></i>, Book III, 40)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thucydides">Thucydides</a> (c460 – c400 BCE):</i><br>
The Helots were invited by a proclamation to pick out those of their number who claimed to have most distinguished themselves against the enemy, in order that they might receive their freedom; the object being to test them, as it was thought that the first to claim their freedom would be the most high-spirited and the most apt to rebel.<br>
As many as two thousand were selected accordingly, who crowned themselves and went round the temples, rejoicing in their new freedom.<br>
The Spartans, however, soon afterwards did away with them, and no one ever knew how each of them perished.<br>
(<i><a href="http://classics.mit.edu/Thucydides/pelopwar.html">The History of Peloponnesian War</a></i>, Book IV, 80)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwame_Anthony_Appiah">Kwame Appiah</a> (1954):</i><br>
Everybody in the world agrees, that most people in the world have incorrect religious beliefs.<br>
(<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07z43ds">Creed</a>, Mistaken Identities, Part 1, 18 October 2016)<br>
<br>
[It is] caring about what your country’s doing in the world and feeling
<ul><li>bad when it does bad things, and</li>
<li>good when it does good things,</li></ul>
that’s at the heart of the kind of morally appropriate patriotism …<br>
(<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07zz5mf">Country</a>, Mistaken Identities, Part 2, <i>BBC Reith Lectures</i>, 25 October 2016)<br>
<br>
<i id="II:16"><a href="https://40-eridani-a.blogspot.com/2017/05/michel-de-montaigne.html#top">Michel Eyquem</a> (1533 – 92) [Lord of Montaigne]:</i><br>
[All] polities have a god at their head, truly so in the case of the one drawn up by Moses for the people of Judaea on leaving Egypt; the rest, falsely so.<br>
(On glory, <i><a href="https://40-eridani-a.blogspot.com/2017/05/michel-de-montaigne.html#top">The Essays of Michel de Montaigne</a></i>, 1580, M A Screech, Translator, Penguin, 1991, p 716)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://scepticwatch.blogspot.com/2016/10/robert-putnam.html#top">Robert Putnam</a> (1941):</i><br>
[Dozens] of studies have linked religious participation to political intolerance …<br>
(<i>Bowling Alone</i>, Simon & Schuster, 2000, Note 9, p 496)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_Toffler">Alvin Toffler</a> (1928 – 2016):</i><br>
For those who lack an intelligent, comprehensive programme, who cannot cope with the novelties and complexities of blinding change, terrorism substitutes for thought.<br>
Terrorism may not topple regimes, but it removes doubts.<br>
(<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Shock">Future Shock</a></i>, Pan, 1971, p 329)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Santayana">George Santayana</a> (1863 – 1952):</i><br>
Intuitive ethics has nothing to offer in the presence of discord except an appeal to force and to ultimate physical sanction.<br>
It can instigate, but not resolve, the battle of nations and the battle of religions.<br>
Precisely
<ul><li>the same zeal,</li>
<li>the same patriotism, [and]</li>
<li>the same readiness for martyrdom</li></ul>
fires adherents to rival societies, and fires them especially in view of the fact that the adversary is no less uncompromising and fierce. …<br>
Here are two flagrant instances where pre-rational morality defeats the ends of morality.<br>
Viewed from within, each religious or national fanaticism stands for a good; but in its outward operation it produces and becomes an evil.<br>
(Intuitive Morality, 1903)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaiah_Berlin">Isaiah Berlin</a> (1909 – 97):</i><br>
Toleration is historically the product of
<ul><li>the realisation of the irreconcilability of equally dogmatic faiths, and</li>
<li>the practical improbability of complete victory of one over the other.</li></ul>
Those who wished to survive realised that they had to tolerate error.<br>
They gradually came to see merits in diversity, and so became sceptical about definitive solutions in human affairs.<br>
(The Originality of Machiavelli, <i>Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas</i>, 1979)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89mile_Durkheim">Emile Durkheim (1858 – 1917)</a>:</i><br>
A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden — beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community … all those who adhere to them.<br>
(<i>The Elementary Forms of Religious Life</i>, 1915, K E Fields, Translator, Free Press, 1995)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://scepticwatch.blogspot.com/2014/08/jonathan-haidt.html#top">Jonathan Haidt</a> (1963):</i><br>
Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, technologies, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate self-interest and make cooperative societies possible.<br>
(<i><a href="https://scepticwatch.blogspot.com/2014/08/jonathan-haidt.html#righteousmind">The Righteous Mind</a></i>, Pantheon, 2012)<br>
<br>
<i id="Hegel"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Schopenhauer">Arthur Schopenhauer</a> (1788 – 1860):</i><br>
Hegel, installed from above, by the powers that be, as the certified Great Philosopher, was a flat-headed, insipid, nauseating, illiterate charlatan, who reached the pinnacle of audacity in scribbling together and dishing up the craziest mystifying nonsense. …<br>
The extensive field of spiritual influence with which Hegel was furnished by those in power has enabled him to achieve the intellectual corruption of a whole generation.<br>
(<i>Works</i>, 2nd Ed, 1888)<br>
<br>
The highest civilization and culture, apart from the ancient Hindus and Egyptians, are found exclusively among the white races; and even with many dark peoples, the ruling caste or race is fairer in colour than the rest …<br>
All this is due to the fact that … those tribes that emigrated early to the north, and there gradually became white, had to:
<ul><li>develop all their intellectual powers, and</li>
<li>invent and perfect all the arts,</li></ul>
in their struggle with need, want and misery, which in their many forms were brought about by the climate.<br>
(<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parerga_and_Paralipomena">Parerga and Paralipomena</a></i>, Vol 2, Section 92, 1851)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_Russell">Bertrand Russell</a> (1872 – 1970):</i><br>
To understand Marx psychologically, one should use the following dictionary:<br>
<br>
<div align="center"><table border="1" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="1" style="width: 480px; font-size: medium;" unselectable="off"><tbody>
<tr><td width="50%">Yahweh</td><td width="50%">Dialectical Materialism</td></tr>
<tr><td>The Messiah</td><td>Marx</td></tr>
<tr><td>The Elect</td><td>The Proletariat</td></tr>
<tr><td>The Church</td><td>The Communist Party</td></tr>
<tr><td>The Second Coming</td><td>The Revolution</td></tr>
<tr><td>Hell</td><td>Punishment of the Capitalists</td></tr>
<tr><td>The Millennium</td><td>The Communist Commonwealth</td></tr>
</tbody></table></div>
<br>
(<i>A History of Western Philosophy</i>, 1961, p 361)</blockquote>
<br>
<h3 id="fascism">Fascism</h3>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato">Plato</a> (c428 – c347 BCE):</i><br>
The greatest principle of all … is that nobody, whether male or female, should ever be without a leader.<br>
Nor should the mind of anybody be habituated to letting him do anything at all on his own initiative, neither out of zeal, nor even playfully.<br>
But in war and in the midst of peace — to his leader he shall
<ul><li>direct his eye, and</li>
<li>follow him faithfully.</li></ul>
And even in the smallest matters he should stand under leadership.<br>
For example, he should get up, or move, or wash, or take his meals … only if he has been told to do so …<br>
In a word, he should teach his soul, by long habit,
<ul><li>never to dream of acting independently, and</li>
<li>to become utterly incapable of it.</li></ul>
In this way the life of all will be spent in total community.<br>
(<i>Laws</i>)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Hess">Rudolf Hess</a> (1894 – 1987):</i><br>
The Party is Hitler!<br>
But Hitler is Germany!<br>
As Germany is Hitler!<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler">Adolf Hitler</a> (1889 – 1945):</i><br>
Before us, Germany lies<br>
In us, Germany burns<br>
And behind us, Germany follows …<br>
<br>
We cannot be disloyal to what has given us sense and purpose.<br>
Nothing will come from nothing, if it is not grounded on a greater order.<br>
This order was not given to us by an earthly superior.<br>
It was given to us by God — who created our people.<br>
<br>
The Party will always be the political leadership of the German people. …<br>
In its entity … it will be like a religious order.<br>
(Leni Riefenstahl, <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triumph_of_the_Will">Triumph of the Will</a></i>, 1935)<br>
<br>
If the war is lost … then the nation will also perish. …<br>
There is no need to consider the basis of even a most primitive existence [for the German people] any longer.<br>
On the contrary, it is better to destroy even that, and to destroy it ourselves.<br>
The nation has proved itself weak.<br>
(Cornelius Ryan, <i>The Last Battle</i>, 1966, pp 172-3)<br>
<br>
He who wants to live, should fight.<br>
And he who does not want to fight, in this world of eternal struggle, does not deserve to live.<br>
(<i>Mein Kampf</i>, 1925)<br>
<br>
Any violence which does not spring from a firm, spiritual base, will be wavering and uncertain.<br>
It lacks the stability which can only rest in a fanatical outlook.<br>
(Hermann Rauschning, <i>Hitler Speaks</i>,1940, p 171)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_G%C3%B6ring">Hermann Goring</a> (1893 – 1946):</i><br>
We love Adolf Hitler because we believe firmly and profoundly that he was sent to us by God to save Germany.<br>
To those who follow him there is no quality that he does not possess to the greatest perfection.<br>
(1934)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benito_Mussolini">Benito Mussolini</a> (1883 – 1945) & <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Gentile">Giovanni Gentile</a> (1875 – 1944):</i><br>
[Our movement <i>rejects</i> the view of man] as an individual, standing by himself, self-centered, subject to natural law, which instinctively urges him toward a life of selfish momentary pleasure …<br>
[It] sees not only the individual but the nation and the country:<br>
[Individuals] and generations bound together by a moral law, with common traditions and a mission which … builds up a higher life, founded on duty …<br>
[A] life free from the limitations of time and space, in which the individual, by self-sacrifice [and] the renunciation of self-interest … can achieve that purely spiritual existence in which his value as a man consists.<br>
(<i>The Doctrine of Fascism</i>, 1932)<br>
<br>
<br>
<h3><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Wilhelm_Friedrich_Hegel">Georg Hegel</a> (1770 – 1831)</h3>
<br>
The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on earth …<br>
We must therefore worship the State as the manifestation of the Divine on earth …<br>
The State is the march of God through the world …<br>
(p 247)<br>
<br>
In the perfect form of the State in which each and every element … has reached its free existence, this will is that of one actual decreeing [Individual: the monarch.]<br>
The monarchical constitution is therefore the constitution of developed reason; and all other constitutions belong to lower grades of the development …<br>
(pp 257-8)<br>
<br>
Without its monarch [(Frederick William III) the Prussian people] are just a formless multitude.<br>
(p 268)<br>
<br>
The deeds of Great Men, of the Personalities of World History, … must not be brought into collision with irrelevant moral claims.<br>
The Litany of private virtues, of modesty, humility, philanthropy, and forbearance, must not be raised against them.<br>
The History of the World can, in principle, entirely ignore the circle within which morality … lies.<br>
(p 278)<br>
<br>
The Nation State is … the Spirit of the People itself.<br>
The actual State is animated by this spirit, in all its particular affairs, its Wars, and its Institutions …<br>
The self-consciousness of one particular Nation is the vehicle for the … development of the collective spirit …<br>
(p 269)<br>
<br>
Each particular National Genius is to be treated as only One Individual in the process of Universal History. …<br>
Against this absolute Will the other particular national minds have no rights: that Nation dominates the World …<br>
(p 275)<br>
<br>
Out of this [dialectical struggle of the different National Spirits] rises the universal Spirit, the unlimited World-Spirit, pronouncing its judgement — and its judgement is the highest — upon the finite Nations of the World’s History; for the History of the World is the World’s court of justice. …<br>
(p 277)<br>
<br>
In civilized nations true bravery consists in the readiness to give oneself wholly to the service of the State so that the individual counts but as one among many. …<br>
Not personal valor is significant; the important aspect lies in self-subordination to the universal. …<br>
(p 280)<br>
<br>
[Thus, it is through War that] the ethical health of a nation is preserved …<br>
War protects the people from the corruption which an everlasting peace would bring upon it. …<br>
History shows [how] Nations, torn by internal strife, win peace at home as a result of war abroad.<br>
(p 279)<br>
<br>
(Karl Popper, <i>The Open Society and Its Enemies</i>, 5th Ed, 1966, Ch 12)<br>
<br>
<br>
<h3 id="Popper"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Popper">Karl Popper</a> (1902 – 94)</h3>
<br>
[The] whole story of Hegel would indeed not be worth relating, were it not for its more sinister consequences, which show how easily a clown may be a ‘maker of history’.<br>
(Ch 12, p 247)<br>
<br>
[For Hegel] all personal relations can … be reduced to the fundamental relation
<ul><li>of master and slave,</li>
<li>of domination and submission.</li></ul>
Each must strive to assert and prove himself, and he who has not
<ul><li>the nature,</li>
<li>the courage, and</li>
<li>the general capacity for preserving his independence,</li></ul>
must be reduced to servitude.<br>
[Likewise,] Nations must assert themselves on the Stage of History; it is their duty to attempt the domination of the World.<br>
(Ch 11, p 225)<br>
<br>
[The] most important principles of humanitarian and equalitarian ethics [are:]
<p><ol><li>Tolerance towards all who are not intolerant and who do not propagate intolerance. …</li>
<li>‘Minimize suffering’ …</li>
<li>The fight against tyranny …</li></ol></p>
(Ch 5, Note 6, pp 548-9)<br>
<br>
It is one of the gravest mistakes if a philosophy ever offers self-evidence as an argument in favour of the truth of a sentence; yet this is done by practically all idealist philosophies.<br>
It shows that idealist philosophies are often systems of apologetics for some dogmatic beliefs.<br>
(Ch 11, Note 43, p 651)<br>
<br>
Marx showed
<ul><li>that a social system can, as such, be unjust; [and]</li>
<li>that if the system is bad, then all the righteousness of the individuals who profit from it is a mere sham righteousness, is mere hypocrisy.</li></ul>
For our responsibility extends to the system, to the institutions which we allow to persist. …<br>
<br>
‘Scientific’ Marxism is dead.<br>
[But its] feeling of social responsibility and its love for freedom must survive.<br>
(Ch 22, p 416)<br>
<br>
[Reason,] supported by imagination, enables us to understand
<ul><li>that men who are far away, whom we shall never see, are like ourselves, and</li>
<li>that their relations to one another are like our relations to those we love. …</li></ul>
[It is thus] by the use of thought and imagination, [that] we may become ready to help all who need our help.<br>
(p 444)<br>
<br>
… Western civilization owes
<ul><li>its rationalism,</li>
<li>its faith in the rational unity of man … and especially</li>
<li>its scientific outlook,</li></ul>
to the ancient Socratic and [early] Christian belief in
<ul><li>the brotherhood of all men</li>
<li>intellectual honesty and</li>
<li>[individual] responsibility.</li></ul>
(p 448)<br>
<br>
What I have tried to show is that the choice with which we are confronted is between
<ul><li>a faith in reason and in human individuals and</li>
<li>a faith in the mystical faculties of man by which he is united to a collective;</li></ul>
and that this choice [corresponds with a further] choice between
<ul><li>an attitude that recognizes the unity of mankind and</li>
<li>an attitude that divides men into friends and foes, into masters and slaves.</li></ul>
(p 450)<br>
<br>
[The strain of civilization] is a consequence of the breakdown of the closed [concrete tribal] society.<br>
It is still felt even in our day, especially in times of social change.<br>
It is the strain created by the effort which life in an open and partially abstract society continually demands from us — by the endeavour
<ul><li>to be rational,</li>
<li>to forgo at least some of our emotional social needs,</li>
<li>to look after ourselves, and</li>
<li>to accept responsibilities.</li></ul>
We must, I believe, bear this strain as the price to be paid for every increase
<ul><li>in knowledge,</li>
<li>in reasonableness,</li>
<li>in co-operation and … mutual help, and consequently</li>
<li>in our chances of survival and … the size of the population.</li></ul>
It is the price we have to pay for being human.<br>
(Ch 10, p 168)<br>
<br>
Once we begin to rely upon our reason, and to use our powers of criticism, once we feel the call of personal responsibilities, and with it, the responsibility of helping to advance knowledge, we cannot return to a state of implicit submission to tribal magic.<br>
For those who have eaten of the tree of knowledge, paradise is lost.<br>
The more we try to return to the heroic age of tribalism, the more surely do we arrive
<ul><li>at the Inquisition,</li>
<li>at the Secret Police, and</li>
<li>at a romanticized gangsterism.</li></ul>
Beginning with the suppression of reason and truth, we must end with the most brutal and violent destruction of all that is human.<br>
(Ch 10, p 189)<br>
<br>
[The] human situation with respect to knowledge is … exhilarating:<br>
[Here] we are, with the immensely difficult task before us of getting to know the beautiful world we live in, and ourselves; and fallible though we are, we nevertheless find that our powers of understanding, surprisingly, are almost adequate for the task — more so than we ever dreamt in our wildest dreams.<br>
We really do learn from our mistakes, by trial and error.<br>
And at the same time we learn how little we know — as when, in climbing a mountain; every step upwards opens some new vista into the unknown, and new worlds unfold themselves of whose existence we knew nothing when we began our climb.<br>
<br>
Thus we can learn [and] we can grow in knowledge …<br>
[And] since we can never know [with absolute certainty,] there are no grounds here for smugness, or for conceit over the [completeness] of our knowledge.<br>
(Addenda to Volume II, p 498)<br>
<br>
[In Marxism] the religious element is unmistakable.<br>
In the hour of their deepest misery and degradation, Marx’s prophecy gave the workers an inspiring belief
<ul><li>in their mission, and</li>
<li>in the great future which their movement was to prepare for the whole of mankind.</li></ul>
(Ch 21, p 402)<br>
<br>
(<i>The Open Society and Its Enemies</i>, 5th Ed, 1966, Routledge 2011)<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<table id="contents" border="1" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1" style="width: 720px; text-align:center" unselectable="off" align="center"><tbody>
<tr><th valign="top" colspan="4"><h2><a href="https://scepticwatch.blogspot.com/2013/03/power-money-and-propaganda.html#10">Ideology</a></h2></th></tr>
<tr><th valign="top" width="25%"><h3><a href="https://40-eridani-a.blogspot.com/2013/02/religion-is-legacy-software.html#top">Religious</a></h3></th><th valign="top" width="25%"><h3>Economic</h3></th><th valign="top" width="50%" colspan="2"><h3>Political</h3></th></tr>
<tr><th valign="top">Supernaturalism</th><th valign="top">Capitalism</th><th colspan="2" valign="top">Nationalism</th></tr>
<tr><td valign="top">Church</td><td valign="top">Market</td><td colspan="2" valign="top">State</td></tr>
<tr><td valign="top">Aristocracy and Theocracy</td><td valign="top">Plutocracy</td><td valign="top" colspan="2"><div align="center">Oligarchy</div></td></tr>
<tr><td valign="top">Caste</td><td valign="top">Class</td><td valign="top" colspan="2"><div align="center">Party</div></td></tr>
<tr><td valign="top">Kings and Priests</td><td valign="top">Executives and Economists</td><td valign="top" colspan="2">Officials</td></tr>
<tr><td valign="top">Tradition</td><td valign="top">Commerce</td><td valign="top" colspan="2"><div align="center">Creed</div></td></tr>
<tr><td valign="top">The Devil</td><td valign="top">Socialists and Communists</td><td valign="top" colspan="2"><div align="center">Other Nations and Races</div></td></tr>
<tr><td valign="top" colspan="2"></td><th valign="top"><br>
<i>Left Wing</i></th><th valign="top"><br>
<i>Right Wing</i></th></tr>
<tr><td valign="top">Prophets</td><td valign="top"><a href="https://scepticwatch.blogspot.com/2016/07/mark-blyth.html#4658124">Adam Smith</a><br>
<a href="https://scepticwatch.blogspot.com/2011/10/blue-army-persons-of-interest.html#Hayek-top">Friedrich Hayek</a><br>
<a href="https://scepticwatch.blogspot.com/2017/07/milton-friedman.html#top">Milton Friedman</a></td><td valign="top">Karl Marx<br>
Friedrich Engels</td><td valign="top">Friedrich Nietzsche<br>
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Gottlieb_Fichte">Johann Fichte</a></td></tr>
<tr><td valign="top">The Messiah</td><td valign="top">Ronald Reagan<br>
Margaret Thatcher</td><td valign="top">Vladimir Lenin<br>
Josef Stalin<br>
Mao Zedong</td><td valign="top">Adolf Hitler</td></tr>
<tr><td valign="top">Holy Spirit</td><td valign="top">The Invisible Hand</td><td valign="top">Dialectical Materialism</td><td valign="top">Will</td></tr>
<tr><td valign="top">The Elect</td><td valign="top">Plutocrats<br>
Entrepreneurs<br>
Capitalists</td><td valign="top" colspan="2"><div align="center">Party Members</div></td></tr>
<tr><td valign="top">The Faithful</td><td valign="top">Consumers<br>
Borrowers<br>
Private Sector Workers<br>
Individualists</td><td valign="top">Workers</td><td valign="top">Aryans</td></tr>
<tr><td valign="top">The Damned</td><td valign="top">The Poor<br>
Trade Unionists<br>
Public Sector Workers<br>
Communitarians</td><td valign="top">Fascists<br>
Bourgeois Capitalists<br>
Counter-revolutionaries
</td><td valign="top">Communists<br>
Race Traitors<br>
Inferior Races<br>
The Disabled
</td></tr>
<tr><td valign="top">Crusaders</td><td valign="top">Captains of Industry</td><td valign="top">Heroes of the Revolution</td><td valign="top">Supermen</td></tr>
<tr><td valign="top">Missionaries</td><td valign="top">Advertising Agencies</td><td valign="top" colspan="2">State Propaganda</td></tr>
<tr><td valign="top">The Second Coming</td><td valign="top">Corporate Control of the State</td><td valign="top">The Revolution</td><td valign="top">National Domination</td></tr>
<tr><td valign="top">The Millennium</td><td valign="top">Corporate Control of the World</td><td valign="top">Communist Commonwealth</td><td valign="top">Global Domination</td></tr>
<tr><td valign="top">Heaven</td><td valign="top">Gated Communities</td><td valign="top">Workers' Paradise</td><td valign="top">The Thousand Year Reich</td></tr>
<tr><td valign="top">Purgatory</td><td valign="top">Unemployment</td><td valign="top"><br></td><td valign="top"><br></td></tr>
<tr><td valign="top">Hell</td><td valign="top">Ghettos and Prisons</td><td valign="top" colspan="2"><div align="center">Concentration, Labor and Extermination Camps</div></td></tr>
<tr><td valign="top">Lost Souls</td><td valign="top">The Destitute</td><td valign="top" colspan="2">The Disappeared</td></tr>
<tr><th valign="top" colspan="4"><br>
<i>Virtues</i></th></tr>
<tr><td valign="top">Chastity<br>
Temperance<br>
Charity<br>
Diligence<br>
Patience<br>
Kindness<br>
Humility</td><td valign="top">Competition<br>
Greed<br>
Conspicuous Consumption<br>
Status Competition<br>
Winning</td><td valign="top" colspan="2"><div align="center">Loyalty<br>
Strength<br>
Duty</div></td></td></tr>
<tr><th valign="top" colspan="4"><br>
<i>Vices</i></th></tr>
<tr><td valign="top">Lust<br>
Gluttony<br>
Greed<br>
Sloth<br>
Wrath<br>
Envy<br>
Pride</td><td valign="top">Cooperation<br>
Sharing<br>
Prudence<br>
Frugality<br>
Delayed gratification<br>
Poverty<br>
Losing</td><td valign="top" colspan="2"><div align="center">Treachery<br>
Weakness<br>
Sentiment</div></td></tr>
<tr><td valign="top">Heresy</td><td valign="top">Environmentalism<br>
Redistribution<br>
<a href="https://scepticwatch.blogspot.com/2011/10/blue-army-persons-of-interest.html#Hayek-top">Social Justice</a><br>
Social Insurance<br>
(health, injury, disability, unemployment, education, child welfare)</td><td valign="top"><br></td><td valign="top"><br></td></tr>
<tr><th valign="top" colspan="4"><br>
<i>Good</i></th></tr>
<tr><td valign="top">Anthing sanctioned by Scripture or the Priesthood</td><td valign="top">Profit<br>
Subsidies<br>
Bail-outs</td><td valign="top" colspan="2">Anything the Great Leader approves of</td></tr>
<tr><th valign="top" colspan="4"><br>
<i>Evil</i></th></tr>
<tr><td valign="top">Anything prohibited by Scripture or the Priesthood</td><td valign="top">Loss<br>
Regulation<br>
Taxation</td><td valign="top" colspan="2">Anything the Great Leader disapproves of</td></tr>
<tr><td valign="top">Cathedrals</td><td valign="top">Banks<br>
Stock Exchanges<br>
Shopping Malls</td><td valign="top"><br></td><td valign="top"><br></td></tr>
</tbody></table>peaceandlonglifehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09059683906637157584noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1170524542125253803.post-56453831265012969972012-05-06T04:16:00.005-07:002021-09-02T08:20:09.085-07:00Stage and Screen<i id="top"><a href="https://40-eridani-a.blogspot.com/p/peace-and-long-life_9.html#contents">Peace and Long Life</a></i><br>
<br>
<br>
<blockquote><span style="font-size: medium">The world is an amazing place.</span><br>
<br>
<i>— <a href="http://www.sbs.com/">SBS Television</a></i><br>
<br>
<br>
<span style="font-size: medium">Fiery the angels fell<br>
Deep thunder rolled around their shores<br>
Burning with the fires of Orc</span><br>
<br>
<i>— <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ridley_Scott">Ridley Scott</a> (1937), </i><a href="https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Blade_Runner#Roy_Batty">Bladerunner</a><i>, 1982.</i><br>
<br>
<br>
<span style="font-size: medium">Fiery the angels rose, and as they rose deep thunder roll'd<br>
Around their shores: indignant burning with the fires of Orc.</span><br>
<br>
<i>— <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Blake">William Blake</a> (1757 – 1827), </i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America_a_Prophecyt">America a Prophecy</a><i>, 1793.</i><br>
<br>
<br>
<span style="font-size: medium">Life is pain …<br>
Anyone who says differently is selling something.</span><br>
<br>
<i>— <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Reiner">Rob Reiner</a> (1947), </i><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093779/quotes/">The Princess Bride</a><i>, 1987.</i><br>
<br>
<br>
<span style="font-size: medium">Shoot straight you bastards:<br>
Don't make a mess of it!</span><br>
<br>
<i>— <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Beresford">Bruce Beresford</a> (1940), </i><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080310/trivia?tab=qt">Breaker Morant</a><i>, 1980.</i><br>
<br>
<br>
<span style="font-size: medium">Come on you apes!<br>
You wanna live forever?</span><br>
<br>
<i>— Unknown Platoon Sergeant, 1918.</i><br>
<br>
<br>
<span style="font-size: medium;">Can anyone be truly free, who only serves himself?</span><br>
<br>
<i>— The Elixir, Episode 11, Season 2, 1973.</i><br>
<br>
<br>
<span style="font-size: medium">If a man dwells on the past, then he robs the present.<br>
But if a man ignores the past, he may rob the future.<br>
The seeds of our destiny are nurtured by the roots of our past.</span><br>
<br>
<i>— Blood of the Dragon, Episode 1.</i><br>
<br>
<br>
<span style="font-size: medium">[A man] does the only thing he can do.<br>
He lives each day from its start to its end.<br>
And hopes there may be another to follow.</span><br>
<br>
<i>— <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Thorpe">Jerry Thorpe</a> (1926), The Vanishing Image, Episode 13, Season 3, </i><a href="#thorpe">Kung Fu</a><i>, 1974.</i></blockquote>
<br>
<br>
<div align="center"><h2 id="matrix">Love is a Word</h2>
<br>
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-4vJioooZbC0/XIu0d4bVgcI/AAAAAAAADG4/vtZQ7OID-FEif3dVSn6pYc1Fbwv1ISUiwCLcBGAs/s1600/MatrixRevolutions.avi_snapshot_00.07.50_%255B2019.03.15_17.52.26%255D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-4vJioooZbC0/XIu0d4bVgcI/AAAAAAAADG4/vtZQ7OID-FEif3dVSn6pYc1Fbwv1ISUiwCLcBGAs/s1600/MatrixRevolutions.avi_snapshot_00.07.50_%255B2019.03.15_17.52.26%255D.jpg" data-original-width="528" data-original-height="224" width="640" height="272"></a></div>
<br>
<blockquote>[Love is just] a word<br>
What matters is the <i>connection</i> the word implies …<br>
<br>
Karma is a word<br>
Like "love"<br>
A way of saying:
<blockquote>What I am here to do</blockquote>
I do not resent my karma — I'm grateful for it …<br>
<br>
Everything that has a beginning<br>
Has an end<br>
<br>
(<i><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0242653/quotes/?tab=qt">The Matrix Revolutions</a></i>, 2003)<br>
<br>
<br>
You've had your time<br>
The future is <i>our</i> world …<br>
The future is <i>our</i> time …<br>
<br>
<a href="https://40-eridani-a.blogspot.com/p/peace-and-long-life_9.html#freeyourmind">Free your mind!</a><br>
<br>
(Lilly & Lana Wachowski, <i><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0133093/trivia?tab=qt">The Matrix</a></i>, 1999)</blockquote>
<br>
<br>
<h2 align="center" id="goodearth">The Good Earth</h2>
<blockquote><span style="font-size: medium">And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck,<br>
a merry Christmas, and God bless all of you.<br>
All of you, on the good earth.</span><br>
<br>
<i>— <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Borman">Frank Boorman</a> (1928), Commander, Apollo 8, December 1968.</i></blockquote>
<br>
<div align="center"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-54dIVTTeywI/XD38o0IAiYI/AAAAAAAADBo/io2vbuAzSBogpT4kvYHTnGyuTNzhg3m3ACLcBGAs/s1600/missioncontrol01.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-54dIVTTeywI/XD38o0IAiYI/AAAAAAAADBo/io2vbuAzSBogpT4kvYHTnGyuTNzhg3m3ACLcBGAs/s1600/missioncontrol01.JPG" data-original-width="587" data-original-height="408" width="640" height="445"
></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Vg1HojkUJ0A/XECW6oUQ04I/AAAAAAAADB0/68fakpvZ4t416enoYiAWkgLZ29O3UjoKQCLcBGAs/s1600/missioncontrol02.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Vg1HojkUJ0A/XECW6oUQ04I/AAAAAAAADB0/68fakpvZ4t416enoYiAWkgLZ29O3UjoKQCLcBGAs/s640/missioncontrol02.JPG" data-original-width="763" data-original-height="408"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-6lkOFM_aEV4/XESHaaoqBCI/AAAAAAAADCA/54BcjYo8eq0mgKC7frtlCZV7WAnJMp7TACLcBGAs/s1600/missioncontrol03.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-6lkOFM_aEV4/XESHaaoqBCI/AAAAAAAADCA/54BcjYo8eq0mgKC7frtlCZV7WAnJMp7TACLcBGAs/s640/missioncontrol03.JPG" data-original-width="761" data-original-height="406"></a><br>
<br>
(David Fairhead, <i>Mission Control</i>, 2018)<br>
<br>
<a name='more'></a>
<br>
<br>
<h2 id="secondearth">Proof of Life</h2></div>
<blockquote><span style="font-size: medium">If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown!</span><br>
<br>
<i>— <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Waldo_Emerson">Ralph Emerson</a> (1803 – 82), </i><a href="https://emersoncentral.com/texts/nature-addresses-lectures/nature2/chapter1-nature/">Nature</a><i>, Chapter 1, 1836.</i></blockquote>
<br>
<div align="center"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-sMEgdNKQ_N4/W36brRW17QI/AAAAAAAACxc/TS_9aCeAWDUpTBYVE9FPs35E15opAtKGACLcBGAs/s1600/secondearth11.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-sMEgdNKQ_N4/W36brRW17QI/AAAAAAAACxc/TS_9aCeAWDUpTBYVE9FPs35E15opAtKGACLcBGAs/s640/secondearth11.JPG" data-original-width="804" data-original-height="509"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YPH6tAs7Z1U/W36brMNx-FI/AAAAAAAACxU/wguNaMdhJcAz-sahIq3OAYJMNRtVNcfKwCLcBGAs/s1600/secondearth08.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YPH6tAs7Z1U/W36brMNx-FI/AAAAAAAACxU/wguNaMdhJcAz-sahIq3OAYJMNRtVNcfKwCLcBGAs/s640/secondearth08.JPG" data-original-width="842" data-original-height="506"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-8xQKT5ncf0k/W36br0L1hdI/AAAAAAAACxk/9_9fq-GlI8cc7oOVcNsKlA-TxoIL6Sl4QCLcBGAs/s1600/secondearth14.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-8xQKT5ncf0k/W36br0L1hdI/AAAAAAAACxk/9_9fq-GlI8cc7oOVcNsKlA-TxoIL6Sl4QCLcBGAs/s640/secondearth14.JPG" data-original-width="896" data-original-height="396"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-chRpagymA9I/W36br2BibhI/AAAAAAAACxg/6KmhaRvR_3Mh0j_3vIn7UDhhG0HZ1B9mwCLcBGAs/s1600/secondearth12.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-chRpagymA9I/W36br2BibhI/AAAAAAAACxg/6KmhaRvR_3Mh0j_3vIn7UDhhG0HZ1B9mwCLcBGAs/s640/secondearth12.JPG" data-original-width="851" data-original-height="528"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-eakmrhadUAU/W36bqlZt-OI/AAAAAAAACxQ/zqRG98494cEdTgbxAa1RR0SvC7Y6Dmw3wCLcBGAs/s1600/secondearth05.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-eakmrhadUAU/W36bqlZt-OI/AAAAAAAACxQ/zqRG98494cEdTgbxAa1RR0SvC7Y6Dmw3wCLcBGAs/s640/secondearth05.JPG" data-original-width="849" data-original-height="479"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vMbFKCD16o8/W36brH6t-sI/AAAAAAAACxY/HItlPCTmuGMlY7R2aFWbDNcMGFtmC24RgCLcBGAs/s1600/secondearth10.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vMbFKCD16o8/W36brH6t-sI/AAAAAAAACxY/HItlPCTmuGMlY7R2aFWbDNcMGFtmC24RgCLcBGAs/s640/secondearth10.JPG" data-original-width="852" data-original-height="452"></a><br>
<br>
(The Planet Hunters, <i>Search for Second Earth</i>, Episode 1, 2018)<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<h2 id="dyinglaughing"><a href="https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/video/1327315011505/dying-laughing">Dead Comics Society</a></h2></div>
<blockquote><i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Seinfeld">Jerry Seinfeld</a> (1954):</i><br>
Comedy is purely a result of your ability to withstand self-torture.<br>
That's where you get great comedy.<br>
Your ability to suffer, and go:
<blockquote>That damn thing doesn't work.<br>
I'm gonna … try it again.</blockquote>
And if you're willing to do that 85 times, for a stupid joke, over the course of many years, great jokes get written.</blockquote>
<br>
<div align="center"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-R4uAXhyikhs/W8NMBsFa5RI/AAAAAAAAC7U/_-iMbOkVAOQmyvFdhm1Rrs7mAbtvK1H7wCLcBGAs/s1600/dyinglaughing10.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img align="center" border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-R4uAXhyikhs/W8NMBsFa5RI/AAAAAAAAC7U/_-iMbOkVAOQmyvFdhm1Rrs7mAbtvK1H7wCLcBGAs/s1600/dyinglaughing10.JPG" width="640" height="394" data-original-width="610" data-original-height="376"></a></div>
<br>
<blockquote><i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Rock">Chris Rock</a> (1965):</i><br>
We are the last philosophers.<br>
Everybody now, that talks, is reading from a pre-approved script.<br>
Even our allegedly "smart" people, are corporately controlled. …<br>
Any people who is going to think for a living, is going to be sad.<i><br>
<br>
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Coogan">Steve Coogan</a> (1965):</i><br>
I don't know many well-adjusted spiritual people who are funny.</blockquote>
<br>
<div align="center"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-7uF8epkXxKI/W8CRnZ_GrgI/AAAAAAAAC6U/JKKhIWG8eN0-sY4CeX_yKrSX1P3e0NkxACLcBGAs/s1600/dyinglaughing01.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img align="center" border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-7uF8epkXxKI/W8CRnZ_GrgI/AAAAAAAAC6U/JKKhIWG8eN0-sY4CeX_yKrSX1P3e0NkxACLcBGAs/s640/dyinglaughing01.JPG" data-original-width="753" data-original-height="413"></a></div>
<br>
<blockquote><i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emo_Philips">Emo Phillips</a> (1956):</i><br>
It's like, you write with chalk.<br>
And you don't know that it's billions of little animals that died a horrible death.</blockquote>
<br>
<div align="center"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-CdYVVEQX_IA/W8CRntZ_CyI/AAAAAAAAC6Y/87xzl1EvMAwuWk4hGh9VqJJEYFnavgT6QCLcBGAs/s1600/dyinglaughing02.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-CdYVVEQX_IA/W8CRntZ_CyI/AAAAAAAAC6Y/87xzl1EvMAwuWk4hGh9VqJJEYFnavgT6QCLcBGAs/s640/dyinglaughing02.JPG" data-original-width="759" data-original-height="418"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-w-Uym2n-BME/W8CRn9gq-SI/AAAAAAAAC6c/brRGFtQvc7cE6lQ5ba3GDydaVB8QWci3ACLcBGAs/s1600/dyinglaughing05.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-w-Uym2n-BME/W8CRn9gq-SI/AAAAAAAAC6c/brRGFtQvc7cE6lQ5ba3GDydaVB8QWci3ACLcBGAs/s640/dyinglaughing05.JPG" data-original-width="761" data-original-height="409"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-1DgEBSNZigY/W8CRoZI4FyI/AAAAAAAAC6g/AWMzDwNwLooqxSZSZo92RE_3SDtldcmTgCLcBGAs/s1600/dyinglaughing06.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-1DgEBSNZigY/W8CRoZI4FyI/AAAAAAAAC6g/AWMzDwNwLooqxSZSZo92RE_3SDtldcmTgCLcBGAs/s640/dyinglaughing06.JPG" data-original-width="765" data-original-height="414"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-6P7R1LDnhYI/W8CRo1mLH-I/AAAAAAAAC6o/r77KQpVabAwuOpNprUM3QvOQw7Ww75YlgCLcBGAs/s1600/dyinglaughing09.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-6P7R1LDnhYI/W8CRo1mLH-I/AAAAAAAAC6o/r77KQpVabAwuOpNprUM3QvOQw7Ww75YlgCLcBGAs/s640/dyinglaughing09.JPG" data-original-width="693" data-original-height="366"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-NO38l7uERx8/W8CRojb0pYI/AAAAAAAAC6k/zana8O9d_WwTH0e0W5_fJUfHs_JBpgkRACLcBGAs/s1600/dyinglaughing08.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-NO38l7uERx8/W8CRojb0pYI/AAAAAAAAC6k/zana8O9d_WwTH0e0W5_fJUfHs_JBpgkRACLcBGAs/s640/dyinglaughing08.JPG" data-original-width="763" data-original-height="412"></a><br>
<br>
(Lloyd Stanton & Paul Toogood, <i><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5068712/">Dying Laughing</a></i>, 2016)<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<h2><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mamoru_Oshii">Mamoru Oshii</a> (1951)</h2>
<br>
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-MSQgxelHMlo/VsOMrbc3XII/AAAAAAAAB-8/wgutgIFQVm8/s1600/Ghost%2BIn%2BThe%2BShell%2B-%2BInnocence.mp4_snapshot_01.06.09_%255B2016.02.15_04.28.29%255D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-MSQgxelHMlo/VsOMrbc3XII/AAAAAAAAB-8/wgutgIFQVm8/s640/Ghost%2BIn%2BThe%2BShell%2B-%2BInnocence.mp4_snapshot_01.06.09_%255B2016.02.15_04.28.29%255D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-r1y-IMNfV0w/VsOMrX7tlNI/AAAAAAAAB_A/SExQwOkTw2Y/s1600/Ghost%2BIn%2BThe%2BShell%2B-%2BInnocence.mp4_snapshot_01.06.13_%255B2016.02.15_04.28.59%255D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-r1y-IMNfV0w/VsOMrX7tlNI/AAAAAAAAB_A/SExQwOkTw2Y/s640/Ghost%2BIn%2BThe%2BShell%2B-%2BInnocence.mp4_snapshot_01.06.13_%255B2016.02.15_04.28.59%255D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-pF4NzGW-3q4/VsOMsGWotbI/AAAAAAAAB_I/0paMhoOK3PM/s1600/Ghost%2BIn%2BThe%2BShell%2B-%2BInnocence.mp4_snapshot_01.06.19_%255B2016.02.15_04.45.02%255D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-pF4NzGW-3q4/VsOMsGWotbI/AAAAAAAAB_I/0paMhoOK3PM/s640/Ghost%2BIn%2BThe%2BShell%2B-%2BInnocence.mp4_snapshot_01.06.19_%255B2016.02.15_04.45.02%255D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-UnINK2T1m8g/VsOMsCwssTI/AAAAAAAAB_M/AtijY29qoXs/s1600/Ghost%2BIn%2BThe%2BShell%2B-%2BInnocence.mp4_snapshot_01.15.03_%255B2016.02.15_21.30.34%255D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-UnINK2T1m8g/VsOMsCwssTI/AAAAAAAAB_M/AtijY29qoXs/s640/Ghost%2BIn%2BThe%2BShell%2B-%2BInnocence.mp4_snapshot_01.15.03_%255B2016.02.15_21.30.34%255D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
(<i><a href="https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ghost_in_the_Shell_2:_Innocence">Ghost in the Shell — Innocence</a></i>, 2004)</div>
<br>
<br>
<h3><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Kubrick">Stanley Kubrick</a> (1928 – 99)</h3>
<br>
<i>Dave Bowman:</i><br>
Open the pod bay doors, HAL.<br>
<br>
<i>HAL:</i><br>
I'm sorry, Dave.<br>
I'm afraid I can't do that.<br>
<br>
<i>Dave Bowman:</i><br>
What's the problem?<br>
<br>
<i>HAL:</i><br>
I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.<br>
<br>
<i>Dave Bowman:</i><br>
What are you talking about, HAL?<br>
<br>
<i>HAL:</i><br>
This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.<br>
<br>
<i>Dave Bowman:</i><br>
I don't know what you're talking about, HAL.<br>
<br>
<i>HAL:</i><br>
I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen.<br>
<br>
<i>Dave Bowman:</i><br>
Where the hell did you get that idea, HAL?<br>
<br>
<i>HAL:</i><br>
Dave, although you took very thorough precautions in the pod against my hearing you, I could see your lips move.<br>
<br>
<i>Dave Bowman:</i><br>
Alright HAL, I'll go in through the emergency airlock.<br>
<br>
<i>HAL:</i><br>
Without your space helmet, Dave?<br>
You're going to find that rather difficult.<br>
<br>
<i>Dave Bowman:</i><br>
HAL, I won't argue with you anymore!<br>
Open the doors!<br>
<br>
<i>HAL:</i><br>
Dave, this conversation can serve no purpose anymore.<br>
Goodbye.<br>
<br>
(<i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062622/trivia?tab=qt">2001: A Space Odyssey</a></i>, 1968)<br>
<br>
<br>
<h3 id="2125608"><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2125608/">Searching for Sugar Man</a> (2012)</h3>
<br>
<i>Eva Rodriguez</i><br>
<br>
Just because people are poor, or have little, doesn't mean that their dreams aren't big and their soul isn't rich.<br>
<br>
<br>
<i>Rick Emmerson</i><br>
<br>
[Sixto] had this kind of magical property that all genuine artists and poets have.<br>
To elevate things, to get above the mundane and the prosaic … all the bullshit, all the mediocrity that's everywhere.<br>
The artist … the artist is the pioneer.<br>
<br>
Even when his musical hopes were dashed, the spirit remained.<br>
And he just had to keep finding the place, refining the process of how to apply himself.<br>
He knew that there was something more.<br>
<br>
It was in the early 80s.<br>
He wanted to … do something righteous.<br>
He wanted to make a difference.<br>
So, lo and behold, he told me that he was going to run for mayor.<br>
And I thought:
<blockquote>Well, God bless you Rodriguez.<br>
If you can become mayor of Detroit, anything is possible! …</blockquote>
<br>
What he has demonstrated very clearly is that you have choice.<br>
He took
<ul><li>all that torment,</li>
<li>all that agony,</li>
<li>all that confusion and pain.</li></ul>
And he transformed it into something beautiful.<br>
He's like the silk worm.<br>
You take this raw material and you transform it and you come out with something that wasn't there before:<br>
<ul><li>something beautiful,</li>
<li>something perhaps transcendent,</li>
<li>something perhaps eternal.</li></ul>
In so far as he does that … he is representative of the human spirit — of what's possible.<br>
That you have a choice and this has been my choice: to give you Sugar Man.<br>
<br>
(Malik Blenjelloul: Writer, Editor and Director)<br>
<br>
<br>
<h3 id="contents">Contents</h3>
<br>
<a href="https://scepticwatch.blogspot.com/2012/04/philosophy-now.html#Cameron">Cameron, James</a><br>
<br>
<a href="#hanson">Hanson, Hart</a><br>
<br>
<a href="#Köhler">Köhler, Walter</a><br>
<br>
<a href="#oliver">Oliver, Neil</a><br>
<br>
<a href="#roddenberry">Roddenberry, Gene</a><br>
<br>
<a href="#scott">Scott, Ridley</a><br>
<br>
<a href="#shakespeare">Shakespeare, William</a><br>
<br>
<a href="#thorpe">Thorpe, Jerry</a><br>
<br>
<a href="#whedon">Whedon, Joss</a><br>
<br>
<a href="#silkroad">Willis, Sam</a><br>
<br>
<br>
<h2>Stage and Screen</h2>
<br>
<h3 id="hanson"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hart_Hanson">Hart Hanson</a> (1957)</h3>
<p><ul><li><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0460627/"><i>Bones</i></a><br>
<br>
The sun comes up because the world turns.<br>
These things are beautiful to me.<br>
There are mysteries I will never understand.<br>
But everywhere I look I see proof that for every effect, there is a corresponding cause.<br>
Even if I can't see it.<br>
I find that reassuring.</li></ul></p>
<br>
<h3 id="Köhler">Walter Köhler</h3>
<p><ul><li><i><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6954526/">Brazil: A Natural History</a></i>, Terra Mater Factual Studios, 2014-5.</li></ul></p>
<br>
<div align="center"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-V8c_YQrwE_g/W4FmP5r6cQI/AAAAAAAACzg/KJQQc3psLakifT30NC_3WOueVuJDaQWzwCLcBGAs/s1600/wildbrazil1.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-V8c_YQrwE_g/W4FmP5r6cQI/AAAAAAAACzg/KJQQc3psLakifT30NC_3WOueVuJDaQWzwCLcBGAs/s640/wildbrazil1.JPG" data-original-width="765" data-original-height="429"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-p6E1QeQhpdM/W4FmQPSM8aI/AAAAAAAACzo/1uALo9AJe64RMX936cpqLjz0hWjRSIAYQCLcBGAs/s1600/wildbrazil9.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-p6E1QeQhpdM/W4FmQPSM8aI/AAAAAAAACzo/1uALo9AJe64RMX936cpqLjz0hWjRSIAYQCLcBGAs/s640/wildbrazil9.JPG" data-original-width="745" data-original-height="425"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-sliIQef6bzE/W4FmP9u2nzI/AAAAAAAACzk/sQyT5LtT5DwIFwTat9UekBGZ6nlkGKXXgCLcBGAs/s1600/wildbrazil10.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-sliIQef6bzE/W4FmP9u2nzI/AAAAAAAACzk/sQyT5LtT5DwIFwTat9UekBGZ6nlkGKXXgCLcBGAs/s640/wildbrazil10.JPG" data-original-width="758" data-original-height="429"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-KL5Nv2V59ro/W4FmPUZsioI/AAAAAAAACzc/EBmdb9gnUIUiqutS-yUZtTtTGxLO_7w9gCLcBGAs/s1600/wildbrazil.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-KL5Nv2V59ro/W4FmPUZsioI/AAAAAAAACzc/EBmdb9gnUIUiqutS-yUZtTtTGxLO_7w9gCLcBGAs/s640/wildbrazil.JPG" data-original-width="755" data-original-height="431"></a>
<br>
<br>
(<i><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7674084/">Fragile Forest</a></i>, Episode 1)<br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-XPv7kQ-ya_M/W6jne89JMwI/AAAAAAAAC2Q/PKOUYVUPbk873o5n3tINLvUujSZh8uKBACLcBGAs/s1600/brazil403.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-XPv7kQ-ya_M/W6jne89JMwI/AAAAAAAAC2Q/PKOUYVUPbk873o5n3tINLvUujSZh8uKBACLcBGAs/s640/brazil403.JPG" data-original-width="755" data-original-height="422"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-mPWd_WKpIQs/W6jnrXfpQHI/AAAAAAAAC2U/j-4vhqTKjawxNT-8Dp4HwgOXTjwzLwICwCLcBGAs/s1600/brazil404.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-mPWd_WKpIQs/W6jnrXfpQHI/AAAAAAAAC2U/j-4vhqTKjawxNT-8Dp4HwgOXTjwzLwICwCLcBGAs/s640/brazil404.JPG" data-original-width="758" data-original-height="425"></a>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-XRNDiDjRpkM/W6jn4CyvavI/AAAAAAAAC2c/YeXyhSTtA8oM6N1oj07VZyRFstq-SIbBQCLcBGAs/s1600/brazil414.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-XRNDiDjRpkM/W6jn4CyvavI/AAAAAAAAC2c/YeXyhSTtA8oM6N1oj07VZyRFstq-SIbBQCLcBGAs/s640/brazil414.JPG" data-original-width="747" data-original-height="414"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wVpGnOAFBzM/W6joBjGeOoI/AAAAAAAAC2g/sQtHp4K8YkMPG6GyAUb7zwPKmNxN4FExgCLcBGAs/s1600/brazil415.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wVpGnOAFBzM/W6joBjGeOoI/AAAAAAAAC2g/sQtHp4K8YkMPG6GyAUb7zwPKmNxN4FExgCLcBGAs/s640/brazil415.JPG" data-original-width="755" data-original-height="429"></a><br>
<br>
(<i><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7685870/">Paradise Coast</a></i>, Episode 4)<br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-meiawBWT2AI/W6jnFP8IxaI/AAAAAAAAC2E/YKM5eVTEeqMkF_Q2L152H4g62xF8HM5FwCLcBGAs/s1600/wildheart02.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-meiawBWT2AI/W6jnFP8IxaI/AAAAAAAAC2E/YKM5eVTEeqMkF_Q2L152H4g62xF8HM5FwCLcBGAs/s640/wildheart02.JPG" data-original-width="759" data-original-height="421"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Twn8b1S9sLM/W6jm3kPD1AI/AAAAAAAAC2A/EoarHLzlcqcHL_egNVqLJzoMaXHJyoL_gCLcBGAs/s1600/wildheart10.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Twn8b1S9sLM/W6jm3kPD1AI/AAAAAAAAC2A/EoarHLzlcqcHL_egNVqLJzoMaXHJyoL_gCLcBGAs/s640/wildheart10.JPG" data-original-width="745" data-original-height="400"></a><br>
<br>
(<i><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7674230/">Wild Heart</a></i>, Episode 2)<br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-PSrMRBY_lHk/W7DAYTrn1lI/AAAAAAAAC3M/j-YHPFcVav4y1lvXzM3Dg76VrbJY0VY1wCLcBGAs/s1600/brazil513.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-PSrMRBY_lHk/W7DAYTrn1lI/AAAAAAAAC3M/j-YHPFcVav4y1lvXzM3Dg76VrbJY0VY1wCLcBGAs/s640/brazil513.JPG" data-original-width="759" data-original-height="428"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-emUbxPJfBN0/W7DAgj2KxFI/AAAAAAAAC3Q/JOTmByALfAAHl0siSlUKRhqApNtxit0dACLcBGAs/s1600/brazil511.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-emUbxPJfBN0/W7DAgj2KxFI/AAAAAAAAC3Q/JOTmByALfAAHl0siSlUKRhqApNtxit0dACLcBGAs/s640/brazil511.JPG" data-original-width="760" data-original-height="423"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-kw3P0f-sDDY/W7DAm6xJ-VI/AAAAAAAAC3U/81mX4hXU93ImtX9GQIg1ZsKlq3tWZX-OQCLcBGAs/s1600/brazil516.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-kw3P0f-sDDY/W7DAm6xJ-VI/AAAAAAAAC3U/81mX4hXU93ImtX9GQIg1ZsKlq3tWZX-OQCLcBGAs/s640/brazil516.JPG" data-original-width="754" data-original-height="426"></a><br>
<br>
(<i><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7689440/">Flooded Forest</a></i>, Episode 5)</div>
<br>
<br>
<h3 id="oliver"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Oliver">Neil Oliver</a> (1967)</h3>
<p><ul><li><i><a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00xchyf">A History of Ancient Britain</a></i>, <a href="https://scepticwatch.blogspot.com/2012/03/british-broadcasting-corporation.html#top">BBC Two</a>, 2011.</li></ul></p>
<br>
<div align="center"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-xBrxopYmLSo/UgjEJo-ducI/AAAAAAAABHc/AWlMEr1wnGk/s1600/A+History+Of+Ancient+Britain+S1+Ep1+-+Age+Of+Ice_1500K.mp4_snapshot_01.27_%5B2013.06.03_23.45.18%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-xBrxopYmLSo/UgjEJo-ducI/AAAAAAAABHc/AWlMEr1wnGk/s640/A+History+Of+Ancient+Britain+S1+Ep1+-+Age+Of+Ice_1500K.mp4_snapshot_01.27_%5B2013.06.03_23.45.18%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-yCIqLFY1PHw/UgjEKZwo7-I/AAAAAAAABHk/rCccuJ71HVA/s1600/A+History+Of+Ancient+Britain+S1+Ep1+-+Age+Of+Ice_1500K.mp4_snapshot_06.32_%5B2013.06.05_01.02.59%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-yCIqLFY1PHw/UgjEKZwo7-I/AAAAAAAABHk/rCccuJ71HVA/s640/A+History+Of+Ancient+Britain+S1+Ep1+-+Age+Of+Ice_1500K.mp4_snapshot_06.32_%5B2013.06.05_01.02.59%5D.jpg"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Q6eLXzlmDtg/UgjENd1Af8I/AAAAAAAABH8/a2ZdyuSJ3mY/s1600/A+History+Of+Ancient+Britain+S1+Ep2+-+Age+Of+Ancestors_1500K.mp4_snapshot_19.11_%5B2013.06.07_02.18.16%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Q6eLXzlmDtg/UgjENd1Af8I/AAAAAAAABH8/a2ZdyuSJ3mY/s640/A+History+Of+Ancient+Britain+S1+Ep2+-+Age+Of+Ancestors_1500K.mp4_snapshot_19.11_%5B2013.06.07_02.18.16%5D.jpg"></a></div>
<br>
<br>
<h3 id="roddenberry"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Roddenberry">Gene Roddenberry</a> (1921 – 91)</h3>
<p><ul><li><i>Star Trek</i>, 1967.<br>
<br>
I find nothing interesting in the fact that we're about to blow up!<br>
(<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708450/">That Which Survives</a>, Episode 17, Season 3, 1969)</li>
<br>
<li><i><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084726/quotes">Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan</a></i>, 1982.<br>
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Meyer">Nicholas Meyer</a> (1945).<br>
<br>
[The] needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few …</li>
<br>
<li><i><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092455/quotes">Star Trek: The Next Generation</a></i>, 1987.<br>
<br>
Space …<br>
The final frontier.<br>
These the voyages of the starship Enterprise.<br>
Its continuing mission:<br>
To explore strange new worlds;<br>
To seek out new life, and new civilizations;<br>
To boldly go where no-one has gone before.<br>
<br>
What we need is a climbing song.<br>
Marissa, is there a song you sing at school?
<ul><i>The Laughing Vulcan and His Dog?</i></ul>
I afraid I don't know that one …<br>
<br>
No-one can deny that the seed of violence remains within every of us.<br>
We must recognize that.<br>
Because that violence is capable of consuming each of us.</li>
<br>
<li><i><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112178/quotes">Star Trek: Voyager</a></i>, 1995.<br>
<br>
Get the cheese to sick bay …</li></ul></p>
<br>
<h3 id="scott"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ridley_Scott">Ridley Scott</a> (1937)</h3>
<p><ul><li><i><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078748/quotes">Alien</a></i>, 1979.<br>
<br>
Ash, that transmission …<br>
Mother's deciphered part of it.<br>
It doesn't look like an SOS.</ul>
<ul>What is it, then?</ul>
<ul>[It] looks like a warning.<br>
<br>
This is Ripley.<br>
Last survivor of the Nostromo.<br>
Signing off.</li></ul>
<br>
<ul><li><i><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083658/quotes">Blade Runner</a></i>, 1982.<br>
<br>
How can it not know what it is?<br>
<br>
Commerce is our goal …<br>
"More human than human," is our motto.<br>
<br>
Painful to live in fear isn't it?<br>
Nothing is worse than having an itch you can never scratch!<br>
<br>
Wake up!<br>
Time to die.<br>
<br>
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe.<br>
Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.<br>
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.<br>
All those moments will be lost in time … like tears in rain.<br>
Time … to die.</li></ul></p>
<br>
<h3 id="shakespeare"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shakespeare">William Shakespeare</a> (1564 – 1616)</h3>
<p><ul><li><i><a href="https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_III_(play)">Richard III</a></i>, 1592.<br>
<br>
Now is the winter of our discontent<br>
Made glorious summer by this sun of York …<br>
(Scene 1, Act 1)<br>
<br>
Conscience is but a word that cowards use,<br>
Devised at first to keep the strong in awe …<br>
(Scene 3, Act 5)</li>
<br>
<li><i>The Two Gentlemen of Verona</i>, 1592.<br>
<br>
Dumb Jewels often, in their silent kind,<br>
More than quick words do move a woman's mind.<br>
(Scene 1, Act 3)</li>
<br>
<li><i>Romeo and Juliet</i>, 1595.<br>
<br>
What's in a name? That which we call a rose<br>
By any other name would smell as sweet.<br>
(Scene 2, Act 2)<br>
<br>
Come, gentle Night; come, loving, black-browed Night:<br>
Give me my Romeo; and when he shall die,<br>
Take him and cut him out in little stars,<br>
And he shall make the face of heaven so fine<br>
That all the world will be in love with night,<br>
And pay no worship to the garish sun.<br>
(Scene 2, Act 3)</li>
<br>
<li><i>The First Part of the History of Henry IV</i>, 1596-7.<br>
<br>
The better part of valour is discretion …<br>
(Scene 4, Act 5)</li>
<br>
<li><i><a href="https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Henry_V_(play)">Henry V</a></i>, 1599.<br>
<br>
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;<br>
Or close the wall up with our English dead …<br>
(Scene 1, Act 3)<br>
<br>
If we are marked to die, we are enow<br>
To do our country loss; and if to live,<br>
The fewer men, the greater share of honour. …<br>
<br>
We would not die in that man's company,<br>
That fears his fellowship to die with us. …<br>
<br>
This day is called the feast of Crispian:<br>
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,<br>
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is named,<br>
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.<br>
He that shall see this day, and live old age,<br>
Will yearly on the vigil feast his friends,<br>
And say, "To-morrow is Saint Crispian."<br>
Then will he strip his sleeve, and show his scars,<br>
And say, "These wounds I had on Crispin's day."<br>
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,<br>
But he'll remember, with advantages,<br>
What feats he did that day. …<br>
<br>
This story shall the good man teach his son:<br>
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,<br>
From this day to the ending of the world,<br>
But we in it shall be rememberéd,<br>
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.<br>
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me<br>
Shall be my brother: be he ne'er so vile,<br>
This day shall gentle his condition.<br>
And gentlemen in England, now a-bed,<br>
Shall think themselves accursed, they were not here;<br>
And hold their manhoods cheap, whiles any speaks,<br>
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.<br>
(Scene 3, Act 4)</li>
<br>
<li><i><a href="https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/As_You_Like_It#Act_II">As You Like It</a></i>, 1599-1600.<br>
<br>
All the world's a stage,<br>
And all the men and women merely players;<br>
They have their exits and their entrances,<br>
And one man in his time plays many parts,<br>
His acts being seven ages …<br>
(Scene 7, Act 2)</li>
<br>
<li>A Midsummer-Night's Dream, 1600.<br>
<br>
Cupid is a knavish lad,<br>
Thus to make poor females mad.<br>
(Scene 1, Act 4)</li>
<br>
<li><i><a href="https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hamlet">Hamlet</a></i>, 1600.<br>
<br>
But look, the morn in russet mantle clad<br>
Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastward hill.<br>
(Scene 1)<br>
<br>
O, that this too too sullied flesh would melt,<br>
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew …<br>
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable<br>
Seem to me all the uses of this world! …<br>
<br>
[Frailty] thy name is woman! …<br>
<br>
A' was a man, take him for all in all,<br>
I shall not look upon his like again.<br>
(Scene 2)<br>
<br>
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,<br>
But not expressed in fancy; rich not gaudy.<br>
For the apparel oft proclaims the man. …<br>
<br>
This above all, to thine own self be true<br>
And it must follow as the night the day<br>
Thou canst not then be false to any man …<br>
(Scene 3)<br>
<br>
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.<br>
(Scene 4)<br>
<br>
There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio,<br>
Than are dreamt of in you philosophy. …<br>
<br>
The time is out of joint, O curséd spite,<br>
That ever I was born to set it right!<br>
(Scene 5, Act 1)<br>
<br>
More matter, with less art. …<br>
<br>
Though this be madness, yet there is method in't. …<br>
<br>
[There] is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so …<br>
<br>
O God! I could be bounded in a nut-shell,<br>
And count myself a king of infinite space;<br>
were it not that I have bad dreams. …<br>
<br>
I have of late, but wherefore I know not,<br>
lost all my mirth,<br>
forgone all custom of exercises:<br>
and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition, that<br>
this goodly frame the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory,<br>
this most excellent canopy the air, look you,<br>
this brave o'erhanging firmament,<br>
this majestical roof fretted with golden fire,<br>
why it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. …<br>
<br>
What a piece of work is a man,<br>
how noble in reason,<br>
how infinite in faculties,<br>
in form and moving,<br>
how express and admirable in action,<br>
how like an angel in apprehension,<br>
how like a god:<br>
the beauty of the world,<br>
the paragon of animals,<br>
and yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? …<br>
<br>
I am but mad north-north-west; when the<br>
wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw. …<br>
<br>
[The] play's the thing<br>
Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king.<br>
(Scene 2, Act 2)<br>
<br>
To be, or not to be, that is the question,<br>
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer<br>
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,<br>
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,<br>
And by opposing end them? To die, to sleep —<br>
No more, and by a sleep to say we end<br>
The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks<br>
That flesh is heir to; 'tis a consummation<br>
Devoutly to be wished to die to sleep!<br>
To sleep, perchance to dream, ay there's the rub,<br>
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come<br>
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil<br>
Must give us pause — there's the respect<br>
That makes calamity of so long life:<br>
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time …<br>
When he himself might his quietus make<br>
With a bare bodkin; who would these fardels bear,<br>
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,<br>
But that the dread of something after death,<br>
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn<br>
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,<br>
And makes us rather bear those ills we have,<br>
Than fly to others that we know not of?<br>
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,<br>
and thus the native hue of resolution<br>
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,<br>
And enterprises of great pitch and moment<br>
With this regard their currents turn awry,<br>
And lose the name of action. … Soft you now,<br>
The fair Ophelia — Nymph, in thy orisons<br>
Be all my sins remembered.<br>
(Scene 1)<br>
<br>
Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.<br>
(Scene 2, Act 3)<br>
<br>
There on the pendent boughs her crownet weeds<br>
Clamb'ring to hang, an envious sliver broke,<br>
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide,<br>
And mermaid-like awhile there bore her up,<br>
Which time she chanted snatches of old lauds,<br>
As one incapable of her own distress,<br>
Or like a creature native and indued<br>
Unto that element. But long it could not be<br>
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,<br>
Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay<br>
To muddy death.<br>
(Scene 7, Act 4)<br>
<br>
There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow.<br>
If it be now, 'tis not to come —<br>
if it be not to come, it will be now —<br>
the readiness is all. …<br>
<br>
… <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100519/">Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead</a>.<br>
(Scene 2, Act 5)</li>
<br>
<li><i>Othello</i>, 1604.<br>
<br>
… I'll not shed her blood.<br>
Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow<br>
And smooth as monumental alabaster —<br>
Yet she must die, else she'll betray more men.<br>
(Scene 2, Act 5)</li>
<br>
<li><i><a href="https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/King_Lear">King Lear</a></i>, 1605.<br>
<br>
We have seen the best of our time.<br>
Machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders, follow us disquietly to our graves.<br>
(Scene 2)<br>
<br>
How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is<br>
To have a thankless child!<br>
(Scene 4, Act 1)<br>
<br>
As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods;<br>
They kill us for their sport.<br>
(Scene 1, Act 4)</li>
<br>
<li><i><a href="https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Macbeth">Macbeth</a></i>, 1606.<br>
<br>
… I am in blood<br>
Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more,<br>
Returning were as tedious as go o'er …<br>
(Scene 4, Act 3)<br>
<br>
Double, Double toil and trouble;<br>
Fire burn and cauldron bubble. …<br>
<br>
By the pricking of my thumbs,<br>
Something wicked this was comes:<br>
(Scene 1)<br>
<br>
[Cruel] are the times, when we are traitors<br>
And do not know ourselves; when we hold rumour<br>
From what we fear, yet know not what we fear,<br>
But float upon a wild and violent sea …<br>
(Scene 2, Act 4)<br>
<br>
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,<br>
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,<br>
To the last syllable of recorded time;<br>
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools<br>
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!<br>
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player<br>
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,<br>
And then is heard no more: it is a tale<br>
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,<br>
Signifying nothing.<br>
(Scene 5, Act 5)</li>
<br>
<li><i><a href="https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Tempest">The Tempest</a></i>, 1611.<br>
<br>
We are such stuff<br>
As dreams are made on; and our little life<br>
Is rounded with a sleep.<br>
(Scene 1, Act 4)<br>
<br>
O, wonder!<br>
How many goodly creatures are there here!<br>
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,<br>
That has such people in't!<br>
(Scene 1, Act 5)</li></ul></p>
<br>
<h3 id="thorpe"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Thorpe">Jerry Thorpe</a> (1926)</h3>
<p><ul><li><i><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068093/">Kung Fu</a></i>, 1972-4.<br>
<br>
Peace lies not in the world …<br>
But in the man who walks the Path. …<br>
To reach perfection, a man must develop equally compassion and wisdom. …<br>
In a heart that is one with Nature, though the body contends, there is no violence.<br>
And in the heart that is not one with Nature, though the body be at rest, there is always violence.<br>
<br>
I have three treasures which I hold and keep.<br>
The first is mercy, for from mercy comes courage.<br>
The second is frugality, from which comes generosity towards others.<br>
The third is humility, for from it comes leadership.<br>
<br>
The best charioteers do not push ahead.<br>
The best fighters do not make displays of anger.<br>
The wisest antagonist is he who wins without engaging in battle. …<br>
This is the power of not contending.<br>
It is how the weak, overcome the strong.<br>
<br>
Learn more ways to preserve, rather than to destroy.<br>
Avoid, rather than check.<br>
Check, rather than hurt.<br>
Hurt, rather than maim.<br>
Maim, rather than kill.<br>
For all life is precious.<br>
Nor can any, be replaced.<br>
<br>
Remember always:<br>
That a wise man walks with his head bowed.<br>
Humble, like the dust.<br>
<br>
[Life] does not end.<br>
The journey goes on, from one time to another.<br>
Nothing dies, that was ever something.<br>
<br>
[Be] yourself.<br>
And never fear, thus, to be naked to the eyes of others.<br>
Yet know that, men so often mask themselves.<br>
That what is simple is rarely understood.<br>
The dust of truth swirls and seeks its own cracks of entry.<br>
And a tree falling in the forest, without ears to hear, makes no sound.<br>
Yet, it falls.<br>
<br>
Will you help me walk the path [to the Truth?]</ul>
<ul>I can only point the way … you must walk the path yourself.<br>
(The Spirit Helper, Episode 5)<br>
<br>
I seek only to become a cup, empty of myself.<br>
<br>
[Evil] cannot be conquered in the world.<br>
It can only by resisted within oneself.<br>
<br>
Time is carving you …<br>
Let yourself be shaped according to your true nature.<br>
(The Tong, Episode 8)<br>
<br>
Bind yourself to nothing.<br>
Seek harmony with all.<br>
Then you will be truly free.<br>
(The Elixir, Episode 11)<br>
<br>
The way to do, is to be.<br>
(The Gunman, Episode 12, Season 2, 1973)<br>
<br>
For good return good.<br>
For evil return justice.<br>
(The Thief of Chendo, Episode 22, Season 3)</li></ul></p>
<br>
<h3 id="whedon"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joss_Whedon">Joss Whedon</a> (1964)</h3>
<p><ul><li><i><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379786/">Serenity</a></i>, 2005.<br>
<br>
How is she physically?</ul>
<ul>Like nothing we've seen.<br>
All our subjects are conditioned for combat.<br>
But River, she's a creature of extraordinary grace.</ul>
<ul>Yes, she always did love to dance.<br>
<br>
Earth that was could no longer sustain our numbers, we were so many.<br>
We found a new solar system, dozens of planets and hundreds of moons.<br>
Each one terraformed, a process taking decades, to support human life, to be new Earths. …<br>
<br>
Do you even know why they sent you?</ul>
<ul>It's not my place to ask.<br>
I believe in something greater than myself.<br>
A better world.<br>
A world without sin.</ul>
<ul>So me and mine gotta lay down and die … so you can live in your better world?</ul>
<ul>I'm not going to live there.<br>
There's no place for me there …<br>
<br>
Storm's getting worse.</ul>
<ul>We'll pass through it soon enough.</li></ul></p>
<br>
<h3 id="silkroad"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Willis">Sam Willis</a> (1977)</h3>
<p><ul><li><i><a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03qb130">The Silk Road</a></i>, BBC Four, 2016.</li></ul></p>
<br>
<div align="center"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-HHzlsbcRmf8/W4AKHlfrFyI/AAAAAAAACzE/gKVbLneOxPoPbvXMQnpB71IFbAZdd0whwCLcBGAs/s1600/silkroad10a.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-HHzlsbcRmf8/W4AKHlfrFyI/AAAAAAAACzE/gKVbLneOxPoPbvXMQnpB71IFbAZdd0whwCLcBGAs/s640/silkroad10a.jpg" data-original-width="365" data-original-height="336"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-i-hmorMNtsg/W4AGp61v8KI/AAAAAAAACyQ/tY23iNu6ug8R9jg7ALfKtHSyo-pIeWXjQCLcBGAs/s1600/silkroad00.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-i-hmorMNtsg/W4AGp61v8KI/AAAAAAAACyQ/tY23iNu6ug8R9jg7ALfKtHSyo-pIeWXjQCLcBGAs/s640/silkroad00.JPG" data-original-width="759" data-original-height="418"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-72o_gPyfpMM/W4AHlb3ek3I/AAAAAAAACyg/Rs-PBaoIOu0Bn1qxJ6vHv5ZfxtYIyX1BwCLcBGAs/s1600/silkroad14.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-72o_gPyfpMM/W4AHlb3ek3I/AAAAAAAACyg/Rs-PBaoIOu0Bn1qxJ6vHv5ZfxtYIyX1BwCLcBGAs/s640/silkroad14.JPG" data-original-width="755" data-original-height="427"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-HqGHCp3GSkI/W4AHlnIwSwI/AAAAAAAACyk/Bw3K2M1wnnkBBM__VCj5lFYCxY9LhFmOQCLcBGAs/s1600/silkroad18.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-HqGHCp3GSkI/W4AHlnIwSwI/AAAAAAAACyk/Bw3K2M1wnnkBBM__VCj5lFYCxY9LhFmOQCLcBGAs/s640/silkroad18.JPG" data-original-width="753" data-original-height="425"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-EAjJEx1H4kQ/W4AHmE5WMlI/AAAAAAAACyo/eVUQ0CWpTDwi1bHBPWkjOZFyd9krLHvoQCLcBGAs/s1600/silkroad21.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-EAjJEx1H4kQ/W4AHmE5WMlI/AAAAAAAACyo/eVUQ0CWpTDwi1bHBPWkjOZFyd9krLHvoQCLcBGAs/s640/silkroad21.JPG" data-original-width="758" data-original-height="429"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-M3hXzlnG_do/W4AQFjknwiI/AAAAAAAACzQ/atKj_m-UAwIgYnBgO45gUN6U5njG5I4gQCLcBGAs/s1600/silkroad26.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-M3hXzlnG_do/W4AQFjknwiI/AAAAAAAACzQ/atKj_m-UAwIgYnBgO45gUN6U5njG5I4gQCLcBGAs/s640/silkroad26.JPG" data-original-width="762" data-original-height="429"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-4WvXrjlsaDU/W4AHmRabSBI/AAAAAAAACys/5mAxvKXCvUwJMC-BZpd9oBx8A1SGIxvrQCLcBGAs/s1600/silkroad28.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-4WvXrjlsaDU/W4AHmRabSBI/AAAAAAAACys/5mAxvKXCvUwJMC-BZpd9oBx8A1SGIxvrQCLcBGAs/s640/silkroad28.JPG" data-original-width="762" data-original-height="426"></a></div>peaceandlonglifehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09059683906637157584noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1170524542125253803.post-65079070220086903602011-09-01T00:57:00.008-07:002022-08-30T08:44:08.424-07:00Poetry and Song<i id="top"><a href="https://40-eridani-a.blogspot.com/p/peace-and-long-life_9.html#contents">Peace and Long Life</a></i><br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<div align="center"><h2><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilfred_Owen">Wilfred Owen</a> (1893 – 1918)</h2>
<br>
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-gFOIpXLR05o/W_bQ1EqYnaI/AAAAAAAADAE/XeN1zi5Bie8qW3FuODbkrZzPBDJKGusdQCLcBGAs/s1600/_Anthem_for_Doomed_Youth__by_Wilfred_Owen_%2528English%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-gFOIpXLR05o/W_bQ1EqYnaI/AAAAAAAADAE/XeN1zi5Bie8qW3FuODbkrZzPBDJKGusdQCLcBGAs/s1600/_Anthem_for_Doomed_Youth__by_Wilfred_Owen_%2528English%2529.jpg" width="360" height="451" data-original-width="700" data-original-height="877"></a><br>
<br>
(<a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1394347">Original manuscript</a> of "Anthem for Doomed Youth", showing Sassoon's revisions, 1917)<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<h2><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Blake">William Blake</a> (1757 – 1827)</h2>
<br>
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyger" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-buVXa0FS-sk/UcGtmj-P7pI/AAAAAAAABFo/Chr4x3f0Tfo/s510/356px-The_Tyger_BM_a_1794.jpg" width="360" height="630" data-original-width="768" data-original-height="1343"></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Poison_Tree" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" width="360" height="584" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-DppRQYsZvnQ/Weosk8JiRxI/AAAAAAAACeQ/6Pt88S7BDJkCvx3dS1jN7Ks8lvKOFlTRwCLcBGAs/s510/Songsie.b.p48-49.300.jpg" data-original-width="805" data-original-height="1305" /></a><br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_(William_Blake_poem)" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-FTRbtp2uoJo/W_bUIOW8AfI/AAAAAAAADAQ/BKyWrkJVtsMBJXEgRYDF8aWLgsr_uz3_QCLcBGAs/s1600/Blake_London.jpg" width="360" height="570" data-original-width="932" data-original-height="1475"></a><br>
<br>
(<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songs_of_Innocence_and_of_Experience#Songs_of_Experience">Songs of Experience</a></i>, 1794)<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<h2><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janis_Joplin">Janis Joplin</a> (1943 – 70)</h2></div>
<blockquote><blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-size: medium">Oh Lord won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz<br>
My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends<br>
Worked hard all my lifetime, no help from my friends<br>
So, Oh Lord won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz</span><br>
<br>
— Pearl, <i>1971</i>.</blockquote></blockquote></blockquote>
<br>
<div align="center"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-MINLh-zt4Dk/XLWLoxtU_PI/AAAAAAAADJ4/cpTe-xJTQbctpjAgsaCilLPhOUjn6OmdQCLcBGAs/s1600/janis02.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-MINLh-zt4Dk/XLWLoxtU_PI/AAAAAAAADJ4/cpTe-xJTQbctpjAgsaCilLPhOUjn6OmdQCLcBGAs/s640/janis02.JPG" data-original-width="728" data-original-height="491" /></a><br>
<br>
(Amy Berg, <i><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3707114/">Janis: Little Girl Blue</a></i>, 2015)</div>
<br>
<br>
<blockquote><i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Louis_Stevenson">Robert Stevenson</a> (1850 – 94):</i><br>
Here he lies where he longed to be;<br>
Home is the sailor, home from sea,<br>
And the hunter home from the hill.<br>
(<i>Requiem</i>, 1887)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._B._Yeats">William Butler Yeats</a> (1865 – 1939):</i><br>
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;<br>
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,<br>
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere<br>
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;<br>
The best lack all conviction, while the worst<br>
Are full of passionate intensity.<br>
(<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Second_Coming_(poem)">The Second Coming</a></i>, 1919)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Babington_Macaulay,_1st_Baron_Macaulay">Thomas Macaulay</a> (1800 – 59):</i><br>
To every man upon the earth<br>
Death cometh soon or late<br>
And how can [a] man die better<br>
Than facing fearful odds<br>
For the ashes of his fathers<br>
And the temples of his Gods<br>
(<a href="https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Lays_of_Ancient_Rome/Horatius">Horatius</a>, <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lays_of_Ancient_Rome">Lays of Ancient Rome</a></i>, 1842)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeschylus">Aeschylus</a> (c 525/524 – c 456/455 BCE):</i><br>
[He] who learns must suffer.<br>
And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget<br>
falls drop by drop upon the heart,<br>
and in our own despite, against our will,<br>
comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.<br>
(<a href="https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Aeschylus#Agamemnon">Agamemnon</a>, <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oresteia">Oresteia</a></i>, 458 BCE)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euripides">Euripides</a> (480 – 406 BCE):</i><br>
To the dear lone lands untroubled of men,<br>
Where no voice sounds, and amid the shadowy green<br>
The little things of the woodland live unseen.<br>
(<i>Bacchae</i>, 405 BCE)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhagavad_Gita">Bhagavad Gita</a>:</i><br>
Now I am become Death,<br>
The Destroyer of Worlds.<br>
(400 BCE)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://40-eridani-a.blogspot.com/2011/09/poetry-and-song.html#Anderson">Laurie Anderson</a> (1947):</i><br>
I don't know about your brain — but mine is really bossy …<br>
(Babydoll, <i>Strange Angels</i>, 1989)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther">Martin Luther</a> (1483 – 1546):</i><br>
A might fortress is our God, a trusty shield and weapon;<br>
He helps us free from every need that hath us now o'ertaken.<br>
The old evil Foe now means deadly woe; deep guile and great might<br>
Are his dread arms in fight; on earth is not his equal<br>
(<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Mighty_Fortress_Is_Our_God">A Might Fortress</a></i>, c1528)<br>
<br>
<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewel_%28singer%29">Jewel</a> (1974):</i><br>
In the end, only kindness matters …</blockquote>
<a name='more'></a>
<br>
<h3 id="tennyson"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Tennyson">Alfred Tennyson</a> (1809 – 92)</h3>
<br>
I am a part of all that I have met;<br>
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'<br>
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades<br>
For ever and forever when I move. …<br>
<br>
[But for] this gray spirit yearning in desire<br>
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,<br>
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought. …<br>
<br>
Death closes all; but something ere the end,<br>
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,<br>
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods. …<br>
<br>
Come, my friends,<br>
T'is not too late to seek a newer world …<br>
[For] my purpose holds<br>
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths<br>
Of all the western stars …<br>
[Perhaps to] touch the Happy Isles,<br>
And see [again] the great Achilles, whom [once] we knew.<br>
<br>
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'<br>
We are not now that strength which in [older] days<br>
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;<br>
One equal temper of heroic hearts,<br>
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will<br>
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.<br>
<br>
(<i><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCO3xgiL1EU">Ulysses</a></i>, 1842)<br>
<br>
<br>
<h3><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wordsworth">William Wordsworth</a> (1770 – 1850)</h3>
<br>
For I have learned<br>
To look on nature, not as in the hour<br>
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes<br>
The still, sad music of humanity …<br>
And I have felt … a sense sublime<br>
Of something far more deeply interfused,<br>
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,<br>
And the round ocean and the living air,<br>
And the blue sky …<br>
<br>
(<a href="https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Wordsworth#Lines_written_a_few_miles_above_Tintern_Abbey_%281798%29">Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey</a>, 1798)<br>
<br>
<br>
One impulse from a vernal wood<br>
May teach you more of man,<br>
Of moral evil and of good,<br>
Than all the sages can.<br>
<br>
(<a href="https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Wordsworth#Lyrical_Ballads_%281798%E2%80%931800%29">The Tables Turned</a>, <i>Lyrical Ballads</i>, 1798)<br>
<br>
<br>
<h3><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeschylus">Aeschylus</a> (c 525/524 – c 456/455 BCE)</h3>
<br>
[He] who learns must suffer.<br>
And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget<br>
falls drop by drop upon the heart,<br>
and in our own despite, against our will,<br>
comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.<br>
<br>
(<a href="https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Aeschylus#Agamemnon">Agamemnon</a>, <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oresteia">Oresteia</a></i>, 458 BCE)<br>
<br>
<br>
<h3><a href="https://40-eridani-a.blogspot.com/2017/03/prose.html#Bible">King James Bible</a> (1611)</h3>
<br>
The LORD is my shepherd:
<ul>I shall not want.</ul>
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures:
<ul>he leadeth me beside the still waters.</ul>
He restoreth my soul:
<ul>he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.</ul>
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil:
<ul>for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.</ul>
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies:
<ul>thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.</ul>
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life:
<ul>and I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.</ul>
(<i>Psalms</i>, 23)<br>
<br>
So teach us to number our days, that we apply our hearts unto wisdom.<br>
(<i>Psalms</i>, 90:12)<br>
<br>
By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion. …<br>
O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed: happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou has served us.<br>
Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.<br>
(<i>Psalms</i>, 137:1,8-9)<br>
<br>
Man is like to vanity: his days are as a shadow that passeth away.<br>
(<i>Psalms</i>, 144:4)<br>
<br>
The LORD is gracious, and full of compassion; slow to anger, and of great mercy. …<br>
[His] kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and [his] dominion endureth throughout all generations. …<br>
The LORD is righteous in all his ways, and holy in all his works. …<br>
[He] preserveth all them that love him: but all the wicked will he destroy.<br>
(<i>Psalms</i>, 145:8,13,17,20)<br>
<br>
He telleth the number of the stars; he calleth them all by their names.<br>
Great is our Lord, and of great power: his understanding is infinite.<br>
The LORD taketh pleasure in them that fear him, in those that hope in his mercy.<br>
(<i>Psalms</i>, 147:4-5,11)<br>
<br>
Let the saints be joyful in glory: let them sing aloud upon their beds.<br>
Let the high praises of God be in their mouth, and a twoedged sword in their hand;<br>
To execute vengeance upon the heathen, and punishments upon the people;<br>
To bind their kings with chains, and their nobles with fetters of iron;<br>
To execute upon them the judgment written: this honour have all his saints.<br>
(<i>Psalms</i>, 149:5-9)<br>
<br>
<br>
<h3 id="Arnold"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Arnold">Matthew Arnold</a> (1822 – 88)</h3>
<br>
Ah, love, let us be true<br>
To one another! for the world, which seems<br>
To lie before us like a land of dreams,<br>
So various, so beautiful, so new,<br>
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,<br>
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;<br>
And we are here as on a darkling plain<br>
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,<br>
Where ignorant armies clash by night.<br>
<br>
(<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dover_Beach">Dover Beach</a></i>, 1867)<br>
<br>
<br>
<h3><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Newton">John Newton</a> (1725 – 1807)</h3>
<br>
Amazing grace (how sweet the sound)<br>
that saved a wretch like me!<br>
I once was lost, but now am found,<br>
was blind, but now I see.<br>
<br>
'Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,<br>
and grace my fears relieved;<br>
how precious did that grace appear<br>
the hour I first believed!<br>
<br>
Through many dangers, toils and snares<br>
I have already come:<br>
'tis grace has brought me safe thus far,<br>
and grace will lead me home.<br>
<br>
The Lord has promised good to me,<br>
his word my hope secures;<br>
he will my shield and portion be<br>
as long as life endures.<br>
<br>
Yes, when this flesh and heart shall fail,<br>
and mortal life shall cease:<br>
I shall possess, within the veil,<br>
a life of joy and peace.<br>
<br>
The earth shall soon dissolve like snow,<br>
the sun forbear to shine;<br>
but God, who called me here below,<br>
will be forever mine.<br>
<br>
(<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazing_Grace">Amazing Grace</a></i>, 1779)<br>
<br>
<br>
<h3><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Paul_Lederach">John Lederach</a> (1955)</h3>
<br>
Maybe, he says, this<br>
is as good as it will get.<br>
Peaceful bigotry.<br>
<br>
Don't ask the mountain<br>
to move, just take a pebble<br>
each time you visit.<br>
<br>
Gods and men love maps<br>
they draw borders with pens that<br>
split lives like an ax.<br>
<br>
(Krista Tippett, <i>Becoming Wise</i>, Corsair, 2016, pp 47-8)<br>
<br>
<br>
<h3 id="contents">Contents</h3>
<br>
<a href="#Anderson">Laurie Anderson</a><br>
<br>
<a href="#Black">Mary Black</a><br>
<br>
<a href="#Jewel">Jewel</a><br>
<br>
<a href="#McBride">Martina McBride</a><br>
<br>
<a href="#Python">Monty Python</a><br>
<br>
<a href="#Richey">Kim Richey</a><br>
<br>
<a href="https://scepticwatch.blogspot.com/2011/09/green-army-persons-of-interest.html#Simone">Nina Simone</a><br>
<br>
<a href="#talkingheads">Talking Heads</a><br>
<br>
<br>
<h2>Poetry and Song</h2>
<br>
<h3 id="Anderson"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurie_Anderson">Laurie Anderson</a> (1947)</h3>
<br>
<h4>Home of the Brave (1986)</h4>
<br>
<b><i>Talk Normal</i></b><br>
<br>
I don't know about your dreams<br>
But mine are sort of hackneyed.<br>
Same thing, night after night.<br>
Just … repetitive.<br>
And the color is really bad -<br>
And the themes are just infantile.<br>
And you always get what you want -<br>
And that's just not the way life is. …<br>
<br>
I came home today<br>
And both our cars were gone.<br>
And there were all these new pink<br>
Flamingoes arranged in star patterns<br>
All over the lawn.<br>
Then I went into the kitchen<br>
And it looked like a tornado had hit.<br>
And then I realized I was in the wrong …<br>
House.<br>
<br>
<br>
<h3 id="Black"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Black">Mary Black</a> (1955)</h3>
<br>
<h4>Babes in the Wood (1991)</h4>
<br>
<b><i>The Dimming of the Day</i></b><br>
<br>
This old house is falling down around my ears<br>
I'm drowning in a river of my tears<br>
When all my will is gone you hold me sway<br>
I need you at the dimming of the day …<br>
<br>
I see you on the street in company<br>
Why don't you come and ease your mind with me<br>
I'm living for the night we steal away<br>
I need you at the dimming of the day<br>
<br>
(Richard Thompson)<br>
<br>
<br>
<h4>Collected (1984)</h4>
<br>
<b><i>Hard Times</i></b><br>
<br>
Let us pause in life's pleasures and count its many tears<br>
While we all sup sorrow with the poor<br>
There's a song that will linger forever in our ears<br>
Oh hard times come again no more.<br>
<br>
Tis the song, the sigh of the weary,<br>
Hard times, hard times, come again no more<br>
Many days you have lingered around my cabin door<br>
Oh hard times come again no more.<br>
<br>
While we seek mirth and beauty and music bright and gay<br>
There are frail forms fainting at the door<br>
Though their voices are silent, their pleading looks will say<br>
Oh hard times come again no more.<br>
<br>
(Stephen Foster)<br>
<br>
<br>
<h4>Without the Fanfare (1985)</h4>
<br>
<b><i>Going Gone </i></b><br>
<br>
There is a lighthouse in the harbor<br>
Giving guidance with its light<br>
But I had no one to return to<br>
As I wander through life<br>
<br>
From the first time that I saw you<br>
Standing silent by the shore<br>
I knew my search was over<br>
And I would look for love no more<br>
<br>
There is a ship on the horizon<br>
Making its way against the wind<br>
And from the place where I stand watching<br>
I swear my ship is coming in<br>
<br>
Deep in the waters of love I am falling<br>
Sinking like a stone<br>
Deep in my heart I can hear love calling<br>
Going once, going twice, going gone<br>
<br>
(Alger, Dale & Koller)<br>
<br>
<br>
<b><i>The Water is Wide</i></b><br>
<br>
The water is wide, I can't cross over,<br>
And neither have, I wings to fly.<br>
Give me a boat that can carry two,<br>
And I shall row — my love and I.<br>
<br>
For love is gentle, and love is kind,<br>
The sweetest flower when first it's new.<br>
But love grows old, and waxes cold,<br>
And fades away like morning dew.<br>
<br>
(Traditional)<br>
<br>
<br>
<h3 id="McBride"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martina_McBride">Martina Mcbride</a> (1966)</h3>
<br>
<h4>Eleven (2011)</h4>
<br>
<b><i>Long Distance Lullaby</i></b><br>
<br>
One more hotel room<br>
One more night away from you<br>
One more phone call<br>
To say I'll be home soon<br>
I’m just so tired<br>
Of all the distance in between<br>
All I really need is you with me<br>
<br>
I know its hard when I'm so far away<br>
These words can only go so far to say<br>
<br>
I miss your voice<br>
I miss your smile<br>
I wish I could give you<br>
A kiss from a thousand miles<br>
Sleep well, my love<br>
Tonight when you close your eyes<br>
Hear my long distance lullaby<br>
<br>
<br>
<h3 id="Python"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Python">Monty Python</a></h3>
<br>
<b><i><a href="http://www.lyricsfreak.com/m/monty+python/lumberjack+song_20239288.html">Lumberjack Song</a></i></b><br>
<br>
Oh, I'm a lumberjack, and I'm okay,<br>
I sleep all night and I work all day.<br>
<br>
I cut down trees, I eat my lunch,<br>
I go to the lava-try.<br>
On Wednesdays I go shoppin'<br>
And have buttered scones for tea.<br>
<br>
I cut down trees, I skip and jump,<br>
I like to press wild flowers.<br>
I put on women's clothing,<br>
And hang around in bars.<br>
<br>
I chop down trees, I wear high heels,<br>
Suspenders and a bra.<br>
I wish I'd been a girlie<br>
Just like my dear papa.<br>
<br>
<br>
<h3 id="Richey"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Richey">Kim Richey</a> (1956)</h3>
<br>
<h4>Little Records 1 & 2</h4>
<br>
<b><i>A Place Called Home</i></b><br>
<br>
Someday I'll go where there ain't no rain or snow<br>
Til then, I travel alone<br>
And I make my bed with the stars above my head<br>
And dream of a place called home<br>
<br>
<br>
<h3 id="talkingheads"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talking_Heads">Talking Heads</a></h3>
<br>
<h4>Remain in Light (1980)</h4>
<br>
<b><i>Listening Wind</i></b><br>
<br>
Mojique sees his village from a nearby hill<br>
Mojique thinks of days before Americans came<br>
He sees the foreigners in growing numbers<br>
He sees the foreigners in fancy houses<br>
He thinks of days that he can still remember now<br>
<br>
Mojique holds a package in his quivering hands<br>
Mojique sends the package to the American man<br>
Softly he glides along the streets and alleys<br>
Up comes the wind that makes them run for cover<br>
He feels the time is surely now or never more<br>
<br>
Mojique buys equipment in the market place<br>
Mojique plants devices in the free trade zone<br>
He feels the wind is lifting up his people<br>
He calls the wind to guide him on his mission<br>
He knows his friend the wind is always standing by<br>
<br>
Mojique smells the wind that comes from far away<br>
Mojique waits for news in a quiet place<br>
He feels the presence of the wind around him<br>
He feels the power of the past behind him<br>
He has the knowledge of the wind to guide him on<br>
<br>
The wind in my heart<br>
The dust in my head<br>
The wind in my heart<br>
(Come to) drive them away<br>
Drive them away<br>
<br>
<br>
<b><i>Once in a Lifetime</i></b><br>
<br>
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile<br>
You may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife<br>
You may ask yourself, "Well, how did I get here?" …<br>
<br>
And you may ask yourself, "Where is that large automobile?"<br>
And you may tell yourself, "This is not my beautiful house"<br>
And you may tell yourself, "This is not my beautiful wife" …<br>
<br>
Into the blue again, after the money's gone<br>
Once in a lifetime …peaceandlonglifehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09059683906637157584noreply@blogger.com0