"There are times when a man must act as though life were equally sweet in any company. I've know such a time, and, what's more, I shan't now pretend to pull a long face over my necessity, because a good many of that bad company from want of moral---moral---what shall I say?---posture, or from some other equally profound cause, were twice as instructive and twenty times more amusing than the usual respectable thief of commerce you fellows ask to sit at your tables without any real necessity---from habit, from cowardice, from good nature, from a hundred sneaking and inadequate reasons."

"It was solemn, and a little ridiculous, too, as they always are, those struggles of an individual trying to save from the fire his idea of what his moral identity should be, this precious notion of a convention, only one of the rules of the game, nothing more, but all the same so terribly effective by its assumption of unlimited power over natural instincts, by the awful penalty of its failure."

"A certain readiness to perish is not so very rare, but it is seldom that you meet men whose souls, steeled in the impenetrable armour of resolution, are ready to fight a losing battle to the last, the desire of peace waxes stronger as hope declines, till at last it conquers the very desire of life. Which of us here has not observed this, or maybe experienced something of that feeling in his own person----this extreme weariness of emotions, the vanity of effort, the yearning for rest? Those striving with unreasonable forces know it well---the shipwrecked castaways in boats, wanderers lost in a desert, men battling against the unthinking might of nature, or the stupid brutality of crowds."

----- Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad

"My earliest memory of Larry was when we were starting off. We were at our first rehearsal in his kitchen and all these girls kept climbing over the walls and looking in the window at Larry. Larry just shouted at them and told them to go away. And then turned the hose on them! Larry likes to play drums." -- Bono

"Come out of the fog, young man. And remember you don't have to be a complete fool in order to succeed. Play the game, but don't believe in it---that much you owe yourself. Even if it lands you in a strait jacket or a padded cell. Play the game, but play it your own way----part of the time at least. Play the game, but raise the ante, my boy. Learn how it operates, learn how you operate---I wish I had more time to tell you only a fragment. We're an ass-backward people, though. You might even beat the game. It's really a very crude affair. Really pre-Renaissance---and that game has been analyzed, put down in books. But down here they've forgotten to take care of the books and that's your opportunity. You're hidden right out in the open---that is, you would be if you only realized it. They wouldn't see you because they don't expect you to know anything, since they believe they've taken care of that. . . . ."

-----The Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison

"The tremulous scrupulosity of those who are obsessed with pleasures they love and fear narrows their souls and makes it impossible for them to get away from their own flesh. They have tried to become spiritual by worrying about the flesh, and as a result they are haunted by it. They have ended in the flesh because they began in it, and the fruit of their anxious asceticism is that they "use things not," but do so as if they used them. In their very self-denial they defile themselves with what they pretend to avoid. They do not have the pleasure they seek, but they taste the bitter discouragement, the feeling of guilt which they would like to escape. This is not the way of the spirit. For when our intention is directed to God, our very use of material things sanctifies both them and us, provided we use them without selfishness or presumption, glad to receive them from Him who loves us and whose love is all we desire."

-----"No Man Is An Island", Thomas Merton

"Indifference to evil is the enemy of good, for indifference is the enemy of everything that exalts the honor of man. We fight indifference through education; we diminish it through compassion. The most efficient remedy? Memory.

To remember means to recognize a time other than the present; to remember means to acknowledge the possibility of a dialogue. In recalling an event, I provoke its rebirth in me. In evoking a face, I place myself in relationship to it. In remembering a landscape, I oppose it to the walls that imprison me. The memory of an ancient joy or defeat is proof that nothing is definitive, nor is it irrevocable. To live through a catastrophe is bad; to forget it is worse."

-----On Sept. 11, 2001, Elie Wiesel

This week's New Yorker has some good articles in it, the best of which is probably Claudia Pierpont's piece on Nietzsche. The article can be found here:

www.newyorker.com/critics/books/?020408crbo_books

It's a very good piece which somehow manages to tie Nietzsche's life in with his thought (I've always believed this to be important, but I've never seen it accomplished so succinctly). It's a sympathetic, but not sychophantic, view of his major works and how his life shaped how his works were brought into being and interpreted.

Read it.

"An open mind, in questions that are not ultimate, is useful. But an open mind about ultimate foundations either of Theoretical or Practical Reason is idiocy. If a man's mind is open on these things, let his mouth at least be shut."

------The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis

. . . and so he parted ways with the Postmodernists. . . .