excerpts from this week's New Yorker....
Anthony Lane on Nicolas Sarkozy: "Awaiting your hero for more than two hours is no hardship to the faithful; standing for two hours without earplugs, however, while the cream of soft Euro-rock is hosed into your consciousness, is another matter."
Norman Mailer on losing his memory as he gets older: "It's awful--I'm absolutely without detail memory now. I keep referring to one metaphor: an old man who's still steering a course is analogous to the captain of an old freighter that may or may not make it to port. You keep throwing ballast overboard. So the hearing goes. The eyesight. The knees. This goes. That goes. ...For a novelist, you really have to retain a memory of how things felt even if you're not reporting them directly. My memory for detals of where something took place, when it happened, is very spotty. What I will remember is the emotional tone of a meeting. Facts you can always lookup somewhere."
And Here is an article worth reading about the growing hysteria over people of faith. I just heard that the new Rush album is all about how bad Christians are for the world. Neil Peart needs to stop reading Hume.
5 comments:
"The history of the West has been so closely interwoven with the history of religious institutions and ideas that it is hard to be confident about what life would have been like without them."
I imagine it would look something like the USSR... human life would have little more than a practical value, and political contrarians like Hitchens would lead very short lives.
It interesting to me. I wonder if he'd accept something like Confucianism. . .where you essentially have "moral authorities" outside the bounds of a religion per se. But I think the point holds. It's very hard to see how order is maintained once you throw out a normative standard. As we discussed, "roll out the red carpet for the dictator. . . "
"I just heard that the new Rush album is all about how bad Christians are for the world. Neil Peart needs to stop reading Hume."
Even if he stopped reading Hume he would still have a whole bunch of history to support his case. Look what we've done recently with Bush. Peart has a strong case without Hume.
I can't argue with that.
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20070525-105753-5623r.htm
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