Works and Days

Whatever happened to the Nietzsche Family Circus? Anyway, here’s Garfield minus Garfield.

Edit: and here’s Garfield plus Jack Chick.

It is not simply that the prayers are banal, but that we are banal. Were we to encounter the full-hearted prayers composed by men of old, we would be as incomprehending as the first barbarian Gauls were when they stumbled into Rome, or as the native Americans were when they first saw the English ink-marks that spoke, or as we would be if we were to stand over the shoulder of Daniel Webster and read his classically modulated prose in defense of the Union. Our knees are creaky, and we don’t bend them as often as we should. But we would bend them more often, if only we could remember how and why.

Anthony Esolen, Piety? Who needs piety?

Mornington suspected his Christianity of being the inevitable result of having moved for some time as a youth of eighteen in circles which were, in a rather detached and superior way, opposed to it; but it was a religion which enabled him to despise himself and everyone else without despising the universe, thus allowing him at once in argument or conversation the advantages of the pessimist and the optimist. It was because the Vicar, a hard-worked practical priest, had been driven by stress of experience to some similar standpoint that the two occasionally found one another congenial.

–Charles Williams, War In Heaven

When I was a boy there were two curious men running about who were called the optimist and the pessimist. I constantly used the words myself, but I cheerfully confess that I never had any very special idea of what they meant. The only thing which might be considered evident was that they could not mean what they said; for the ordinary verbal explanation was that the optimist thought this world as good as it could be, while the pessimist thought it as bad as it could be. Both these statements being obviously raving nonsense, one had to cast about for other explanations. An optimist could not mean a man who thought everything right and nothing wrong. For that is meaningless; it is like calling everything right and nothing left. Upon the whole, I came to the conclusion that the optimist thought everything good except the pessimist, and that the pessimist thought everything bad, except himself. It would be unfair to omit altogether from the list the mysterious but suggestive definition said to have been given by a little girl, “An optimist is a man who looks after your eyes, and a pessimist is a man who looks after your feet.” I am not sure that this is not the best definition of all. There is even a sort of allegorical truth in it. For there might, perhaps, be a profitable distinction drawn between that more dreary thinker who thinks merely of our contact with the earth from moment to moment, and that happier thinker who considers rather our primary power of vision and of choice of road.

–Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Exercent illi sociae commercia linguae:
per gestum res est significanda mihi.
Barbarus hic ego sum, quia non intellegor ulli,
et rident stolidi uerba Latina Getae.

They hold commerce in their common tongue:
for me, the thing must be signified through a gesture.
I am a barbarian here,
since I am not understood by anyone;
and the stolid Getae laugh at my Latin words.

–Ovid, Tristia V.10.35-38

They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.
“I was for Bonnie Prince Charlie,” announced Amory.
“Of course you were—and for Hannibal——”
“Yes, and for the Southern Confederacy.” He was rather sceptical about being an Irish patriot—he suspected that being Irish was being somewhat common—but Monsignor assured him that Ireland was a romantic lost cause and Irish people quite charming, and that it should, by all means, be one of his principal biasses.

–F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

Worth reading: an analysis of the symbolism behind the seven anarchists in Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, from the Discovery Institute, and Narnia’s Secret: The Seven Heavens of the Chronicles Revealed from Touchstone Magazine.

Every one of the popular modern phrases and ideals is a dodge in order to shirk the problem of what is good. We are fond of talking about “liberty”; that, as we talk of it, is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. We are fond of talking about “progress”; that is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. We are fond of talking about “education”; that is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. The modern man says, “Let us leave all these arbitrary standards and embrace liberty.” This is, logically rendered, “Let us not decide what is good, but let it be considered good not to decide it.” He says, “Away with your old moral formulae; I am for progress.” This, logically stated, means, “Let us not settle what is good; but let us settle whether we are getting more of it.” He says, “Neither in religion nor morality, my friend, lie the hopes of the race, but in education.” This, clearly expressed, means, “We cannot decide what is good, but let us give it to our children.”

–Chesterton, Heretics

Quoted in the Introduction to the Loeb edition of Plato’s Republic

Use of Cases. (Imagine with illustrations a la Basil T. Blackwood; cf. Belloc’s Cautionary Tales.)

1. The NOMINATIVE is used to show
the SUBJECT of a phrase, like so:
“ALBERTA plays the piccolo.”

In NOMINATIVE is also found
the PREDICATE, as adjective or noun.
“He is A MAN; his shoes are BROWN.”

2. Possessors in the GENITIVE we see:
“The FARMER’S house, the NEIGHBOR’S tree.”

3. The DATIVE is a useful bird
To show TO WHOM a gift’s transferred.
“My true love gave a gift TO ME,
It was a partridge in a pear tree.”

4. Things we find ACCUSATIVE:
The OBJECT that you act upon or give;
with prepositions, MOTION TO:
“We took THE CHILDREN to THE ZOO.”

5. The ABLATIVE shows MOTION FROM
or PLACE WHERE, as a rule of thumb.
“How many strawberries grow in the SEA?
As many as herrings which fall from the TREE.”