What People Can't Take From You

Own only what you can carry with you; know language, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Truth from the mouth of the enemy

I have a half dozen posts rattling around in my head, most of them musing about the nature of academia, the state of education in our country and the place of Catholics in the academy.  Unfortunately, the very situation which I am trying to think through makes it impossible to find the the time to do so.  At some point I will get these thoughts down on paper in an attempt to sort through them, for by then the things to which I am responding will be quite dated.  In the meantime here is a quote which resonates strongly with my state of mind.

"Only the learned read old books and we have now so dealt with the learned that they are of all men the least likely to acquire wisdom by doing so. We have done this by inculcating The Historical Point of View. The Historical Point of View, put briefly, means that when a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true. He asks who influenced the ancient writer, and how far the statement is consistent with what he said in other books, and what phase in the writer's development, or in the general history of thought, it illustrates, and how it affected later writers, and how often it has been misunderstood (specially by the learned man's own colleagues) and what the general course of criticism on it has been for the last ten years, and what is the "present state of the question". To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge—to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or your behaviour—this would be rejected as unutterably simple-minded. And since we cannot deceive the whole human race all the time, it is most important thus to cut every generation off from all others; for where learning makes a free commerce between the ages there is always the danger that the characteristic errors of one may be corrected by the characteristic truths of another. But thanks be to our Father and the Historical Point of View, great scholars are now as little nourished by the past as the most ignorant mechanic who holds that "history is bunk."

                 C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

  

I don't just dust your books

"It is a sad fate for a man to die too well known to everybody else and still unknown to himself." Francis Bacon.

Still small voice

The moment you wake up each morning, all your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists in shoving it all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other, larger, stronger, quieter life coming flowing in.

C. S. Lewis

And I will have my vengeance in this life or the next

The credit belongs to the man who is in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes again and again, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause, who at best, knows the triumph of high achievement; who at worst, if he fails at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.

Theodore Roosevelt

One brilliant flash

I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark burn out in a brilliant blaze than it be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

Jack London

The magic of the everyday

And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.
--Roald Dahl