I have suggested that the cultural health of Europe, including the cultural health of its component parts, is incompatible with extreme forms of both nationalism and internationalism. But the cause of that disease, which destroys the very soil in which culture has its roots, is not so much extreme ideas, and the fanaticism which they stimulate, as the relentless pressure of modern industrialism, setting the problems which the extreme ideas attempt to solve. Not least of the effects of industrialism is that we become mechanized in mind, and consequently attempt to provide solutions in terms of engineering, for problems which are essentially problems of life.
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David Hicks on the Desire to Know the Truth
Only men and women who want to know the truth more than to be proven right will accept dialectical challenges and not regard reason with suspicion and fear.
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Before the Bullfight
It’s incredible to imagine a painter covering the entire surface of this canvas with their thought and attention. And it’s incredible to see photos of this painter, Joaquin Sorolla, working on location, in the open air, with brushes that look like javelins, on canvases that resemble billboards. I don’t know how much of Before the Bullfight was painted outside, but the painting has both the fresh spontaneity of a plein air work, and the considered compositional architecture of a well-planned studio piece. Sorolla is somehow able to have it both ways.
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MacDonald on Life and Law
Life and law cannot be so at variance that perfection must be gained by thwarting development!
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Annie Dillard on Ascending the Hill of the Lord
Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? or who shall stand in his holy place? There is no one but us. There is no one to send, nor a clean hand, nor a pure heart on the face of the earth, nor in the earth, but only us, a generation comforting ourselves with the notion that we have come at an awkward time, that our innocent fathers are all dead — as if innocence had ever been — and our children busy and troubled, and we ourselves unfit, not yet ready, having each of us chosen wrongly, made a false start, failed, yielded to impulse and the tangled…
