Cabbage Soup

The man from the upland village went away first, and as the landlady took him out to the door our Irish friend said to the woman from the foothills, “He seems very nice.”  “Do you think so?” said the woman.  Her nose seemed literally to turn up.  “Well, don’t you?” asked our friend.  “We-e-e-ell,” said the woman, “round about here we don’t care much for people from that village”  “Why not?” asked our friend.  “We-e-e-ell, for one thing, you sometimes go up there and you smell cabbage soup, and you say, ‘That smells good,’ and they say, ‘Oh, we’re just having cabbage soup.’”  A pause fell, and our friend inquired, “Then don’t they offer you any?”  “Oh, yes.”  “And isn’t it good?”  “It’s very good.  But, you see, we grow cabbages down here and they can’t up there, and they never buy any from us, and we’re always missing ours.  So, really, we don’t know what to think.”

 - Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

On Believing in God

Believing in God dispenses one from believing in anything else - which is an estimable advantage.  

  - E. M. Cioran, Anathemas and Admirations

War and Criminality

The idea of a legal war or, indeed, a just war, relies on the controllability of the instruments of destruction.  But because uncontrollability is part of that very destructiveness, there is no war that fails to commit a crime against humanity, a destruction of civilian life.  In other words, the international law that prohibits crimes against civilians presupposes that there can be a war without such crimes, reproduced the idea of a “clean” war whose destruction has perfect aim.  Only on such a condition can we distinguish between war and crimes of war.  But if there is no stable way to distinguish permissible collateral damage from the destruction of civilian life, then such crimes are inevitable, and there is no non-criminal war.  In other words, wars become permissible forms of criminality, but they are never non-criminal.

 - Judith Butler, Frames of War

Reading Dickens

Most people read Dickens before they are out of their teens and seldom look at him again.  How mistakenly?  For Dickens’s work is like a wine that improves with age - the age not of the bottle but of the taster.  The richer the experience of the reader, the riper seems Dickens.  At sixteen one enjoys the extravagant impossibility of his caricatures; at thirty-five what one appreciates is their absolute fidelity to nature.

 - Aldous Huxley “The Critic in the Crib”

The Great Men

V. S. Pritchett on Edward Gibbon's reading habits during his military service:

He took Horace with him on the march and read up the questions of Pagan and Christian theology in his tent. Sooner or later, the great men turn out to be all alike. They never stop working. They never lose a minute. It is very depressing. 

 - “Gibbon and the Home Guard”

Every Citizen a King

...in a democracy, every ordinary citizen effectively is a king - but a king in a constitutional democracy, a king who only formally decides, whose function is to sign measures proposed by an executive administration.  This is why the problem of democratic rituals is homologous to the big problem of constitutional democracy: how to protect the dignity of the king?  How to maintain the appearance that the king effectively decides, when we all know this is not true?  What we call a “crisis of democracy” does not occur when people stop believing in their own power but, on the contrary, when they stop trusting the elites, those who are supposed to know for them and provide the guidelines, when they experience anxiety signaling that “the (true) throne is empty”, that the decision is now really theirs.  

- Slavoj Zizek, Trouble in Paradise

Hannah Arendt on People with Revolvers

…I can’t judge the situation in Germany, and all I really know is that people who like to respond to arguments with revolvers have by no means died out.

 - Hannah Arendt to Karl Jaspers, Correspondence, January 25, 1948

What is History?

      In our final history lesson of the year, Old Joe Hunt, who had guided his lethargic pupils through Tudors and Stuarts, Victorians and Edwardians, the Rise of Empire and its Subsequent Decline, invited us to look back over all those centuries and attempt to draw conclusions.
      "We could start, perhaps, with the seemingly simple question, What is History? Any thoughts, Webster?"
      "History is the lies of the victors," I replied, a little too quickly.
      "Yes, I was rather afraid you'd say that.  Well, as long as you remember that it is also the self-delusions of the defeated."

- Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

GBS and Seattle

From a George Bernard Shaw lecture to the Fabian Society on November 26, 1931:

In America there was something that was called the Seattle community.  The Seattle community suggests to you a lot of really 100% Americans.  There is something in the name Seattle that is 100% American.  I think you will acknowledge that.