Journal, May 10th

-In most societies, the most educated class will also be the most effectively propagandized.

-A problem for the Burkean: a person can feel more at home in a foreign culture than the one they grew up in. How is that possible?

"My Father Photographed with Friends" by William Bronk

Historic Hudson Falls, New York State Archives

This is my father photographed with friends, when he was young

Unsettled on the steps of a wooden porch, and the one

who lived there elegant beside him. They and the others

hopefully casual in the face of the deciding camera,

the judgments of which are unfeeling but can be swayed.

And I, as in some later picture of myself, 

look for a person identified beyond doubt, and knowing that he

is none of the others that he is not, yet still unsure,

under the features composed and trusting, who is there.

As if the decision were long and legal when handed down,

hard to be read and truly rendered in a such a case.

And hard, in the face, to find our usual pitiful ends.

God sweeten the bitter judgements of our lives. We wish so much.

[From Life Supports, 1976]

"Magna est veritas" by Coventry Patmore

Here, in this little Bay
Full of tumultuous life and great repose,
Where, twice a day,
The purposeless, glad ocean comes and goes,
Under high cliffs, and far from the huge town,
I sit me down.
For want of me the world's course will not fail;
When all its work is done, the lie shall rot;
The truth is great, and shall prevail,
When none cares whether it prevail or not.

[From The Unknown Eros, 1877]

"...To catacombs, caverns, and deserts."

The Hermit, Mikhail Nesterov, 1889

And we, the wise men and the poets
       Custodians of truths and of secrets
Will bear off our torches of knowledge
       To catacombs, caverns and deserts.

[L.A. Lyusternik, quoted in Naming Infinity, by Loren Graham and Jean-Michel Kantor]

"A Marriage" by R.S. Thomas

White Herons in Falling Snow, Ohara Shoson, circa 1927

We met
           under a shower
of bird-notes.
           Fifty years passed,
love's moment
           in a world in
servitude to time.
           She was young;
I kissed with my eyes
           closed and opened
them on her wrinkles.
           'Come,' said death,
choosing her as his
            partner for
the last dance. And she,
            who in life
had done everything
            with a bird's grace,
opened her bill now
            for the shedding
of one sigh no
            heavier than a feather. 

[From Collected Poems: 1945-1990]

Notes from an Old Journal

1. "People said of Sam Ward that he was the only man capable of strutting while seated."

2. "The effect of the telegraphic style is to intimate a whole spectrum of moral discriminations without ever making them explicit."

3. "Is the primary task of human reason to find formal solutions to abstract problems, and impose these solutions on the raw material of the world, as we experience it? Or is the primary task to get acquainted with the world of experience in all its concrete detail, stating our problems and resolving them later, in the light of that experience?"

Two Accounts of Literary Decadence

"What is the mark of every literary decadence? That the life no longer resides in the whole. The word becomes sovereign and leaps out of the sentence, the sentence reaches out and obscures the meaning of the page, and the pages comes to life at the expense of the whole -- the whole is no longer a whole. This, however, is the style of every style of decadence: every time there is an anarchy of atoms."

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, Section 7

"I would define that baroque as the style that deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) its own possibilities, and that borders on self-caricature. In vain did Andrew Lang attempt in the 1880's to imitate Pope's Odyssey, it was already a parody and so defeated the parodist's attempt to exaggerate its tautness. "Baroco" was a term used for one of the syllogistic reasoning: the 18th century applied it to certain abuses in 17th century architecture and painting. I would venture to say that the baroque is the final stage in all art, when art flaunts and squanders all its resources. The baroque is intellectual, and Bernard Shaw has said that all intellectual labor is inherently humorous."

Jorge Luis Borges, Preface to the 1954 edition of A Universal History of Inquity