"'He has got no good red blood in his body,' said Sir James.In the margins of the copy I got from a used book store, written in pencil:
"'No. Somebody put a drop under magnifying-glass, and it was all semicolons and parentheses," said Mrs Cadwallader."
-from Chapter 8 of Middlemarch
Gha!
Sickle-
cell
"Some controverters in divinity are like swaggerers in a tavern, that catch that which stands next to them, the candlestick, or pots; turn everything into a weapon: ofttimes they fight blindfold; and both beat the air. The one milks a he-goat, the other holds under a sieve. Their arguments are as fluxive as liquor spilt upon a table; which with your fingers you may drain as you will. Such controversies, or disputations, (carried with more labour, than profit) are odious: where most times the truth is lost in the midst, or left untouched. And the fruit of their fight is that they spit on one another, and are both defiled. These fencers in religion, I like them not."
-Ben Jonson
I once arrived at Duke to teach Marxism and they said, “If you teach Marxism here they will flock to your classes, you won’t even be able to get in the door. If you teach it five miles down the road, they’ll shoot you through the head.”I don't think this is really a UNC joke, but that "five miles" gets you most of the way between campuses.
That it is human to err is admitted by even the most positive of our thinkers. Here we have the great difference between latter-day thought and the thought of the past. If Euclid were alive to-day (and I dare say he is) he would not say, "The angles at the base of an isosceles triangle are equal to one another." He would say, "To me (a very frail and fallible being, remember) it does somehow seem that these two angles have a mysterious and awful equality to one another." The dislike of schoolboys for Euclid is unreasonable in many ways; but fundamentally it is entirely reasonable. Fundamentally it is the revolt from a man who was either fallible and therefore (in pretending to infallibility) an impostor, or infallible and therefore not human.
Now, since it is human to err, it is always in reference to those things which arouse in us the most human of all our emotions—I mean the emotion of love—that we conceive the deepest of our errors. Suppose we met Euclid on Westminster Bridge, and he took us aside and confessed to us that whilst he regarded parallelograms and rhomboids with an indifference bordering on contempt, for isosceles triangles he cherished a wild romantic devotion. Suppose he asked us to accompany him to the nearest music-shop, and there purchased a guitar in order that he might worthily sing to us the radiant beauty and the radiant goodness of isosceles triangles. As men we should, I hope, respect his enthusiasm, and encourage his enthusiasm, and catch his enthusiasm. But as seekers after truth we should be compelled to regard with a dark suspicion, and to check with the most anxious care, every fact that he told us about isosceles triangles. For adoration involves a glorious obliquity of vision. It involves more than that. We do not say of Love that he is short-sighted. We do not say of Love that he is myopic. We do not say of Love that he is astigmatic. We say quite simply, Love is blind. We might go further and say, Love is deaf. That would be a profound and obvious truth. We might go further still and say, Love is dumb. But that would be a profound and obvious lie. For love is always an extraordinarily fluent talker. Love is a wind-bag, filled with a gusty wind from Heaven.
It is always about the thing that we love most that we talk most. About this thing, therefore, our errors are something more than our deepest errors: they are our most frequent errors. That is why for nearly two thousand years mankind has been more glaringly wrong on the subject of Christmas than on any other subject. If mankind had hated Christmas, he would have understood it from the first. What would have happened then, it is impossible to say. For that which is hated, and therefore is persecuted, and therefore grows brave, lives on for ever, whilst that which is understood dies in the moment of our understanding of it—dies, as it were, in our awful grasp. Between the horns of this eternal dilemma shivers all the mystery of the jolly visible world, and of that still jollier world which is invisible. And it is because Mr. Shaw and the writers of his school cannot, with all their splendid sincerity and, acumen, perceive that he and they and all of us are impaled on those horns as certainly as the sausages I ate for breakfast this morning had been impaled on the cook's toasting-fork—it is for this reason, I say, that Mr. Shaw and his friends seem to me to miss the basic principle that lies at the root of all things human and divine. By the way, not all things that are divine are human. But all things that are human are divine. But to return to Christmas.
I select at random two of the more obvious fallacies that obtain. One is that Christmas should be observed as a time of jubilation. This is (I admit) quite a recent idea. It never entered into the tousled heads of the shepherds by night, when the light of the angel of the Lord shone about them and they arose and went to do homage to the Child. It never entered into the heads of the Three Wise Men. They did not bring their gifts as a joke, but as an awful oblation. It never entered into the heads of the saints and scholars, the poets and painters, of the Middle Ages. Looking back across the years, they saw in that dark and ungarnished manger only a shrinking woman, a brooding man, and a child born to sorrow. The philomaths of the eighteenth century, looking back, saw nothing at all. It is not the least of the glories of the Victorian Era that it rediscovered Christmas. It is not the least of the mistakes of the Victorian Era that it supposed Christmas to be a feast.
The splendour of the saying, "I have piped unto you, and you have not danced; I have wept with you, and you have not mourned" lies in the fact that it might have been uttered with equal truth by any man who had ever piped or wept. There is in the human race some dark spirit of recalcitrance, always pulling us in the direction contrary to that in which we are reasonably expected to go. At a funeral, the slightest thing, not in the least ridiculous at any other time, will convulse us with internal laughter. At a wedding, we hover mysteriously on the brink of tears. So it is with the modern Christmas. I find myself in agreement with the cynics in so far that I admit that Christmas, as now observed, tends to create melancholy. But the reason for this lies solely in our own misconception. Christmas is essentially a dies iræ. If the cynics will only make up their minds to treat it as such, even the saddest and most atrabilious of them will acknowledge that he has had a rollicking day.
This brings me to the second fallacy. I refer to the belief that "Christmas comes but once a year." Perhaps it does, according to the calendar—a quaint and interesting compilation, but of little or no practical value to anybody. It is not the calendar, but the Spirit of Man that regulates the recurrence of feasts and fasts. Spiritually, Christmas Day recurs exactly seven times a week. When we have frankly acknowledged this, and acted on this, we shall begin to realise the Day's mystical and terrific beauty. For it is only every-day things that reveal themselves to us in all their wonder and their splendour. A man who happens one day to be knocked down by a motor-bus merely utters a curse and instructs his solicitor, but a man who has been knocked down by a motor-bus every day of the year will have begun to feel that he is taking part in an august and soul-cleansing ritual. He will await the diurnal stroke of fate with the same lowly and pious joy as animated the Hindoos awaiting Juggernaut. His bruises will be decorations, worn with the modest pride of the veteran. He will cry aloud, in the words of the late W.E. Henley, "My head is bloody but unbowed." He will add, "My ribs are broken but unbent."
I look for the time when we shall wish one another a Merry Christmas every morning; when roast turkey and plum-pudding shall be the staple of our daily dinner, and the holly shall never be taken down from the walls, and everyone will always be kissing everyone else under the mistletoe. And what is right as regards Christmas is right as regards all other so-called anniversaries. The time will come when we shall dance round the Maypole every morning before breakfast—a meal at which hot-cross buns will be a standing dish—and shall make April fools of one another every day before noon. The profound significance of All Fool's Day—the glorious lesson that we are all fools—is too apt at present to be lost. Nor is justice done to the sublime symbolism of Shrove Tuesday—the day on which all sins are shriven. Every day pancakes shall be eaten, either before or after the plum-pudding. They shall be eaten slowly and sacramentally. They shall be fried over fires tended and kept for ever bright by Vestals. They shall be tossed to the stars.
I shall return to the subject of Christmas next week.
I am prejudiced against twenty-year-olds. Because at nineteen you're still your parents' fault. At twenty, you're technically an adult, but you still haven't done anything. Like, twenty-year-olds are like, "this job sucks"--yes, that's why we gave it to you. Because you're twenty. You're twenty years old. You haven't done anything. You've just been sucking up resources: you've just been taking food and love and education and iPods, and just taking it and judging it: "yeah, I like that, uhh, that sucks." You're like a big orange on a tree that's rotting, and the tree's like "get off!" and you're like "I don't wanna!"
-Louis CK on The Tonight Show
For years, the federal government bought the [dairy] industry's excess cheese and butter, an outgrowth of a Depression-era commitment to use price supports and other tools to maintain the dairy industry as a vital national resource. This stockpile, packed away in cool caves in Missouri, grew to a value of more than $4 billion by 1983, when Washington switched gears.
-“While Warning About Fat, U.S. Pushes Cheese Sales,” New York Times, 7 Nov 2010
It's not a question of whether you agree with Bob Ehrlich or not…I just don't know what I would do if someone raised my taxes by $3 billion.
It's a question of which Bob Ehrlich you agree with.
Is it the Bob Ehrlich who keeps talking about all the tax cuts he'll give you?
Or the Bob Ehrlich who raised your taxes by $3 billion?
“Prawo Jazdy, presumed to be one of the hundreds of thousands of Poles lured to Ireland during its economic boom, was the Scarlet Pimpernel of motoring, leaving a trail of multiple identities and vehicles across the data base of the Republic’s Garda Siochana.
“With not a single conviction by 2007 and more than fifty offences recorded, the police decided to take a closer look at Mr Jazdy, according to the Irish Times and Irish Independent.
“The result was unexpected and embarrassing: in a letter that is now doing the rounds of Garda e-mail inboxes, a traffic division official wrote that it had come to his attention that officers inspecting Polish driving licences were recording Prawo Jazdy as the licence holder’s name. ‘Prawo Jazdy is actually Polish for 'driving licence' and not the first and surname on the licence,’ he wrote.
Who wants to bet that “Prawo Jazdy” starts showing up on fake IDs sometime soon?
