| 18 April, 2009 |
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Who will relieve me of this Wuthering Height. If heaven is going to be full of people like Hardie, well, the Almighty can have them to himself. There but for the grace of God goes God. It might be said that Lord Rosebery outlived his future by ten years and his past by more than twenty. [On recognizing China] But if you recognize anyone it does not mean you like them. For instance, we all recognize the right honourable gentleman the member for Ebbw Vale. Chaos is the score upon which reality is written. Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not understood. There is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy. I have a perfect cure for a sore throat: cut it. My teen angst has a body count. Philosophy is the highest music. No Voice; but oh! the silence sank like music on my heart. I see music as the augmentation of a split second of time. Without music, life would be a mistake. Sure there is music even in the beauty, and the silent note which Cupid strikes, far sweeter than the sound of an instrument. For there is music wherever there is harmony, order and proportion; and thus far we may maintain the music of the spheres; for those well ordered motions, and regular paces, though they give no sound unto the ear, yet to the understanding they strike a note most full of harmony. How good bad music and bad reasons sound when we march against an enemy. Numerous politicians have seized absolute power and muzzled the press. Never in history has the press seized absolute power and muzzled the politicians. Political language - and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists - is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories. To look backward for a while is to refresh the eye, to restore it, and to render it the more fit for its prime function of looking forward. I gather, young man, that you wish to be a Member of Parliament. The first lesson that you must learn is, when I call for statistics about the rate of infant mortality, what I want is proof that fewer babies died when I was Prime Minister than when anyone else was Prime Minister. That is a political statistic. Politics is made up largely of irrelevancies. We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all of our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind of self-government; upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God. Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and other organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot actually masturbate. A sympathetic Scot summed it all up very neatly in the remark, "You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk dancing. Of the delights of this world, man cares most for sexual intercourse, yet he has left it out of his heaven. Be on the alert to recognize your prime at whatever time of your life it may occur. Language exists only on the surface of our consciousness. The great human struggles are played out in silence and in the ability to express oneself. There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable. There is no way you can tell the child that if language had been a melody, he had mastered it and done well, but that since it was in fact a sense, he had botched it utterly. ...exaggerated turns of speech conceal mediocre affections: as if the fulness of the soul might not sometimes overflow in the emptiest of metaphors, since no one, ever, can give the exact measurements of his needs, nor of his conceptions, nor of his sufferings, and the human word is like a cracked cauldron upon which we beat out melodies fit for making bears dance when we are trying to move the stars to pity. Sticks and stones will break our bones, but words will break our hearts... For I am a Bear of Very Little Brain, and big words Bother me. "Where did you put it?" Aim at the sun, and you may not reach it; but your arrow will fly far higher than if aimed at an object on a level with yourself. I have found you an argument: but I am not obliged to find you an understanding. Man does not live by words alone, despite the fact that he sometimes has to eat them. I think I am a verb. What you are shouts so loud in my ears I cannot hear what you say. All last year we tried to teach him English, and the only word he learned was million. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own neccessities but of their advantages. The market is not an invention of capitalism. It has existed for centuries. It is an invention of civilization. One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar. The worst crime against working people is a company which fails to operate at a profit. Fine art and pizza delivery, what we do falls neatly in between! I like less the story that a frog if put in cold water will not bestir itself if that water is heated up slowly and gradually and will in the end let itself be boiled alive, too comfortable with continuity to realize that continuous change at some point may become intolerable and demand a change in behavior. Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone. I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin." The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern. I stopped believing in Santa Claus when I was six. Mother took me to see him in a department store and he asked for my autograph. The least deviation from truth will be multiplied later. Everything has got a moral if you can only find it. |
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