June
2008
From Thunderbird Falls by
C.E. Murphy,
2006
Don't do that. ... Belittle yourself. Or anyone else, for that matter. ... I don't like what you can do at all. But I like you setting yourself up for the sucker punch even less. It's degrading, and you're better than that. I won't tolerate it.
* * *
May
2008
From Urban Shaman by
C.E. Murphy,
2005
You want to know the horrible thing? I felt like it was a big secret, that I couldn't see, and I figured everybody'd point and stare when I came to school with glasses. Nobody even noticed. I'd spent all that time psyching myself up for the trauma of being teased. The trauma of not being noticed was worse.
* * *
April
2008
From Love Monkey by
Kyle Smith,
2004
When I was a kid, my older brothers would scamper off on a Sunday afternoon while my parents dragged me around to flea markets. . . . Until we stumbled upon some merchant-wizard who had a barrel filled with lumps of undercover merchandise in brown paper sacks tied with ribbons. A Magic Marker question mark was their only label. "Grab Bags," the sign would say. Only a buck. I had to have one, every time. By the time we got home I would have thrown away the Bakelite candy bowl or wooden duck that always lay within.
* * *
March
2008
From Jude's Law by
Lori Foster,
2006
Will I need my glasses?
* * *
February
2008
From
What Jesus Meant by Garry
Wills, 2006
However we understand the mysterious sacrifice of the cross, one this is certain — it is a proof of God's love, not his anger. ... Jesus was sent to express, vindicate, and extend the Father's love. That is why the completion of his rescue raid into history is the descent into hell. This is not mentioned in the New Testament — save for a highly dubious reference in a notoriously obscure verse. But it is contained in the early creeds and baptismal oaths, showing that it is original to the revelation that was preached. ... That is part of the whole conception of Jesus as the summation and climax of creation. He reaches back with his redeeming power to rescue mankind from the very beginning.
* * *
January
2008
From The Art of Medieval Hunting: The Hound and the Hawk
by John Cummins,
1988
Clearly, there was female participation in certain forms of hunting, especially falconry, and female interest in other forms, but for women to take part in the rigors of classic par force hunting, as opposed to its social preliminaries and aftermath, must have been a rarity. The medieval practical manuscripts, lavishly illustrated, depict only men, hounds and their quarry. ... However, when the practical element in a picture or work of hunting literature is less than total, women ... are usually the first thing to creep in.
* * *
December
2007
From Walking
the Bible by Bruce Feiler,
2001
Because Egyptian temples were built so early in the course of human history, they often seem closer to the natural world than to other man-made structures. One reason is that they are unencumbered by architectural precedent; they refer to nature, not to other buildings. ... The volume of words on the public monuments of ancient Egypt is comparable to that other magnum force of Egypt, the flood. If language is going to triumph over nature, it first must become nature — the pictograms themselves; then divert attention from nature — use those pictograms to tell stories; then dominate it — erect tall buildings that show the triumph of stories over nature. ... From now on, the written word was king.
* * *
November
2007
From "Dynasty of Nomads: Rediscovering the Forgotten Liao Empire" in Archaeology
(November/December 2007; 30-31), by Jake Hooker
The Liao created a dual administration to govern their nomadic Khitan subjects
and the sedentary Chinese, a system that the Mongols and Manchus later adopted
when they came to power. It is the same 'one country, two systems' model the
Chinese government uses today to govern the special administrative regions of
Hong Kong and Macau.
Chinese art and
literature enjoyed a renaissance during the Song dynasty and it is hard to
imagine any Chinese, then or now, seeing nomads as cultural rivals. Yet at the
turn of the first millennium, the Liao had a uniquely sophisticated culture and
arguably the more powerful state. From Korea to the Mongolian steppe to the site
of present-day Beijing, they controlled a vast swath of territory, all while
living much the way that some semi-nomadic Tibetans and Mongolians live today,
breeding livestock and relying on horses.
* * *
October
2007
from
"Return of the Goldwater GOP" by Harold Meyerson, in the Washington
Post (10/03/07; A23)
A free public education is a right, or, if you prefer, an entitlement in America, because the nation long ago decided that an educated population is a national good. You might think that the same logic would apply to providing children with health care, that the gains to the nation from having a healthy population would outweigh those of bolstering private health insurance companies in the name of laissez-faire ideology.
* * *
September
2007
from Parallel
Lives: Five Victorian Marriages by Phyllis Rose, 1983
To say that George Eliot was the child of the extraordinarily happy union of
Marian Evans and George Henry Lewes is more than wordplay. Literary
parthenogenesis being as impossible for Miss Evans as the biological sort is
generally impossible, George Eliot would almost certainly not have entered the
world without Lewes's participation. But what exactly was his role, the dynamics
of his contribution? The usual explanation — that Marian was 'not fitted to
stand alone' and needed someone to lean on — is subtly misleading, making
England's strongest woman novelist seem deficient and dependent. . . .
To want love and sex in
one's life is hardly, after all, a sign of neurosis. . . . It is a small
matter of emphasis only, but it does seem to me to make some difference whether
we think of one of the most powerful female writers ever as neurotically
dependent on men or as brave enough to secure for herself what she wanted.
* * *
August
2007
from Three
Doors to Death by Rex Stout, 1948
She was forty and looked it, and she was not an eyestopper in any obvious way, but everything about her, the way she walked, the way she stood, her eyes and mouth and whole face, seemed to be saying, without trying or intending to, that if you happened to be hers, and she yours, life would be full of pleasant and interesting surprises.
* * *
July
2007
from Harry
Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling, 2001
Pettigrew owes his life to you. You have sent Voldemort a deputy who is in your debt. . . . and I'm much mistaken if Voldemort wants his servant in the debt of Harry Potter. . . . the time may come when you will be very glad you saved Pettigrew's life.
* * *
June
2007
from Boogers
are my Beat by Dave Barry, 2003
Maturity is a crippling handicap for humor columnists. It's like height for jockeys, or ethics for lawyers.
* * *
May
2007
from The
Art of Hugging by William Cane, 1996
Hugs early in life make us capable of love. Infants raised without hugging tend to grow up incapable of loving others. They can become psychopaths, sociopaths and psychological misfits. Cross-cultural studies show this startling finding: Societies with less hugging tend to be more violent.
* * *
April
2007
from a St. Louis Daily Globe
interview with Oscar Wilde, 1882
The West I liked best. The people are stronger, fresher, saner than the rest. They are ready to be taught. The surroundings of nature have instilled in them a love of the beautiful, which but needs development and direction. The East I found a feeble reflex of Europe; in fact, I may say that I was in America for a month before I saw an American.
* * *
March
2007
from "Black
Charlie" by Gordon Dickson, 1954
Let
us say that you pick up something. A piece of statuary — or,
better, a piece of stone, etched and colored by some ancient man of
prehistoric times. You look at it. At first, it
is nothing, a half-developed reproduction of some wild animal, not
even as good as a grade-school child could accomplish today.
But
then, holding it, your imagination suddenly reaches through rock
and time, back to the man himself, half-squatted before the stone
wall of his cave — and you see there, not the dusty thing you hold in
your hand, but what the man himself saw in the hour of its creation.
You look beyond the physical reproduction to the magnificent accomplishment of
his imagination.
This, then, may be called art — no
matter what strange guise it appears in — this magic which bridges all gaps
between the artist and yourself.
* * *
February
2007
from Bad Habits: A 100% Fact Free Book
by Dave Barry, 1987
Cats are less loyal than dogs, but more independent. (This is code. It means: 'Cats are smarter than dogs, but they hate people.') Many people love cats. From time to time, newspapers print stories about some elderly widow who died and left her entire estate, valued at $32,000, to her cat, Fluffkins. Cats read these stories, too, and are always plotting to get named as beneficiaries in their owners' wills. Did you ever wonder where your cat goes when it wanders off for several hours? It meets with other cats in estate-planning seminars. I just thought you should know.
* * *
January
2007
from The Fourth Bear by Jasper Fforde, 2006
Few bills before Parliament were ever so soundly rejected as the Ursine Self-Defense Bill of 2003, defeated by a record 608 to 1. Proposed to allow bears to protect themselves against illegal hunting and bile tappers, the bill would have permitted adult bears to legally carry a concealed sidearm within the designated safe haven of Berkshire, UK. The defeat of this particular private member's bill brought an end to the previous record, set in 1821 when Sir Clifford Nincompoop's proposal to allow marriage to one's horse was defeated by 521 to 5.
* * *
2006
* * *
December
2006
from “Richards' Rant Wakes Up Blacks to N-Word's Hate,” by Leonard
Pitts, 2006
In the calculus of race, I am not my brother's keeper. I am my brother. Individuality is the first casualty of bigotry.
* * *
November
2006
from Partners in Necessity by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller,
2000
If the mind processes something as experience, then it is experience. Reality is perhaps more difficult to define than truth.
* * *
October
2006
from
“Miss Jéromette and the Clergyman” by
Wilkie Collins, 1875
“There, there!” she said, returning to her natural manner; “don't take what I say too seriously. A poor girl who has led a lonely life like mine thinks strangely and talks strangely -- sometimes. Yes; I give you my promise. If I am ever in trouble, I will let you know it. God bless you -- you have been very kind to me -- goodbye!” A tear dropped on my face as she kissed me. The door closed between us. The dark street received me.
* * *
September
2006
from
The
Knight in History by Frances Gies, 1984
Georges
Duby, in his Medieval Marriage and in an essay "Youth in Aristocratic
Society," goes further, asserting that troubadour poetry was an expression not
only of the desire for upward mobility but of the frustrations, particularly
strong in the twelfth century, that resulted from the knight's position in
society. A knight was considered a "youth" until he had married, become
the head of a house, and started a family. Younger sons, or even eldest
sons unable to make a good match, might remain "youths" for a long time, even
permanently. Although the troubadours glorified youth, the longed-for and
often unreachable goal was to join the company of the adults. The poetry
of courtly love may have been a gesture of defiance to the system, a
"sublimated
form of abduction."
The traditional view of critics is that the poetry of
the troubadours idealized women. Perhaps the reverse is true: the women in
the poems already possessed a status from which the poets, through their
verses,
sought to borrow. ... the heroines of the poems always remained objects through
which the poet tried to attain his goal of self-realization or, more
concretely,
position at court.
* * *
August
2006
from Dave Barry's
Complete Guide to Guys by Dave Barry,
1995
Of course human beings, as a species, are no longer subject to the kinds of threats that face animals in the wild. Thanks to modern medical advances such as anesthesia, antibiotics, and organ transplants, few human beings born in the latter half of the twentieth century have been eaten by wrens.
* * *
July
2006
from "Call to Renewal" Keynote Address by
Senator Barack Obama, 2006
[T]he discomfort of some progressives with any hint of religion has often prevented us from effectively addressing issues in moral terms. Some of the problem here is rhetorical -- if we scrub language of all religious content, we forfeit the imagery and terminology through which millions of Americans understand both their personal morality and social justice. Imagine Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address without reference to "the judgments of the Lord." Or King's I Have a Dream speech without references to "all of God's children." Their summoning of a higher truth helped inspire what had seemed impossible, and move the nation to embrace a common destiny. ... Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God's will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all. ... Politics depends on our ability to persuade each other of common aims based on a common reality.
* * *
June
2006
from The Grey Horse by R.A. MacAvoy, 1987
I am the horse that bore you over your first jump, a Thóibín. I am the hauler of the stones for the walls hereabout. I eat the paltry grass and the flowers and wade in the sea. I steal men and women, if I might love them, and I carry them off. I am the púca, and my riders come off me different people than they went on. ... Or that is the idea. I would be a more formidable fairy if I were more clever.
* * *
May
2006
from F. Scott Fitzgerald's
"O Russet Witch!" in Tales of the Jazz Age,
1922
He knew now that he had always been a fool. ... But it was too late. He had angered Providence by resisting too many temptations. There was nothing left but heaven, where he would meet only those who, like him, had wasted earth.
* * *
April
2006
from Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe
by George Eliot, 1861
So, year after year, Silas Marner had lived in this solitude, his guineas rising in the iron pot, and his life narrowing and hardening itself more and more into a mere pulsation of desire and satisfaction that had no relation to any other being. His life had reduced itself to the functions of weaving and hoarding without any contemplation of an end towards which the functions tended. The same sort of process has perhaps been undergone by wiser men when they have been cut off from faith and love -- only, instead of a loom and a heap of guineas, they have had some erudite research, some ingenious project, or some well-knit theory.
* * *
March
2006
from A. A. Milne's 1940
introduction to The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
(1908)
One can argue over the merits of most books, and in arguing understand the point of view of one's opponent. One may even come to the conclusion that possibly he is right after all. One does not argue about The Wind in the Willows. The young man gives it to the girl with whom he is in love, and if she does not like it, asks her to return his letters. The older man tries it on his nephew, and alters his will accordingly. The book is a test of character. We can't criticize it, because it is criticizing us. ... When you sit down to it, don't be so ridiculous as to suppose that you are sitting in judgment on my taste, or on the art of Kenneth Grahame. You are merely sitting in judgment on yourself. You may be worthy; I don't know. But it is you who are on trial.
* * *
February
2006
from "Amends," Buffy the Vampire Slayer,
Season 3, Episode 10, by Joss Whedon, 1998
“Just this once, let me be strong.”
“Strong is fighting. It's hard.
And it's painful. And it's every day. It's what we
have to do. And we can do it together.”
* * *
January
2006
from Daughter of
the Forest by Juliet Marillier, 2000
There was a reedy shore, a place of shelter and serenity. There was a tiny white beach, and a stretch of tranquil lake water. On it swam a beautiful swan, her neck proudly arched, her beautiful eyes clear and bright. Beside her, two downy young ones but half fledged, dipping and splashing in the water. I too have said my farewells. ... I had a little time. More than you have had. But I fear the cold, and the wolf, and the long loneliness. More than I can tell you, I fear for them.
* * *
2005
* * *
December 2005
from Sanditon
by Jane Austen, 1817
The truth was that Sir Edward, whom circumstances had confined very much to one spot, had read more sentimental novels than agreed with him. His fancy had been early caught by all the impassioned and most exceptionable parts of Richardson's, and such authors as have since appeared to tread in Richardson's steps, so far as man's determined pursuit of woman in defiance of every opposition of feeling and convenience is concerned, had since occupied the greater part of his literary hours, and formed his character. With a perversity of judgment (which must be attributed to his not having by nature a very strong head) the graces, the spirit, the sagacity and the perseverance of the villain of the story outweighed all his absurdities and all his atrocities with Sir Edward. With him, such conduct was genius, fire and feeling. It interested and inflamed him, and he was always more anxious for its success and mourned over its discomfitures with more tenderness than could ever have been contemplated by the authors.
* * *
November 2005
from Catholicism and American Freedom by John T. McGreevy, 2003
The philosopher Charles Taylor's brilliant investigation of our moral resources places current tensions in perspective. Taylor readily admits the importance of modern notions of autonomy and the "free self-determining subject," and he notes that affirmations of universal human rights emerged in spite of Catholic nostalgia for Christendom, not because of it. At the same time, Taylor urges Catholics and other people of good will to counter an ethical individualism unwilling to recognize any authority beyond the self, and an economic individualism pliant before the marketplace. A romantic view of individual autonomy, often commingled in the United States with anti-Catholicism, may weaken the solidarity needed to ensure dignity for society's most vulnerable members.
* * *
October 2005
from The Big Over Easy
by Jasper Fforde, 2005
Citizens who find a corpse while walking their dog may be fined if proposed legislation is made law, it was disclosed yesterday. The new measures, part of the Criminal Narrative Improvement Bill, have been drafted to avoid investigations looking clichéd once they reach the docudrama stage. Other offenses covered by the act will be motorists declaiming in a huffy tone, 'Why don't you catch burglars/real criminals for a change?' when caught speeding, if there is a documentary crew in attendance. Civil libertarians, motorist groups and dog walkers are said to be 'outraged.'
* * *
September 2005
from Why There are No Good
Men Left: The Romantic Plight of the New Single Woman by Barbara Dafoe
Whitehead, 2004
For most of the past century, there was one dominant mating system. It could be accurately described as a system of romantic courtship and marriage. It was devoted almost solely to the young and never-married. Its main function was to pair up young people, usually while one or both of them were still in school, and move them toward marriage, usually in the years shortly after the end of formal schooling. ... It provided a set of rules, conventions and practices that nearly everyone recognized and many followed. ... No one suffered confusion about what the standards for courtship were, or what the consequences of violating the standards might be. ... By the time that the women who are now in their 20s and 30s reached college, this national courtship system, for all practical purposes, no longer existed. ... The new single woman who hopes to marry someday faces a quandary: she isn't able to rely on the earlier courtship system. It no longer exists. Even if it did, it wouldn't fit the timetable of her early adult life. It was designed for college women who got married in their early 20s. And the emerging system doesn't offer an updated courtship systems that helps her fulfill her aspirations for finding a life mate at an older age.
* * *
August 2005
from Winds of Fury
by Mercedes Lackey, 1994
There's no great virtue in being lifebonded, you know. It's a lot like having a Predestined Fate; often uncomfortable, frequently inconvenient, usually hazardous. ... it isn't love, that's for certain, even though love usually cements the bond. Van thinks that it's likelier that someone with an extremely powerful Gift of some kind and a tendency to deep depression will be lifebonded than someone who is not so burdened and hag-ridden. That's so the Gifted-and-suicidal half has someone outside of himself to keep him stable and give him an external focus.
* * *
July 2005
from 1776 by Peter Stone, 1972
A second flood, a simple famine, plagues of locusts everywhere, or a cataclysmic earthquake, I'd accept with some despair. But no, You sent us Congress! Good God, Sir! Was that fair?
* * *
June 2005
from "You Can't Cut and Paste Your Way Toward Learning to Write," in
the Miami Herald, by Leonard Pitts, June 3, 2005
My words are important to me. I struggle with them, obsess over them. Show me something I wrote and like a mother recounting a child's birth, I can tell you stories of how it came to be, why this adjective here or that colon there. See, my life's goal is to learn to write. And you cannot cut and paste your way to that. You can only work your way there, sweating out words, wrestling down prose, hammering together poetry. There are no shortcuts. ... But before you go, let me say something on behalf of all of us who are struggling to learn how to write, or just struggling to be honorable human beings: The dictionary is a big book. Get your own damn words. Leave mine alone.
* * *
May 2005
from The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl, 2003
That which we are, we are: what we choose to be. This calmed Holmes a bit. The three friends waiting for him had agreed. Still, he could walk away with his hands in his pockets. He drew in a deep asthmatic breath, the sort followed by an equally pronounced exhale of release. But instead of completing the motion, Holmes chose. He did not recognize his own voice, a voice composed enough to belong to the noble flame that spoke to Dante. He only barely realized his reason for the decision that his words, Tennyson's words, carried into existence.
* * *
April
2005
from "Prozac to my Ears" in the Washington Post,
02/25/05, by Eugene Robinson
But we should realize that constant interaction truncates the mental treks that once led us to our moods -- the sustained train of thought, the extended reverie, the day-long smolder, the can't-get-it-out-of-my-head anticipation, the lingering funk. It used to take a while to internalize a slight to the point where we reached a proper state of righteous indignation, or to reflect on our many blessings and soar into unbridled joy. But there's no time, and the cell phone keeps ringing. We plug in our ear-buds and whisper-click the wheel to shut out the world and get our heads where we need them to be, in a hurry. We used to do this with long walks and quiet rooms, but not anymore. Designer noise is the new silence.
* * *
March
2005
from "Strychnine in the Soup" by P.G. Wodehouse,
1932
The subject of bereavement is one that has often been treated powerfully by poets, who have run the whole gamut of the emotions while laying bare for us the agony of those who have lost parents, wives, children, gazelles, money, fame, dogs, cats, doves, sweethearts, horses, and even collar-studs. But no poet has yet treated of the most poignant bereavement of all -- that of the man half-way through a detective story who finds himself at bedtime without the book.
* * *
February 2005
from "The Aztecs: Blood and Glory" in Smithsonian, January 2005, page 81, by Dan Hofstadter
One is reminded, making one's way through the exhibition, that there was in the sacred quarter of Tenochtitlan a temple, called the coateocalli, that served a very peculiar function. 'It was here,' writes the 16th-century scholar Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, 'that lived the gods of the cities that the Mexicans had conquered. They made the gods prisoner and brought them back and set them in this temple.' The Aztecs tended to accept rather than exclude local deities -- but they did want to make sure they had them under their thumb.
* * *
January 2005
from In Memorium
A.H.H., Stanza 106, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1850
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,
But ring the fuller minstrel in.Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.
* * *
2004
* * *
December
2004
from Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
by Susanna Clarke, 2004
Chaston wrote that men and fairies both contain within them a faculty of reason and a faculty of magic. In men reason is strong and magic is weak. With fairies it is the other way round: magic comes very naturally to them, but by human standards they are barely sane.
* * *
November
2004
from
Something Rotten by Jasper Fforde, 2004
Well, it's now called The Merry Wives of Elsinore, and features Gertrude being chased around the castle by Falstaff while being outwitted by Mistress Page, Ford and Ophelia. Laertes is the king of the fairies, and Hamlet is relegated to a sixteen-line subplot where he is convinced Doctor Caius and Fenton have conspired to kill his father for seven hundred pounds. ... It takes a long time to get funny, and when it finally does, everyone dies.
* * *
October
2004
from
Shards of Honor by Lois McMaster Bujold, 1986
He was just a little villain. An old-fashioned craftsman, making crimes one-off. The really unforgivable acts are committed by calm men in beautiful green silk rooms, who deal death wholesale, by the shipload, without lust, or anger, or desire, or any redeeming emotion to excuse them but cold fear of some pretended future. But the crimes they hope to prevent in that future are imaginary. The ones they commit in the present -- they are real.
* * *
September
2004
from
The House of Gentle Men by Kathy Hepinstall, 2000
And Marty fell with his hands over his eyes, and Daniel died a week later. And you can't cover horror with horror, for horror is [transparent] and I could see right through it at the thing I'd done.
* * *
August
2004
from
"Plutarch's Exemplary Lives: An ancient Greek wrote the book on
biography then and now," by Lance Morrow, in Smithsonian, July 2004
In the age of chaotic electronic information, there seems to be an indefatigable production line turning out big, solid biographies, written to the weight and bulk of footlockers. It's as if Thomas Carlyle's Great Man theory of history, a rather heavy nineteenth-century concept, had been genetically crossed with People magazine to create a genre of historical infotainment: retrospection compounded of scholarship, vivid period drama and soap opera at the highest levels.
* * *
July
2004
from "How Polarization
Sells," by Robert J. Samuelson, in The Washington Post, June 30,
2004
The red and blue states make a pretty graphic. But in 19 states, the victor in the 2000 presidential election won with about 51 percent of the vote or less; small shifts would have reversed the outcomes. Then the graphic and its message -- geographic polarization -- would be ruined. What's actually happened is that politics, and not the country, has become more polarized. ... The result is a growing disconnect between politics -- and political commentary -- and ordinary life. Politics is increasingly a world unto itself, inhabited by people convinced of their own moral superiority. Polarization and nastiness are not side effects. They are the game. ... Politics should reflect and, at its best, conciliate the nation's differences. Increasingly, it does the opposite. It distorts, amplifies and inflames conflicts. It's a turnoff to vast numbers of centrist voters who do not see the world in such uncompromising absolutes. This may be the real polarization: between the true believers on both sides and everyone else.
* * *
June
2004
St. Bernard, quoted
by Beatrice of Nazareth, c. 1260, from the anthology In Her Words:
Women's Writing in the History of Christian Thought, 1994
Many are those who suffer torments for Christ, but few are those who love themselves perfectly for Christ's sake.
* * *
May
2004
from "The Art of the Final
Episode" by John Romano, Weekend Edition (NPR), May 1, 2004
[Great shows] live in people's lives in such a very special way. . . . It comes into your living room, sits there with you like a friend, and when that series ends, it's very much a real sense of people going out of your lives in a personal way, and of a conversation you've been having -- that's really been central to your own thoughts, about yourself, and the society we live in -- coming to an end. . . . And when that's over, that's different than reaching page 350 of a book, even a very good book, which you knew from the beginning ended in a certain place . . . . There's nothing quite like the way a loved show vanishes from its audience's life.
* * *
April
2004
from The Towers of Trebizond by
Rose Macaulay, 1956
[I]t is a most strange thing that this important part of human life, the struggle that almost everyone has about good and evil, cannot now be talked of without embarrassment, unless of course one is in church. It goes on, just the same as it always has ... But now you cannot talk about it when it is your own struggle, you cannot say to your friends that you would like to be good, they would think you are going Buchmanite, or Grahamite, or something else that you would not at all care to be thought. Once people used to talk about being good and being bad, they wrote about it in letters to their friends, and conversed about it freely; the Greeks did this, and the Romans, and then, after life took a Christian turn, people did it more than ever ... they went on like this through most of the nineteenth century, even when they were not evangelicals or tractarians or anything like that, and nineteenth century novels are full of such interesting conversations, and the Victorian agnostics wrote to one another about it continually, it was one of their favorite topics, for the weaker they got on religion the stronger they got on morals ... I am not sure when all this died out, but it has now become very dead.
* * *
March
2004
from "Why the M Word
Matters to Me" in Time by Andrew Sullivan, February 16, 2004
When I looked toward the years ahead, I couldn't see a future. There was just a void. Was I going to be alone my whole life? ... I shut myself in my room with my books night after night while my peers developed the skills needed to form real relationships and loves. In wounded pride, I even voiced a rejection of family and marriage. It was the only way I could explain my isolation. ... Because my sexuality had emerged in solitude — and without any link to ... an actual relationship — it was hard later to reconnect sex to love and self-esteem. It still is. But I persevered, each relationship slowly growing longer than the last, learning in my 20s and 30s what my ... friends had found out in their teens.
* * *
February
2004
from Lost in a Good Book
by Jasper Fforde, 2002
We didn't know the nature of lightning or rainbows for three and a half million years, pet. Don't reject it just because it seems impossible.
* * *
January
2004
from "The Sister Years"
by Nathaniel Hawthorne, January 1, 1839
There came [the New Year] treading lightsomely on tiptoe along the street . . . Her dress was rather too airy for the season, and was bedizened with fluttering ribbons and other vanities, which were likely soon to be rent away by the fierce storms, or to fade in the hot sunshine, amid which she was to pursue her changeful course. But still she was a wonderfully pleasant looking figure, and had so much promise and such an indescribable hopefulness in her aspect, that hardly anybody could meet her without anticipating some very desirable thing — the consummation of some long-sought good — from her offices. A few dismal characters there may be [who] have now ceased to pin any faith upon the skirts of the New Year. But, for my own part, I have great faith in her; and should I live to see fifty more such, still, from each of those successive sisters, I shall reckon upon receiving something that will be worth living for.
* * *
2003
* * *
December
2003
from Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold,
2003
“I'm not getting it right.”
“You are brilliant,”
the Voice reassured her.
“It
is imperfect.”
“So
are all things trapped in time. You are brilliant,
nonetheless. How fortunate for Us that We thirst for glorious souls
rather than faultless ones, or We should be parched indeed, and
most lonely in Our perfect righteousness. Carry on imperfectly,
shining Ista.”
* * *
November
2003
from "Boo, Humbug!" by
Michael Elliot in Time, October 27, 2003
How did cultural infantilization creep up on us? . . . a shift from a culture based on literature -- on reading -- to one based on the image. In a preliterate world, there's no distinction between children and adults. Look at a Bruegel painting, and you see adults eating, drinking, groping, necking, together with their children. Literacy changed all that. Reading has to be learned; it separates the world of the child from that of the adult. But children can absorb images -- from TV, say -- just as easily as their elders. . . . [A] postliterate culture would be one in which barriers that protected children from the perils and temptations of the outside world would be torn down.
* * *
October
2003
from the speech opening Vatican II, by Pope John XXIII,
October 11, 1962
The substance of the ancient doctrines of the Deposit of Faith is one thing and the way in which it is presented is another. And it is the latter which must be taken into great consideration, with patience if necessary, everything being measured in the forms and proportions of the magisterium which is predominantly pastoral in character.
* * *
September
2003
from The Pickwick
Papers by Charles Dickens, 1836
There are very few moments in a man's existence when he experiences so much ludicrous distress, or meets with so little charitable commiseration, as when he is in pursuit of his own hat. A vast deal of coolness, and a peculiar degree of judgment, are requisite in catching a hat. . . . The best way is, to keep gently up with the object of pursuit, to be wary and cautious, to watch your opportunity well, get gradually before it, then make a rapid dive, seize it by the crown, and stick it firmly on your head: smiling pleasantly all the time, as if you thought it as good a joke as anybody else.
* * *
August
2003
from "Free
the Children" in Time by Nancy Gibbs, 2003
Maybe we adults idealize our own red-rover days, the hot afternoons spent playing games that required no coaches, eating foods that involved no nutrition, getting dirty in whole new ways and rarely glancing in the direction of a screen of any kind. Ask friends about the people and places that shaped them, and summer springs up quickly . . . The best summer moments were stretchy enough to carry us all through the year . . .
* * *
July
2003
from My Man Godfrey
by Morrie Ryskind and Eric Hatch, 1936
It's surprising how fast you can go downhill when you feel sorry for yourself. . . . You see, Tommy, there's two kinds of people: those who fight the idea of being pushed into the river, and the other kind. . . . There's a very peculiar mental process called "thinking" -- you wouldn't know much about that, but when I was living down here, I did a lot of it, and one thing I discovered is that the only difference between a derelict and a man is a job.
* * *
June
2003
from A Civil Campaign
by Lois McMaster Bujold, 1999
“You can't make them -- whoever your particular them is -- do anything, really,” said Ekaterin slowly. “Adulthood isn't an award they'll give you for being a good child. You can waste . . . years, trying to get someone to give that respect to you, as though it were a sort of promotion or raise in pay. If only you do enough, if only you are good enough. No. You have to just . . . take it. Give it to yourself, I suppose. . . . But that's hard.”
* * *
May
2003
from Something New by
P.G. Wodehouse, 1915
You remind me of an old cat I once had. Whenever he killed a mouse, he would bring it into the drawing-room and lay it affectionately at my feet. I would reject the corpse with horror and turn him out, but back he would come with his loathsome gift. I simply couldn't make him understand that he was not doing me a kindness. He thought highly of his mouse, and it was beyond him to realize that I did not want it. You are just the same with your chivalry. It's very kind of you to keep offering me your dead mouse, but, honestly, I have no use for it. I won't take favors just because I happen to be a female. If we are going to form this partnership, I insist on doing my fair share of the work and running my fair share of the risks.
* * *
April
2003
from a speech by Woodrow
Wilson, July 4, 1918
The settlement of every question, whether of territory or sovereignty, of economic arrangement, or of political relationship, [must be] upon the basis of the free acceptance of that settlement by the people immediately concerned, and not upon the basis of the material interest or advantage of any other nation or people which may desire a different settlement for the sake of its own exterior influence or mastery.
* * *
March
2003
from Dirk Gently's Holistic
Detective Agency by Douglas Adams, 1988
Invention, pure, creative invention. . . . [It] is a rare mind indeed that can render the hitherto nonexistent blindingly obvious. The cry 'I could have thought of that' is a very popular and misleading one, for the fact is that they didn't, and a very significant and revealing fact it is, too.
* * *
February
2003
from Seeing Salvation by
Neil MacGregor and Erika Langmuir, 2000
When war broke out in 1939, the [British National Gallery's] entire collection was evacuated to a slate mine in North Wales. Eventually, in January 1942, it was decided that every month one picture should be brought back to sustain the public, brave the bombs in Trafalgar Square and to hang alone in the gallery. . . . And so [Titian's] Noli me tangere became the first Picture of the Month, drawing such crowds that the scheme was continued for the rest of the war. Every month, tens of thousands came to contemplate one picture, and returned next month to see another. In a way rarely before experienced in modern times, great paintings became a part of everyday life.
* * *
January
2003
from The Container Garden
by Nigel Colborn, 1990
Winter is the season which exposes all your planning errors. If a garden walk on the year's shortest day is not only a pleasurable and interesting experience but also yields a bunch of something to put into a vase indoors, you will have earned your sense of triumph. Containers are not the only way to achieve this, but chances are your winter walk would have been duller without them.
* * *
2002
* * *
December
2002
from Miracle on 34th
Street by George Seaton and Valentine Davies, 1947
Now, you've heard of the French nation and the British nation? Well, this is the imagination. It's a wonderful place. How would you like to be able to make snowballs in the summertime? Eh? Or drive a great big bus right down fifth avenue? How would you like to have a ship all to yourself that makes daily trips to China and Australia? How would you like to be the Statue of Liberty in the morning, and in the afternoon fly south with a flock of geese? It's very simple. Of course it takes practice. Now, the first thing you've got to learn is how to pretend.
* * *
November
2002
from a letter to Robert
Bridges by Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1882
It is long since such things had any significance for you. But what is strange and unpleasant is that you sometimes speak as if they had in reality none for me and you were only waiting with a certain disgust until I too should be disgusted with myself enough to throw off the mask. . . . Yet I can hardly think you do not think I am in earnest. And let me say, to take no higher ground, that without earnestness there is nothing sound or beautiful in character and that a cynical vein much indulged coarsens everything in us.
* * *
October
2002
from City of Quartz:
Excavating the Future in Los Angeles by Mike Davis, 1990
[Contemporary noir], depending on one's viewpoint, is either the culmination of the genre or its reductio ad absurdum. . . . Yet in building such an all-encompassing noir mythology (including Stephen King-like descents into the occult), Ellroy risks extinguishing the genre's tensions, and, inevitably, its power. In his pitch blackness there is no light left to cast shadows and evil becomes a forensic banality. The result feels very much like the actual moral texture of [recent times]: a supersaturation of corruption that fails any longer to outrage or even interest.
* * *
September
2002
from The Rise of Silas Lapham
by William Dean Howells, 1885
The whole business of love, and love-making, is painted by the novelists in monstrous disproportion to the other relations of life. . . . [Romance is] the affair, commonly, of very young people, who have not yet character and experience enough to make them interesting. In novels, it's treated as if it's not only the chief interest of life, but the sole interest of the lives of two ridiculous young persons; and it is taught that love is perpetual, that the glow of true passion lasts forever; and that it is sacrilege to think or act otherwise. . . . [Romance] ought to be recognized as something natural and mortal, and divine honors, which belong to righteousness alone, ought not to be paid it.
* * *
August
2002
from The Life of St.
Louis by Jean de Joinville, c. 1310
At the end of nine days, the bodies [of those killed in battle] came to the surface of the water, owing, it was said, to the fact that the gall had putrified. These bodies came floating down to the bridge between our two camps, but could not pass under it because the water was up to the arches. There was such a number of them that all the river was full of corpses, from one bank to the other. . . . I saw the Chamberlains of the Comte d'Artois, and many other people, seeking for their friends among the dead; but I never heard that any one of them was found there.
* * *
July
2002
from The Republic of
Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment by Dena Goodman,
1994
[S]alonnière[s] achieved success by balancing and blending voices into a harmonious whole. On one level, this was the rococo aesthetic of order and variety applied to the discursive space of the salon: the salonnière brought order to the variety of views expressed by her guests. Such harmonizing was necessary both because different views were expressed, and because strong egos were involved. Because social and intellectual identities could not be easily separated when philosophes interacted directly, it was essential that the salonnière bring them into harmony. Her function was political as well as aesthetic. . . . In the eighteenth century, the ideal woman was characterized by a lack of ego which enabled her to direct her attention to coordinating the egos of the men around her. The qualities that defined the successful salonnière were thus thought to be gender-specific.
* * *
June
2002
from Memory by Lois
McMaster Bujold, 1996
Then Illyan remarked, “I'd thought that crack about wrestling with
temptation was a joke.”
“Best
two falls out of three, Simon. It was that close. .
. . Some prices are just too high, no matter how much you may
want the prize. The one thing you can't trade for your heart's
desire is your heart.”
* * *
May
2002
from Harry Potter and the
Sorcerer's Stone by J. K. Rowling, 1997
“The
truth,” Dumbledore sighed. “It is a beautiful and
terrible thing, and should therefore be treated with great caution.
However, I shall answer your questions unless I have a very good reason
not to, in which case I beg you'll forgive me. I shall not,
of course, lie.”
“Well . . . Voldemort said that he only killed my mother because she tried to
stop him from killing me. But why would he want to kill me in the
first place?”
Dumbledore sighed very deeply this time. “Alas,
the first thing you ask me I cannot tell you. Not today.
Not now. You will know, one day . . . put it from
your mind for now, Harry. When you are older . . . I
know you hate to hear this . . . when you are ready, you will know.”
* * *
April
2002
"God's Grandeur,"
by Gerard Manly Hopkins, 1877
The world is charged with the grandeur of God. / It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; / It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil / Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod? / Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; / And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; / And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil / Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod. / And for all this, nature is never spent; / There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; / And though the last lights off the black West went / Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs -- / Because the Holy Ghost over the bent / World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
* * *
March
2002
from A Distant
Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, by Barbara Tuchman, 1978
If children survived to age seven, their recognized life began, more or less as miniature adults. Childhood was already over. The childishness noticeable in medieval behavior, with its marked inability to restrain any kind of impulse, may have been simply due to the fact that so large a proportion of active society was actually very young in years. About half the population, it has been estimated, was under twenty-one, and about one third under fourteen.
* * *
February
2002
from "The Village
Uncle" by Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1842
How strangely the past is peeping over the shoulders of the present! To judge by my recollections, it is but a few moments since I sat in another room; yonder model of a vessel was not there, nor the old chest of drawers, nor Susan's profile and mine in that gilt frame; nothing, in short, except this same fire, which glimmered on books, papers, and a picture, and half discovered my solitary figure in a looking glass. But it was paler than my rugged old self, and younger, too, by almost half a century. . . . [Y]our figures grow indistinct, fading into pictures on the air, and now to fainter outlines, while the fire is glimmering on the walls of a familiar room, and shows the book that I flung down, and the sheet that I left half written, some fifty years ago. I lift my eyes to the looking glass, and perceive myself alone. . . .
* * *
January
2002
from Drum-Taps by Walt
Whitman, 1865
Year that trembled and reel'd beneath me! / Your summer wind was warm enough, yet the air I breathed froze me, / A thick gloom fell through the sunshine and darken'd me, / Must I change my triumphant songs? said I to myself, / Must I indeed learn to chant the cold dirges of the baffled? / And sullen hymns of defeat? . . . Over the carnage rose prophetic a voice, / Be not dishearten'd, affection shall solve the problems of freedom yet, / Those who love each other shall become invincible, / They shall yet make Columbia victorious.
* * *
2001
* * *
December
2001
from a letter by J. R. R. Tolkein
to C. S. Lewis, quoted by Salon.com
We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming a 'sub-creator' and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbor, while materialistic 'progress' leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil.
* * *
November
2001
from "It's Freedom,
Stupid" in The New York Times, by Thomas L. Friedman, 2001
The animating vision of America in the world is the promotion and protection of freedom -- freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of markets and freedom of politics. And that while America might align itself with all sorts of countries for economic or strategic reasons, in the end it was those who were "basically pro-freedom" whom America would never abandon and with whom America would always share a special bond. . . . Americans want to destroy this terrorist menace so that we and all other free nations . . . can really enjoy our freedom. That's what it's all about.
* * *
October
2001
from Democracy in
America by Alexis De Tocqueville, 1835
In the middle ages, when it was very difficult to reach offenders, the judges inflicted frightful punishments on the few who were arrested, but this did not diminish the number of crimes. It has since been discovered that when justice is more certain and more mild it is more efficacious. The English and the Americans hold that tyranny and oppression are to be treated like any other crime, by lessening the penalty and facilitating conviction.
* * *
September
2001
from Felix Holt:
The Radical by George Eliot, 1866
[W]hat we call illusions are often, in truth, a wider vision of past and present realities -- a willing movement of a man's soul with the larger sweep of the world's forces -- a movement toward a more assured end than the chances of a single life. We see human heroism broken into units and say, this unit did little -- might as well not have been. But in this way we might break up a great army into units; in this way we might break the sunlight into fragments, and think that this and the other might be cheaply parted with. Let us rather raise a monument to the soldiers whose brave hearts only kept the ranks unbroken, and met death -- a monument to the faithful who were not famous, and who are precious as the continuity of the sunbeams is precious, though some of them fall unseen and on barrenness.
* * *
August 2001
from Queens'
Play by Dorothy Dunnett, 1964
But would you have cherished your beautiful buildings and dressed them with works of art? Would you have spent your money on jewels and fine clothes, on music and tapestries? Neither of you can lead. Neither of you has made a wild success of the profession of arms. If you are not going to be practical, you must perfect the lusty arts of leisure. . . . To succeed as you want, you have to be precise; you have to have polish; you have to carry polish and precision into everything you do. You have no time to sigh over seigneuries and begrudge other people their gifts. Lack of genius never held anyone back. . . . Only time wasted on resentment and daydreaming can do that. You never did work with your whole brain and your whole body . . . and you ended neither soldier nor seigneur, but a dried-out huddle of grudges strung cheek to cheek on a withy.
* * *
July 2001
from Rose Daughter
by Robin McKinley, 1997
Roses are for love. Not forget-me-not, honeysuckle, silly sweethearts' love, but the love that makes you and keeps you whole, love that gets you through the worst your life'll give you and that pours out of you when you're given the best instead. . . . [T]here aren't many roses around anymore because they need more love than people have to give 'em, to make 'em flower, and the only thing that'll stand in for love is magic . . . And the bushes only started covering themselves with thorns when it got so it was only magic that ever made 'em grow. They were sad, like, and it came out in thorns.
* * *
June 2001
from "Friendship" by Ralph Waldo Emerson, c. 1841
Our intellectual and active powers increase with our affection. The scholar sits down to write, and all his years of meditation do not furnish him with one good thought or happy expression ; but it is necessary to write a letter to a friend, -- and forthwith troops of gentle thoughts invest themselves, on every hand, with chosen words.
* * *
May
2001
from 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene
Hanff, 1970
[typographical errors as in the original letter, responding to an edition of Catullus containing the Latin text, a verse translation by Sir Richard Burton, and a prose translation by Leonard Smithers]
jan. 4. 1956
i
write you from under the bed where that catullus drove me.
i mean it PASSETH understanding.
Up til now, the only Richard Burton I ever heard of is
a handsome young actor I've seen in a couple of British movies and I wish I'd
kept it that way. This one got knighted for turning Catullus -- caTULLus
-- into Victorian hearts-and-flowers.
and poor mr. smithers must have been afraid his mother
was going to read it, he like to KILL himself cleaning it all up.
all right, let's just you go find me a nice plain Latin
Catullus, I bought myself a Cassell's dictionary, I'll work out the hard
passages myself.
. . . i enclose a sawbuck for that thing.
that catullus. bound in white Limp -- mit-white-silk-bookmark-yet,
frankie, where do you FIND these things?!
* * *
April
2001
from The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot,
1862
[History] is a thing hardly to be predicted from even the completest knowledge of characteristics. For the tragedy of our lives is not created entirely from within. "Character," says Novalis, in one of his questionable aphorisms -- "Character is destiny." But not the whole of our destiny. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, was speculative and irresolute, and we have a great tragedy in consequence. But if his father had lived to a good old age, and his uncle had died an early death, we can conceive Hamlet's having married Ophelia, and got through life with a reputation of sanity, notwithstanding many soliloquies, and some moody sarcasms toward the fair daughter of Polonius, to say nothing of the frankest incivility to his father-in-law.
* * *
March
2001
from King of Morning, Queen of Day
by Ian McDonald, 1991
I have this dread that afflicts me in
the dead of night: it is that somehow, we have lost the power to generate
new mythologies for a technological age. We are withdrawing into
another age's mythotypes, an age when the issues were so much simpler, clearly
defined, and could be solved with one stroke of a sword called something like
Durththane. We have created a comfortable, santised pseudofeudal
world of trolls and orcs and mages and swords and sorcery, big-breasted women in
scanty armor and dungeonmasters; a world where evil is a host of angry
goblins threatening to take over Hobbitland and not starvation in the Horn of
Africa, child slavery in Filipino sweatshops, Columbian drug squirarchs,
unbridled free market forces, secret police, the destruction of the ozone layer,
child pornography, snuff videos, the death of the whales, and the desecration of
the rain forests.
Where is the mythic archetype who
will save us from ecological catastrophe, or credit card debt? Where are
the Sagas and Eddas of the Great Cities? Where are our Cuchulains and
Rolands and Arthurs? . . . Where are the Translators who can shape our
dreams and dreads, our hopes and fears, into the heroes and villains of the Oil
Age?
* * *
February
2001
from The Blue Sword by Robin McKinley, 1982
She paused a minute,
looking at the thoughts that had been with her constantly for the weeks since
she had left her old life . . . . "It is that I cannot see what I am
doing or why, and it is unsettling always to live only in the moment as it
passes. Oh, I know -- one never sees ahead or behind. But I see even
less. It is like being blindfolded when everyone else in the room is
not. No one can see outside the room -- but everyone else can see the
room. I would like to take my blindfold off."
The man smiled.
"It is a reasonable wish. No one lives more than a few moments either
way -- even those fortunate or unfortunate ones who can see how the future will
be cast; and perhaps they feel the minute's passing most acutely. But it
is comforting to have some sense of . . . the probability of choices,
perhaps?"
* * *
January
2001
from "The Thraldom [sic] of Names" by Theodore Roosevelt, 1913
The rule of a mob may be every whit as tyrannical and oppressive as the rule of a single individual, whether or not called a dictator; and the rule of an oligarchy, whether this oligarchy is a plutocracy or a bureaucracy, or any other small set of powerful men, may in its turn be just as sordid and just as bloodthirsty as that of a mob. But the apologists for the mob or oligarchy or dictator, in justifying the tyranny, use different words. The mob leaders usually state that all that they are doing is necessary in order to advance the cause of "liberty," while the dictator and the oligarchy are usually defended upon the ground that the course they follow is absolutely necessary so as to secure "order." Many excellent people are taken in by the use of the word "liberty" at the one time, and the use of the word "order" at the other, and ignore the simple fact that despotism is despotism, tyranny tyranny, oppression oppression, whether committed by one individual or by many individuals, by a state or by a private corporation.
* * *
2000
* * *
December
2000
from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams, 1980
The Belcerebon people [of planet Kakrafoon] used to cause great resentment and insecurity among neighboring races by being one of the most enlightened, accomplished and, above all, quiet races in the Galaxy. As a punishment for this behavior -- which was held to be offensively self-righteous and provocative -- a Galactic Tribunal inflicted on them that most cruel of all social diseases: telepathy. Consequently, in order to prevent themselves broadcasting every slightest thought that crosses their minds to anyone within a five-mile radius, they now have to talk very loudly and continuously about the weather, their little aches and pains, the match this afternoon and what a noisy place Kakrafoon has suddenly become.
* * *
November
2000
from News: The Politics of Illusion by W. Lance Bennett, 1988
The credibility of a political image lies not in some independent check on its accuracy but in its past success as a news formula. In this world of media reality, newsworthiness becomes a substitute for validity, and validity becomes reduced to a formula of who applies what images to which events under what circumstances. Ordinary logic tells us that the more standardized an image, the less valid and meaningful is its application to unique, real-world situations. Media logic, on the other hand, tells us that reality "is" the image applied to it. The more "official" the position, the more likely it is to be reported; the more it is reported, the more credibility it gains; and the more credibility it gains, the more "official" it becomes. It is obvious why common sense fares poorly in direct competition with media logic. [Media logic] enables both news and politics to operate on a routine, symbiotic basis. Common sense, by comparison, is of little use in unraveling the news web of political secrecy, double talk, and untestable abstraction.
* * *
October
2000
from Middlemarch by George Eliot, 1874
The sufferings of his own pride from humiliations past and to come were keen enough, yet they were hardly distinguishable to himself from that more acute pain which dominated them -- the pain of foreseeing that Rosamond would come to regard him chiefly as the cause of disappointment and unhappiness to her. He had never liked the makeshifts of poverty, and they had never before entered into his prospects for himself; but he was beginning now to imagine how two creatures who loved each other, and had a stock of thoughts in common, might laugh over their shabby furniture, and their calculations how far they could afford butter and eggs. But the glimpse of that poetry seemed as far off from him as the carelessness of the golden age; in poor Rosamond's mind there was not room enough for luxuries to look small in.
* * *
September
2000
from "The Quitter" in Rhymes of a Rolling Stone by Robert Service, 1912
In hunger and woe, oh, it's easy to blow . . .
It's the hell-served-for-breakfast that's hard.
"You're sick of the game!" Well, now, that's a shame.
You're young and you're brave and you're bright.
"You've had a raw deal!" I know -- but don't squeal,
Buck up, do your d**nedest, and fight.
It's the plugging away that will win you the day,
So don't be a piker, old pard!
Just draw on your grit; it's so easy to quit:
It's the keeping-your-chin-up that's hard.
It's easy to cry that you're beaten -- and die;
It's easy to crawfish and crawl;
But to fight and to fight when hope's out of sight --
Why, that's the best game of them all!
And though you come out of each grueling bout,
All broken and beaten and scarred,
Just have one more try -- it's dead easy to die,
It's the keeping-on-living that's hard.
* * *
August
2000
from Newsweek, "Sexual Assault, Film at Eleven" by Anna Quindlen, 2000
What happened after the parade [in Central Park] happens in this country, in every country, every day. Oh, it doesn't often happen in broad daylight, and the numbers are not usually so huge, except in war zones . . . A century ago sexual assault was explained as the inevitable explosive acting-out of men in a repressive sexual atmosphere; now it is supposed to be the inevitable effect of a permissive sexual environment. When we natter on about our culture, about how this is a corollary of violent lyrics and explicit movies, it is no more than a different kind of excuse. It is not entirely their fault; rap music made them do it, or halter tops. Nonsense. When skirts were longer and necklines higher, certain men were still holding women down and forcing themselves upon them in an age-old act of power and dominance. And humiliation, of course: the men on the videotape laugh while the women weep and scream. There is no mystery about whether this is wrong, and what is the right thing. . . . Why is it so simple for some boys to learn they cannot lift a person's wallet and yet so difficult for them to understand they cannot lift a person's skirt?
