From The Storyteller Essays by Walter Benjamin, Edited by Samuel Titan, Translated by Tess Lewis (2019).

I recount this old tale for those who would like to try figs or Falernian wine, borscht or a peasant lunch on Capri. There once was a king who had all the power and treasures of the world at his command, but who was nonetheless unhappy and became more melancholy with each passing year. One day he summoned his personal cook and said to him: “You have served me faithfully for many a year and filled my table with the most magnificent dishes. I am well-disposed toward you. Now, however, I would like to put your art to a final test. You must make me a mulberry omelet such as I enjoyed fifty years ago in my earliest childhood. My father, at the time, was waging war against his evil neighbor to the east. He conquered us and we had to escape. And so we fled day and night, my father and I, until we reached a dark wood. We wandered through it and were on the brink of perishing from hunger and exhaustion when we stumbled on a little hut. In it lived an old woman who most warmly bid us rest and set to work at the stove. It wasn’t long before the mulberry omelet appeared before us. The moment I took the first bite, I felt a wonderful sense of consolation and my heart swelled with hope. I was a mere child then and I did not think of the relief this delicious food provided. But when I later had the woman searched for throughout my entire realm, neither she nor anyone able to prepare a mulberry omelet could be found. If you can grant me this last wish, I will make you my son-in-law and heir to my throne. But if you cannot satisfy me, you must die.” The cook replied: “Your majesty, you must then summon the hangman at once. I know well the secret of the mulberry omelet and all its ingredients, from the common cress to the noble thyme. I know well the spell one must say as one stirs and how the boxwood whisk must always be turned towards the right lest our labor be rewarded only with trouble. But nevertheless, oh King, I must die. Nevertheless my omelet will not satisfy you. For how shall I season it with all that you savored at the time: the danger of battle and the alertness of the pursued, the warmth of the hearth, and the sweetness of rest, the foreign present, and the dark future?” Thus spoke the cook. The king remained silent for a time and not long after, he released the cook from his duty richly rewarded. (1930)

From Markings by Dag Hammarskjöld:

Respect for the word is the first commandment in the discipline by which a man can be educated to maturity — intellectual, emotional and moral. Respect for the word-to employ it with scrupulous care and an incorruptible heartfelt love of truth-is essential if there is to be any growth in a society or in the human race. To misuse the word is to show contempt for man. It undermines the bridges and poisons the wells. It causes Man to regress down the long path of his evolution.

New at IWP Books: G. K. Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles, 1909.

Before any modern man talks with authority about loving men, I insist (I insist with violence) that he shall always be very much pleased when his barber tries to talk to him. His barber is humanity: let him love that. If he is not pleased at this, I will not accept any substitute in the way of interest in the Congo or the future of Japan. If a man cannot love his barber whom he has seen, how shall he love the Japanese whom he has not seen?

New at IWP Books: Don Marquis, Chapters for the Orthodox, 1934. Which Albert Jay Nock thought was a “delightful” book.

If there’s anything I can’t stand, it’s theology. Did I ever mention publicly how Hell got started? I don’t think I ever did. It was this way: I thought I’d do something nice for a lot of theologians who had, after all, been doing the best they could, according to their lights; so I gave them an enormous tract of Heaven to do what they pleased with — set it apart for them to inhabit and administer. I didn’t pay any attention to it for a few thousand years, and when I looked at it again, they’d made it into Hell. Yes, that’s how Hell got started.”

The Christian ideas and ideals, if they were really put into practice, instead of being merely talked about, in churches and elsewhere, would burst the world asunder. Cover them up with any sort of talk or clever explication you like, attempt to explain them away if you will, the fact is that if they are really put into effect it means a revolution in every department of human life, an overturning of all our cherished institutions. Do we believe in these ideals enough to follow through with them to the limit, to face all that their sincere practice connotes?

More than 50 books published online, including works by Desmond MacCarthy, Aldous Huxley, E. M. Forster, Bernard Berenson, Leo Stein, Willa Cather, & Logan Pearsall Smith. Moreover: Two collections of Horace translations (of Ad Pyrrham and Exegi Monumentum), and several hard-to-find translations of the odes.

From An Exaltation of Larks, or The Venereal Game (1968) by James Lipton.

“Our language, one of our most precious natural resources in the English-speaking countries, is also a dwindling one that deserves at least as much protection as our woodlands, streams and whooping cranes. We don’t write letters, we make long-distance calls; we don’t read, we are talked to, in the resolutely twelve-year-old vocabulary of radio and television. Under the banner of Timesaving we are offered only the abbreviated, the abridged, the aborted. Our Noble Eightfold Path consists entirely of shortcuts. And what are we urged to do with the time saved by these means? Skim through the Reader’s Digest at eighteen hundred words a minute, eating a pre-cooked dinner of condensed soup and reconstituted meat and vegetables on a jet going six hundred miles an hour. Refreshed by our leisurely holiday we can then plunge back into the caucus-race with renewed vigor, dashing breathless behind the Dodo toward an ever-retreating finish-line. Before it is too late I would like to propose a language sanctuary, a wild-word refuge, removed and safe from the hostile environment of our TV-tabloid world.

“Perhaps it is already too late. Under the influence of film and television especially (both valuable but intensely pictorial arts) the picture is finally replacing those maligned thousand words. Soon, if all goes badly, we may be reduced to a basic vocabulary of a few hundred smooth, homogenized syllables, and carry tiny movie projectors and bandoliers of miniaturized film cartridges to project our more important thoughts (too precious to entrust to mere words) in the proper pictorial form on the shirtfront of our conversational partner. Eventually we may be able to press a button on our belt and produce an instantaneous, abstract, psychedelic, atonal, aleatory light-show that will penetrate straight to the beholder’s chromosomes, influencing not only him or her, but logophobic generations yet unborn. Wordless, we will build the new Jerusalem!”

Worth subscribing to The New Criterion for these, and many others by Epstein:

• Desmond MacCarthy’s Familiar Criticism (1991)
• Willa Cather: Listing Toward Lesbos (1983)
• Selling Henry James (1990)
• The James Cult (2012)
• Maurice Baring & The Good High-brow (1992)
• George Santayana and the Consolations of Philosophy (1987)
• Max Beerbohm and the Law of Levity (1985)

Another Willa Cather at IWP Books: A Lost Lady, 1922.

The winter before, when the Forresters were away, and one dull day dragged after another, he had come upon a copious diversion, an almost inexhaustible resource. The high, narrow bookcase in the back office, between the double doors and the wall, was filled from top to bottom with rows of solemn looking volumes bound in dark cloth, which were kept apart from the law library; an almost complete set of the Bohn classics, which Judge Pommeroy had bought long ago when he was a student at the University of Virginia. He had brought them West with him, not because he read them a great deal, but because, in his day, a gentleman had such books in his library, just as he had claret in his cellar. Among them was a set of Byron in three volumes, and last winter, apropos of a quotation which Niel didn’t recognize, his uncle advised him to read Byron, — all except “Don Juan.” That, the Judge remarked, with a deep smile, he “could save until later.” Niel, of course, began with “Don Juan.” Then he read “Tom Jones” and “Wilhelm Meister” and raced on until he came to Montaigne and a complete translation of Ovid. He hadn’t finished yet with these last, — always went back to them after other experiments. These authors seemed to him to know their business. Even in “Don Juan” there was a little “fooling,” but with these gentlemen none.

There were philosophical works in the collection, but he did no more than open and glance at them. He had no curiosity about what men had thought; but about what they had felt and lived, he had a great deal. If anyone had told him that these were classics and represented the wisdom of the ages, he would doubtless have let them alone. But ever since he had first found them for himself, he had been living a double life, with all its guilty enjoyments. He read the Heroides over and over, and felt that they were the most glowing love stories ever told. He did not think of these books as something invented to beguile the idle hour, but as living creatures, caught in the very behaviour of living, — surprised behind their misleading severity of form and phrase. He was eavesdropping upon the past, being let into the great world that had plunged and glittered and sumptuously sinned long before little Western towns were dreamed of. Those rapt evenings beside the lamp gave him a long perspective, influenced his conception of the people about him, made him know just what he wished his own relations with these people to be.

New Willa Cather at IWP Books: The Professor’s House, 1925.

“…long after they had ceased to be pupil and master, he had been able to experience afresh things that had grown dull with use. The boy’s mind had the superabundance of heat which is always present where there is rich germination. To share his thoughts was to see old perspectives transformed by new effects of light.”

Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman by Jeremy Adelman; The Gift of Doubt by Malcolm Gladwell.

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“Previously, men could be divided simply into the learned and the ignorant, those more or less the one, and those more or less the other. But your specialist cannot be brought in under either of these two categories. He is not learned, for he is formally ignorant of all that does not enter into his speciality; but neither is he ignorant, because he is ‘a scientist,’ and ‘knows’ very well his own tiny portion of the universe. We shall have to say that he is a learned ignoramus, which is a very serious matter, as it implies that he is a person who is ignorant, not in the fashion of the ignorant man, but with the petulance of one who is learned in his own special line. And such in fact is the behavior of the specialist. In politics, in art, in social usages, in the other sciences, he will adopt the attitude of primitive, ignorant man; but he will adopt them forcefully and with self-sufficiency, and will not admit of — this is the paradox — specialists in those matters. By specializing him, civilization has made him hermetic and self-satisfied within his limitations; but this very inner feeling of dominance and worth will induce him to wish to predominate outside his speciality. The result is that even in this case, representing a maximum of qualification in man — specialization — and therefore the thing most opposed to the mass-man, the result is that he will behave in almost all spheres of life as does the unqualified, the mass-man.” (José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses)

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How Reading Josef Pieper Can Help You Stay Sane

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“…we can always do more for mankind by following the good in a straight line than we can by making concessions to evil. The illusion that it is wise or necessary to suppress our instinctive love of truth comes from an imperfect understanding of what that instinctive love of truth represents, and of what damage happens both to ourselves and to others when we suppress it. The more closely we look at the facts, the more serious does this damage appear. And on the other hand, the more closely we look at the facts, the more trifling, inconsequent, and absurd do all those reasons appear which strive to make us accept, and thereby sanctify and preserve, some portion of the conceded evil in the world.” (John Jay Chapman, Practical Agitation)