Author: Isaac

Dec 2, 2024

“…telling the truth to ourselves and to the world is a condition of survival, the beginning of revival, and the only moral option.” Fania Oz-Salzberger, We Have to Choose

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“How rotten is the translation of Lang, Leaf & Myers. Surely Pope is better.” E. M. Forster (1903)

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Anonymity: An Enquire by E. M. Forster.

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What William Vallicella Likes About Wittgenstein

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“Unlimited gullibility is required to be able to believe that any social condition can be improved in any other way than slowly, gradually, and involuntarily.” Nicolás Gómez Dávila

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“Our progress is slow; the path leads upward at a very small angle. But let us remember that slowness of growth is what America most needs in all directions. In everything we have grown up too quickly. Today all things among us go crashing forward too quickly. We should not desire sudden changes, even for the better. Sudden changes signify short-lived events. Therefore, if we see steady improvement going forward anywhere, let us rejoice that it goes forward slowly, so that its roots may sink deep, and all nature may accommodate herself to the change. Thus will the good things become permanent. Isaiah says in a text that is too seldom quoted: ‘He that believeth shall not make haste.'” John Jay Chapman, 1915, The Negro Question

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“Tão cedo passa tudo quanto passa!
Morre tão jovem ante os deuses quanto
Morre! Tudo é tão pouco!
Nada se sabe, tudo se imagina.
Circunda-te de rosas, ama, bebe e cala.
O mais é nada.”
Ricardo Reis (Fernando Pessoa)

like squirrels in a wheelcage

Christmas Book Recommendations by Jacques Barzun (Harper’s, Dec. 1976)

Delicacy linked with power is rare in fiction at any time and today more than ever. That is why I suggest reading the novels — six of them — written a quarter-century ago by the late Anne Goodwin Winslow, a New Englander transplanted to the South and widely travelled besides. Begin with It Was Like This (1949) or A Quiet Neighborhood (1947).

Then modulate to the short study, The Harried Leisure Class (1970) by the Swedish economist and member of parliament Staffan B. Linder. He explains in his own excellent English why in proportion to our help from gadgets and machines those of us from whose calm contemplation the world might conceivably benefit are driven like squirrels in a wheelcage.

For insight into another department of our unsatisfactory existense, turn to Theodore Caplow’s definitive statement of the reasons why programs of social betterment fail of their object and waste our money. Toward Social Hope (1975) is again a small book. It combines trenchant description with brilliant historical judgments and establishes the indispensable criteria for assessing and managing social undertakings, from the war on poverty to the avoidance of war itself. Caplow, as his other works demonstrate, is unique among sociologists in being a highly cultivated mind and a superb writer — witness the chapter in Two Against One (1968)where he applies to Hamlet his understanding of human alliances.

I call him unique, because I want to claim Robert Nisbet as an historian, despite his willingness to consort with sociologists and to be known as one of them. In any event, his most recent essay, Sociology as an Art Form (1976),shows his critical and historical powers in brief compass; the reader will probably be too busy thinking to bother about classifying the author.

After those short and suggestive works, all of them philosophical in the true sense, I would urge the reading of Jonathan Goodman on The Killing of Julia Wallace (1976). He reconstructs with consummate skill the best unsolved murder of our century — best, because it is as full of clues and limiting factors as any contrived tale, because the large cast of characters (including the police and the law men) is remarkable, and because the case has aroused conflicting passions in the notable literature published about it during the last forty years. Mr. Goodman, I may say with confidence, has produced the classic account: thorough but never tedious, scholarly yet original, vivid though sober in tone — altogether satisfying as history and entertainment.

(Note: The books by Anne Goodwin Winslow are available at IWP Books).

The Sound of a Drum

“Another neighbour, a patriarchal old Englishman with a white beard, kept a great stand of bees. I remember his incessant drumming on a tin pan to marshal them when they were swarming, and myself as idly wondering who first discovered that this was the thing to do, and why the bees should fall in with it. It struck me that if the bees were as intelligent as bees are cracked up to be, instead of mobilising themselves for old man Reynolds’s benefit, they would sting him soundly and then fly off about their business. I always think of this when I see a file of soldiers, wondering why the sound of a drum does not incite them to shoot their officers, throw away their rifles, go home, and go to work. Why, instead of producing this effect which seems natural and reasonable, does it produce one which seems exactly the opposite? In the course of time I found that Virgil had remarked the fact about bees, and that in his parable called The Drum Count Tolstoy had remarked the fact about the human animal. Neither, however, had accounted for the fact. Virgil had not tried to account for it, and Count Tolstoy’s attempt was scattering and unsatisfactory.” (Albert Jay Nock, 1943, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man)

A Certain Amount of Resistance

From Albert Jay Nock, “The Triumph of the Gadget,” The American Mercury, July, 1939

During the last fifty years there has been invented almost every conceivable labor-saving device, with the consequence that the average man is in a state of utter manual incompetence. This is well-known and is often commented upon. But what is not so often observed is that these gadgets are not only labor-saving but brain-saving, thought-saving; and it seems an inescapable conclusion that a correlative mental incompetence is being induced.

A certain amount of resistance seems necessary for the proper functioning of mental and moral attributes, as it is for that of physical attributes. In any of these three departments of life, if you can get results without effort, and habitually do so, the capacity for making the effort dwindles. Whatever takes away the opportunity for effort, whatever obviates or reduces the need for making it, is therefore to some degree deleterious. It needs a bit of brains to manage a furnace-fire successfully; an automatic heater needs none; hence many householders today could not manage a furnace-fire to save their lives. It needs some brainwork to add up a column of figures; running an adding-machine needs nothing but attention; consequently there are many book-keepers and bank-clerks now who not only do not add but cannot. As we all have frequently had occasion to observe, shopkeeping now seldom requires any more strenuous mental exercise than is involved in consulting a price-list. Cooking is a great art, requiring a lot of brain-work; running the modern kitchen requires far less.

(The whole essay is available at IWP Articles. The complete series of Nock’s essays for The American Mercury can be found at IWP Books).

AJN

Essays by Albert Jay Nock at IWP Articles:

  • Artemus Ward (1924)
  • The Decline of Conversation (1928)
  • A Cultural Forecast (1928)
  • Pantagruelism (1932)
  • Artemus Ward’s America (1934)
  • Isaiah’s Job (1936)
  • Free Speech and Plain Language (1936)
  • College is No Place to Get an Education (1939)
  • ​ The Triumph of the Gadget (1939)

Nock’s complete works are available at IWP Books:.

Pascal on Eloquence

Jacques Barzun Translation (2003)

16. Eloquence is the art of saying things in such a way (1) that those to whom we speak are able to hear them without pain and with pleasure; (2) that they feel their self-interest involved, so that self-love leads them the more willingly to think over what has been said. It consists, then, in a correspondence which we try to establish, on the one hand, between the head and the heart of those to whom we speak and, on the other, between the thoughts and the expressions that we use. This presupposes that we have studied the heart of man in order to know all its workings and that we find the right arrangement of the remarks that we wish to make suitable. We must put ourselves in the place of those who are to hear us, and try out on our own heart the appeal we make in what we say, so as to see whether the one is rightly made for the other, and whether we can feel confident that the hearer will be, as it were, forced to surrender. We ought to restrict ourselves, so far as possible, to the simple and natural, and not to magnify that which is small or diminish that which is great. It is not enough that a thing be beautiful; it must be suitable to the subject and there must be in it nothing excessive or lacking.

W. F. Trotter Translation (1958)

16. Eloquence is an art of saying things in such a way — (1) that those to whom we speak may listen to them without pain and with pleasure; (2) that they feel themselves interested, so that self-love leads them more willingly to reflection upon it. It consists, then, in a correspondence which we seek to establish between the head and the heart of those to whom we speak on the one hand, and, on the other, between the thoughts and the expressions which we employ. This assumes that we have studied well the heart of man so as to know all its powers, and then to find the just proportions of the discourse which we wish to adapt to them. We must put ourselves in the place of those who are to hear us, and make trial on our own heart of the turn which we give to our discourse in order to see whether one is made for the other, and whether we can assure ourselves that the hearer will be, as it were, forced to surrender. We ought to restrict ourselves, so far as possible, to the simple and natural, and not to magnify that which is little, or belittle that which is great. It is not enough that a thing be beautiful; it must be suitable to the subject, and there must be in it nothing of excess or defect.