Friday Florilegium

Part 2 of 2, for now

Two weeks ago I sent out a thematic collection of quotes that, taken together, represent for me (sometimes precisely in the tensions between them) a kind of cultural, moral, political, and Christian “program.” These weren’t pulled from an actual commonplace book, but I have sporadically attempted to keep one. Since some people seemed to like the previous post, today I’m reproducing below some of the quotes from my actual commonplace book. There’s no intended theme linking these quotes, though likely there are some connections here organically, including ones that rhyme with the earlier post.

“The business of a writer is to show others how you see the world so that they will then have two views of it, theirs and yours. We are all of us trapped on our minds. We can get out through the imaginative alchemy of reading” -Guy Davenport, The Hunter Gracchus

“Writing for magazines taught him how to shape a essay, and he never forgot Whitman’s rule that a fact accurately observed is worth any amount of opinion.” -Guy Davenport, The Hunter Gracchus

“He’s got a note in his manuscript that a vision of evil may be as effective to conversion as a vision of good” -Muriel Spark, The Girls of Slender Means

“Do you think human beings are really like bottomless wells? That we can drain ourselves endlessly without sooner or later finding our souls depleted?” -Giorgio De Maria, The Twenty Days of Turin

“We study the past for the ways it can shock as into diagnosing what is oddest, most perplexing, and yet most glorious and enduring in our own situation. The point of looking at past ideas and images is what Alexander Nagel has argued in his recent book Medieval Modern: to juxtapose past and present in order to make us more shocked by, attuned to, and curious about the fact that our own concepts and creations are very particular, very contradictory and incoherent, indeed very strange, yet they too stretch toward a kind of confidence and courage.” -Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336

“But if we consider what the work of attention is like, how continuously it goes on, and how imperceptibly it builds up structures of value around us, we will not be surprised that at crucial moments of choice most of the business of choosing is already over. This does not imply that we are not free, certainly not. But it implies that the exercise of our freedom is a small piecemeal business which goes on all the time and not a grandiose leaping about unimpeded at important moments” -Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good

“Van Breda concluded with a comparison between Husserl and Edward Pusey, one of the leading lights of the Oxford movement in nineteenth-century Britain. Leo XIII had described Pusey as a ‘bell that, while remaining outside, called believers to church’” -Edward Baring, Converts to the Real

“Richard was not aware that he was no longer reasoning, but allowing a series of overlapping images…to act as a substitute for argument” -Penelope Fitzgerald, Offshore

“The Old English name Bede records for February is Solmōnaþ, and though the etymology of this word is uncertain, one plausible interpretation is ‘mud-month’—an inevitable consequence of those spring floods. (Alternatively, Bede’s theory is that it means ‘month of cakes’, because the pagan Anglo-Saxons offered cakes to their gods in that month; there’s no other evidence to support this claim)” -Eleanor Parker, Winters in the World

“O king, the present life of man on earth seems to me, in comparison to the time which is unknown to us, is as if you were sitting at dinner with your men and counsellors in the winter time, with a good fire kindled on the hearth in the midst of the hall and all inside well warmed, while outside storms of winer rain and snow are raging. A sparrow comes swiftly flying through the hall; it enters at one door, and soon goes out through the other. During the time it is inside, the storms of winter cannot touch it; but after the briefest moment of calm weather it vanishes from your sight, quickly returning from winter into winter. In the same way, this life of men appears for a brief moment; what went before, or what will come after, we do not know at all. If, therefore, this new teaching [Christianity] offers something more certain, it seems worthy to be followed.” Bede, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People as quoted in Ibid

“I once read of a burglar who was caught because he sat down to watch television in the house he was burgling, thus adding contrary-to-reason-ness of imprudence to that of dishonesty. Because his actions were faulty in that he did not hurry away with the swag, we can say, if we like, that he should have done so. It does not follow, however, that he would have acted well if he had avoided imprudence, because no one can act well with full practical rationality in the pursuit of a bad end” -Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness

“If the sceptic does not succeed in refuting us here, but still goes on saying that he has not been shown that there is a reason for acting as a good person would act, it is no longer clear what he is asking for. To ask for a reason for acting rationally is to ask for a reason where reasons must a priori have come to an end. And if he goes on saying, ‘but why should I?’, we may query the meaning of this ‘should’. No doubt what our sceptic (especially if he be a gangster) really means to insist is that we have not been able, in anything we have said, to touch his desires; and if he is a dangerous person that may be what we shall most care about. But the fact that we might hunt around for something that has a chance of affecting his actions should not be taken as giving any support to a philosophy that takes practical reasons to encompass only reasons of that kind” -Ibid