Orwell vs. Huxley

Huxley wins. Crap.

Do Re Mi: Or, What I Learned From a Sci-Fi Book

Initially written by Paolo Diacono as a hymn to Saint John the Baptist (ca 720 - 799), the Latin words "Ut queant laxis, Resonare fibris, Mira gestorum, Famuli tuorum, Solve polluti, Labii reatum," translate to "So that Your servants may sing at the top of their voices the wonders of Your Acts, and absolve the fault from their stained lips."

1. UT - Queant Laxis
2. RE - Sonare Fibris
3. MI - Ra Gestorum
4. FA - Muli Tuorum
5. SOL - Ve Polluti
6. LA - 0 Biireatum

Using the syllables ut, re, mi, fa, sol, and la as names for the six tones, C to A, an Italian monk named Guido d'Arezzo (990-1050) created the system of Solmization, a system of using syllables, especially sol-fa like syllables, to represent the tones of the scale (known as the Guido System). Later in history 'Ut' was replaced by the more easily singable 'Do,' and another syllable, si or ti, was added at the end, giving the scale of seven syllables called do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti, which forms the present basic system of singing names for the tones of the scale. The syllable sol was later shortened to 'So,' making all of the syllables uniform in spelling and all ending with a vowel. This allowed for ease of remembering for faster learning and making it easy to do 'sight singing', or being able to instantly sing new music in tune from reproduced standardized sheet music.

Once again: thanks monks! No monks, no monasteries. No monasteries, no western culture.

On Dogmas

Every man in the street must hold a metaphysical system, and hold it firmly. The possibility is that he may have held it so firmly and so long as to have forgotten all about its existence. This latter situation is certainly possible; in fact, it is the situation of the whole modern world. The modern world is filled with men who hold dogmas so strongly that they do not even know that they are dogmas.

- G. K. Chesterton

Lewis and Children's Literature

C. S. Lewis believed in the value of childhood, and he believed that children’s innocence should be protected. But in Lewis’ Christian understanding, loss of innocence is a result of sin. It is quite possible to gain wisdom and experience without losing innocence in Lewis’ view. Most of our contemporaries, on the other hand, foolishly see loss of innocence as a prerequisite to wisdom.

Lewis also shunned the idea that we must pretend to the young that the world isn’t full of pain and death, good and evil (“On Three Ways”). His Narnia books demonstrate that understanding. They are filled with instances of children who—far from exhibiting the kind of guileless naïveté that friends and neighbors disdain as (wrongly) Christian—must make hard moral choices, often without clear knowledge of what to do and in the face of difficult consequences.

To take just one example, Digory Kirke, the hero of The Magician’s Nephew, faces a moral dilemma towards the end of the novel: obey the command of Aslan, the great Lion and creator of all of Narnia, or save his dying mother. In fact the dilemma turns out not to be one; by obeying Aslan’s command Digory does, in fact, save his mother after all, but we note that he must, and does, act without certain knowledge of the outcome. Far from being a misty-eyed celebration of the goodness of innocence, this is a real, adult depiction of temptation and moral choice. It is not naïveté to suggest that love costs dearly or that life offers no guarantees; that these ideas are fundamentally Christian is almost incidental.

Archimedes Quatrain

Jerusalem, fulcrum of our uplift,
Is not this rough plank the Cross, laid aslant Golgatha,
The lever with which the philosophers boasted
They could move the world?

- Amit Majmudar

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.

When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.

Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.

Listen to carrion -- put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.

Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.

As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go.

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

- Wendell Berry

Always Sunny But Never Hot

When the boys came home from school she told them that Dad was gone for good, dead, they wouldn't see him again, not in this life. Both boys said they already pretty much knew, and Harold asked what heaven was like. "Sandy. Lots of fun birds. Always sunny but never hot."

- Daniel Woodrell, Winter's Bone

Thinking About Writing

Blog Maintenance - Additions

Check out the new adds to the Literature list on the left. Like most things on this blog, it is still under development; but, for now - well - a man could almost fill his library and more importantly his spirit with the writings of these authors.

If you are looking for some new and good periodical reads, don't neglect to wander through the Periodicals I Read list: it has taken many years to find and rely on these. Have some fun poking through them: don't be afraid to subscribe if it fancies you as most have low introductory rates.

Getting to Know the Middle Ages

It is quite natural that the prosperous people in our time should know no history. If they did know it, they would know the highly unedifying history of how they became prosperous. It is quite natural, I say, that they should not know history: but why do they think they do? Here is a sentence taken at random from a book written by one of the most cultivated of our younger critics, very well written and most reliable on its own subject, which is a modern one. The writer says: "There was little social or political advance in the Middle Ages" until the Reformation and the Renaissance. Now I might just as well say that there was little advance in science and invention in the nineteenth century until the coming of William Morris: and then excuse myself by saying that I am not personally interested in spinning-jennies and jelly-fish - which is indeed the case. For that is all that the writer really means: he means he is not personally interested in heralds or mitred abbots. That is all right; but why, when writing about something that did not exist in the Middle Ages, should he dogmatise about a story that he has evidently never heard? Yet it might be made a very interesting story.

A little while before the Norman Conquest, countries such as our own were a dust of yet feeble feudalism, continually scattered in eddies by barbarians, barbarians who had never ridden a horse. There was hardly a brick or stone house in England. There were scarcely any roads except beaten paths: there was practically no law except local customs. Those were the Dark Ages out of which the Middle Ages came. Take the Middle Ages two hundred years after the Norman Conquest and nearly as long before the beginnings of the Reformation. The great cities have arisen; the burghers are privileged and important; Labour has been organised into free and responsible Trade Unions; the Parliaments are powerful and disputing with the princes; slavery has almost disappeared; the great Universities are open and teaching with the scheme of education that Huxley so much admired; Republics as proud and civic as the Republics of the pagans stand like marble statues along the Mediterranean; and all over the North men have built such churches as men may never build again. And this, the essential part of which was done in one century rather than two, is what the critic calls "little social or political advance." There is scarcely an important modern institution under which he lives, from the college that trained him to the Parliament that rules him, that did not make its main advance in that time.

If anyone thinks I write this out of pedantry, I hope to show him in a moment that I have a humbler and more practical object. I want to consider the nature of ignorance, and I would begin by saying that in every scholarly and academic sense I am very ignorant myself. As we say of a man like Lord Brougham that his general knowledge was great, I should say that my general ignorance was very great. But that is Just the point. It is a general knowledge and a general ignorance. I know little of history; but I know a little of most history. I don’t know much about Martin Luther and his Reformation, let us say; but I do know that it made a great deal of difference. Well, not knowing that the rapid progress of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries made a great deal of difference is quite as extraordinary as never having heard of Martin Luther. I am not very well-informed about Buddhists; but I know they are interested in philosophy. Believe me, not knowing that Buddhists are interested in philosophy is not a bit more astounding than not knowing that the mediaevals were interested in political progress or experiment. I do not know much about Frederick the Great. I was frightened in my boyhood by the row of Carlyle’s volumes on the subject: there seemed to be such an awful lot to know. But, in spite of my fears, I should have been able to guess with some sort of probability the sort of substance such volumes would contain. I should have guessed (and I believe not incorrectly) that the volumes would have contained the word "Prussia" in one or more places; that war would be touched on from time to time; that some mention might be made of treaties and boundaries; that the word "Silesia" might be found by diligent search, as well as the names of Maria Teresa and Voltaire; that somewhere in all those volumes their great author would mention whether Frederick the Great had a father, whether he was ever married, whether he had any great friends, whether he had a hobby or a literary taste of any kind, whether he died on the battle-field or on his bed, and so on and so on. If I had summoned the audacity to open one of these volumes, I should probably have found something on these general lines at least.

Now change the image; and conceive the ordinary young, well-educated Journalist or man of letters from a public school or a college when he stands in front of a still longer row of still larger books from the libraries of the Middle Ages - let us say, all the volumes of St. Thomas Aquinas. I say that in nine cases out of ten that well-educated young man does not know what he would find in those leathery volumes. He thinks he would find discussions about the powers of angels in the matter of balancing themselves on needles; and so he would. But I say he does know that he would find a schoolman discussing nearly all the things that Herbert Spencer discussed: politics, sociology, forms of government, monarchy, liberty, anarchy, property, communism, and all the varied notions that are in our time fighting for the time of "Socialism." Or, again, I do not know much about Mohammed or Mohammedanism. I do not take the Koran to bed with me every night. But, if I did on some one particular night, there is one sense at least in which I know what I should not find there. I apprehend that I should not find the work abounding in strong encouragements to the worship of idols; that the praises of polytheism would not be loudly sung; that the character of Mohammed would not be subjected to anything resembling hatred and derision; and that the great modern doctrine of the unimportance of religion would not be needlessly emphasised. But again change the image; and fancy the modern man (the unhappy modern man) who took a volume of mediaeval theology to bed. He expect to find a pessimism that is not there, a fatalism that is not there, a love of the barbaric that is not there, a contempt for reason that is not there. Let him try the experiment. It will do one of two good things: send him to sleep - or wake him up.

- G. K. Chesterton

The State of American Literature Studies

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

A classic.