Tuesday, November 28, 2023

Samuel Ullman


"Youth is not a time of life. It is a state of mind. It is not a matter of rosy cheeks, red lips, and supple knees. It is matter of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions. It is a freshness of the deep springs of life. 

"Youth means a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity of the appetite, for adventure and the love of ease. This often exists in a person of 60 more than a person of 20. 

"Nobody grows old merely by a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.

 "Worry, fear, self-distrust bows the heart and turns the spirit back to dust. Whether 60 or 16 there is in every human beings heart the lure of wonder, the unfailing childlike appetite of what's next, and the joy of the game of living.  

"In the center of your heart and my heart there is a wireless station. So long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer, courage, and power from humanity and from the infinite, so long are you young. When aerials are down your spirit is covered with snows of cynicism and the ice of pessimism then you are grown up - even at 20. 

"But as long as your aerials are up to catch the waves of optimism there is hope that you may die young (or never die)."


 - Samuel Ullman a la Thandi, The End of the World 

Friday, November 24, 2023

Simone de Beauvoir



 Young & brilliant


“I should like this sky, this quiet water, to think themselves within me, that it might be I whom they express in flesh and bone, and I remain at a distance. But it is also by this distance that the sky and the water exist before me.”

― Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity







Friday, June 23, 2023

Love


 Let us rise up and go from out this grey
Last twilight of the gods, to find again
The lost Hesperides where love is pure.

For we have gone too far, oh much too far
Towards the darkness and the shadow of death,
Let us turn back, lest we should all be lost.

Let us go back now, though we give up all
The treasure and the vaunt we ever had,
Let us go back, the only way is love.

D. H. Lawrence

Monday, March 20, 2023

Sobornost

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Sobornost "spiritual community of many jointly-living people" is a Russian term whose usage is primarily attributed to the 19th-century Slavophile Russian writers Ivan Kireyevsky (1806-1856) and Aleksey Khomyakov (1804-1860). The term expresses the need for co-operation between people at the expense of individualism... Khomyakov believed that the Western world was progressively losing its unity because it was embracing Aristotle and his defining individualism. 

Saturday, March 18, 2023

Pierre Proudhon on being governed

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon | The Anarchist Library 

 

I am on a search to understand the factors amounting to the distress we in the West seem to be under. The existential "homelessness" as I call it in my Substack entitled Homecoming. Perhaps the manner in which we are governed has something to do with it...

 

A quote on being governed from Pierre Proudhon: 

 

"To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. 

 

"To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be place[d] under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonoured. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality."

 

A solution? Read Paul Kinsnorth's wonderful essay, The Jellyfish Tribe