'The current generation now sees everything clearly'

There have been many errors in the world which, it would seem, even a child would not make now. What crooked, blind, narrow, impassable, far-straying paths mankind has chosen, striving to attain eternal truth, while a whole straight road lay open before it, like the road leading to a magnificent dwelling meant for a king’s mansions! Broader and more splendid than all the other roads it is, lit by the sun and illumined all night by lamps, yet people have flowed past it in the blind darkness. So many times already, though guided by a sense come down from heaven, they have managed to waver and go astray, have managed in broad daylight to get again into an impassable wilderness, have managed again to blow a blinding fog into each other’s eyes, and, dragging themselves after marsh-lights, have managed finally to reach the abyss, only to ask one another in horror: where is the way out, where is the path? The current generation now sees everything clearly, it marvels at the errors, it laughs at the folly of its ancestors, not seeing that this chronicle is all overscored by divine fire, that every letter of it cries out, that from everywhere the piercing finger is pointed at it, at this current generation; but the current generation laughs and presumptuously, proudly begins a series of new errors, at which their descendants will also laugh afterwards.

—Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls (1842, trans. 1996 Pevear and Volokhonsky)

Dancing and Thinking

Learning to think: our schools no longer have any idea what this means. Even in our universities, even among students of philosophy themselves, the theory, the practice, the vocation of logic is beginning to die out. Read German books: no longer the remotest recollection that a technique, a plan of instruction, a will to mastery is required for thinking — that thinking has to be learned in the way dancing has to be learned, as a form of dancing. . . . Who among Germans still knows from experience that subtle thrill which the possession of intellectual light feet communicates to all the muscles! — A stiffly awkward air in intellectual matters, a clumsy hand in grasping — this is in so great a degree German that foreigners take it for the German nature in general. The German has no fingers for nuances. . . . dancing in any form cannot be divorced from a noble education, being able to dance with the feet, with concepts, with words: do I still have to say that one has to be able to dance with the pen — that writing has to be learned?

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (1888; trans. R. J. Hollingdale, 1968)

'All of them are different, like the fingers on a hand.'

[Pope] Francis has frequently used his public audience in St. Peter's Square as a venue to focus on the importance of the family.

In his talk, Francis repeatedly praised children as "the joy of family and society" and the key to humanity's future. As he often does, he departed from his prepared text to speak off the cuff, at one point noting that he was one of five children growing up in Argentina, and that when his mother was asked which was her favorite child she would compare them to her five fingers.

"If you hit this one it hurts me, if you hit that one, it hurts me," he recalled his mother saying. "All of them are mine. All of them are different, like the fingers on a hand."

—David Gibson, "Pope Francis: Opting not to have children a 'selfish choice,'" Religious News Service, February 11, 2015

'when but a finger of one of us is hurt'

And is not that the best-ordered State in which the greatest number of persons apply the terms 'mine' and 'not mine' in the same way to the same thing?

Quite true. 

Or that again which most nearly approaches to the condition of the individual—as in the body, when but a finger of one of us is hurt, the whole frame, drawn towards the soul as a centre and forming one kingdom under the ruling power therein, feels the hurt and sympathizes all together with the part affected, and we say that the man has a pain in his finger; and the same expression is used about any other part of the body, which has a sensation of pain at suffering or of pleasure at the alleviation of suffering.

Very true, he replied; and I agree with you that in the best-ordered State there is the nearest approach to this common feeling which you describe.

Then when any one of the citizens experiences any good or evil, the whole State will make his case their own, and will either rejoice or sorrow with him?

Yes, he said, that is what will happen in a well-ordered State.

—Plato, The Republic, Book V (360 B.C.E.; trans. B. Jowett 1894)

John Henry Newman's Personal Terror

Discovering no external assurance that history was guided by the hand of God, he looked out upon society and saw suffering, disease, squalor, misery, men falling away from Christianity and not returning, the long procession of the world, its Babel of languages, the astrologers of Chaldaea and the chariots of Egypt, and he shrank away with a sensitive horror. This bogy of skepticism was no bogy; it was his personal terror, the dead hand which scrabbled at him in the night when his faith was sleeping.

—Owen Chadwick, From Bossuet to Newman (1957)

'Music demands risk'

. . . she practiced unstintingly each day, the Beethoven, the Liszt, her beloved Chopin, and the Fantasy over which her fingers were gradually gaining control. Pianists will tell you that they practice in order to reduce the risk of catastrophe, but they know that to play with complete safety is an insult to their art. Music demands risk, a condition that Anna seems to have embraced with near-manic devotion, as if by engaging the demons inherent in her art she might destroy all claims they might have on her.

—Ben Fountain, "Fantasy for Eleven Fingers," Brief Encounters with Che Guevara (2006)

The resistance of matter.

He didn’t have two cents’ worth of patience, his thoughts moved too fast and too far, they were too intense, too deep . . . The resistance of matter gave him an epileptic fit . . . The result was wreckage . . . He could tackle a problem in theory . . . But when it came to practice, all he could do on his own was swing dumbbells in the back room . . . or on Sunday climb into the basket and shout “Let her go” . . . and roll up in a ball to land when he was through . . . Whenever he tried to do any tinkering with his own fingers, it ended in disaster. He couldn’t move anything without dropping it or upsetting it . . . or getting it in his eye . . . You can’t be an expert at everything . . . You’ve got to resign yourself . . .

—Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Death on the Installment Plan (1933) (trans. Ralph Manheim 1966)

'planning to be such an important finger'

"Well," Amory considered, "I'm not sure that the war itself had any great effect on you or me—but it certainly ruined the old backgrounds, sort of killed individualism out of our generation."

Tom looked up in surprise.

"Yes it did," insisted Amory. "I'm not sure it didn't kill it out of the whole world. Oh Lord, what a pleasure it used to be to dream I might be a really great dictator or writer or religious or political leader—and now even a Leonardo da Vinci or Lorenzo de Medici couldn't be a real old-fashioned bolt in the world. Life is too huge and complex. The world is so overgrown that it can't lift its own fingers, and I was planning to be such an important finger—"

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise (1920)

'Don't forget the fingers.'

[Ellen Burka] also choreographed part of the long program that helped Dorothy Hamill win the 1976 Olympics, as well as her short program. 

"Don't forget the fingers," Hamill remembers Burka telling her in her autobiography, On and Off the Ice. "The hands. The arms. Feel the music in every part of you. Let it flow out of your fingers."

—Beverly Smith, Talking Figure Skating: Behind the Scenes in the World's Most Glamorous Sport (1997)

'three fingers...or the traditional two'

Devout Russians considered crucial such matters as how many hallelujahs were to be shouted at various points in the service, how many consecrated loaves were to be at the offertory or on the altar, the spelling of Jesus' name (from Isus to Iisus) and, most notably, whether, in making the sign of the cross, one extended the newly decreed three fingers (symbolizing the Trinity) or the traditional two fingers (symbolizing the dual nature of Christ). If one was convinced that the world was only a preparation for paradise or the inferno, and that personal salvation depended on the punctilious observance of church ritual, then crossing oneself with two fingers instead of three could make the difference between spending eternity in heaven or in hellfire.

—Robert K. Massie, Peter the Great: His Life and World (1980)

the reason for hands

...yet nature added [hands] to our body preeminently for the sake of reason. For if man were destitute of hands, the various parts of his face would certainly have been arranged like those of the quadrupeds, to suit the purpose of his feeding: so that its form would have been lengthened out and pointed towards the nostrils, and his lips would have projected from his mouth, lumpy, and stiff, and thick, fitted for taking up the grass, and his tongue would either have lain between his teeth, of a kind to match his lips, fleshy, and hard, and rough, assisting his teeth to deal with what came under his grinder, or it would have been moist and hanging out at the side like that of dogs and other carnivorous beasts, projecting through the gaps in his jagged row of teeth. If, then, our body had no hands, how could articulate sound have been implanted in it, seeing that the form of the parts of the mouth would not have had the configuration proper for the use of speech, so that man must of necessity have either bleated, or "baaed," or barked, or neighed, or bellowed like oxen or asses, or uttered some bestial sound? But now, as the hand is made part of the body, the mouth is at leisure for the service of the reason. Thus the hands are shown to be the property of the rational nature, the Creator having thus devised by their means a special advantage for reason.

—St. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Making of Man (379)

'two fingers on one hand'

'So you don't want me for a husband?'

The girl eyed him hard, and said: 'No.'

'For your lover?' Gringoire went on.

She pouted and answered: 'No.'

'For your friend?' Gringoire perservered.

Again she eyed him hard, and after a moment's thought, she said: 'Perhaps.'

This 'perhaps', so dear to philosophers, emboldened Gringoire.

'Do you know what friendship is?' he asked.

'Yes,' answered the gypsy. 'It's being brother and sister, two souls which touch without merging, two fingers on one hand.'

'And love?' Gringoire continued.

'Oh, love!' she said, and her voice trembled and her eye shone. 'That's being two and only one. A man and a woman who merge into an angel. That is heaven.'

—Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame of Paris (1831) (trans. John Sturrock 1978)

I am not ashamed...

I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed at myself for having at one time been ashamed. About eighty-five years ago they were told they were free, united with others of our country in everything pertaining to the common good, and, in everything social, separate like the fingers of the hand. And they believed it. They exulted in it. They stayed in their place, worked hard, and brought up my father to do the same.

—Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)

It is one of those fables...

It is one of those fables, which, out of an unknown antiquity, convey an unlooked-for wisdom, that the gods, in the beginning, divided Man into men, that he might be more helpful to himself; just as the hand was divided into fingers, the better to answer its end.

The old fable covers a doctrine ever new and sublime; that there is One Man, — present to all particular men only partially, or through one faculty; and that you must take the whole society to find the whole man. Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier. In the divided or social state, these functions are parcelled out to individuals, each of whom aims to do his stint of the joint work, whilst each other performs his. The fable implies, that the individual, to possess himself, must sometimes return from his own labor to embrace all the other laborers. But unfortunately, this original unit, this fountain of power, has been so distributed to multitudes, has been so minutely subdivided and peddled out, that it is spilled into drops, and cannot be gathered. The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters, — a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The American Scholar," An Oration Delivered to the Phi Beta Kappa Society, at Cambridge, August 31, 1837