We Sin Alone

The poor human race dreams from century to century of breaking that solitude — but it's no use! The devil, who can do so many things, will never succeed in founding a Church, a Church that will put in common both the merits of hell and the sin of all. From now until the end of the world, the sinner will have to sin alone, always alone — for just as we die alone, so also do we sin alone. The devil, you see, is the friend who never stays with us to the end.

—Georges Bernanos, Monsieur Ouine (1943)

'He had better begin somewhat sooner.'

I mean this: When a carpenter is ill he asks the physician for a rough and ready cure; an emetic or a purge or a cautery or the knife,—these are his remedies. And if some one prescribes for him a course of dietetics, and tells him that he must swathe and swaddle his head, and all that sort of thing, he replies at once that he has no time to be ill, and that he sees no good in a life which is spent in nursing his disease to the neglect of his customary employment; and therefore bidding good-bye to this sort of physician, he resumes his ordinary habits, and either gets well and lives and does his business, or, if his consitution fails, he dies and has no more trouble. 

Yes, he [Glaucon] said, and a man in his condition of life ought to use the art of medicine thus far only. 

Has he not, I said, an occupation; and what profit would there be in his life if he were deprived of his occupation? 

Quite true, he said. 

But with the rich man this is otherwise; of him we do not say that he has any specially appointed work which he must perform, if he would live. 

He is generally supposed to have nothing do do. 

Then you never heard of the saying of Phocylides, that as soon as a man has a livelihood he should practise virtue? 

Nay, he said, I think that he had better begin somewhat sooner.

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

Genius

But to find no contradiction in the union of old and new, to contemplate the Ancient of days with feelings as fresh, as if they the sprang forth at his own fiat—this characterizes the minds that feel the riddle of the world, and may help to unravel it! To carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood, to combine the child's sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day for perhaps forty years has rendered familiar, this is the character and privilege of genius, and one of the marks which distinguishes genius from talent.

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1817)

'a harmony thrust on an imperfect world'

Then I thought of the dead man, and how pale his face would be, and I said into the passing floes of mist:

"I'll say to Christy when next we argue about religion: 'Christy, beauty is all there is. It's the end. It's the only perfect thing there is. It is the perfection of the moon, Christy, a harmony thrust on an imperfect world. Everything comes from it—all our beliefs and faiths—all our dreams of a perfect world hereafter. So that if there were a square moon, Christy, you'd be talking about the corners of heaven. All life! Everything! In the perfect moon!'"

—Seán O'Faoláin, Bird Alone (1936)

'all things end by becoming me'

Morning after morning, when I saw her kneel among the communicants waiting for the communion, I, who knelt behind her, wanted to stroke her ankle in her shoe. Her curls under her father's old hat became the curls of all the women in the world; her waist was the waist of a statue; she was losing her identity for me already, merged into myself. But that is the misfortune of my nature, that all things end by becoming me until now, nothing exists that is not me.

—Seán O'Faoláin, Bird Alone (1936)

In silence, I understood, and I remembered

To keep you is no gain, to kill you is no loss. Under the rules of the Organization we were reduced to this dictum. How was I to live by such words? With so many carted away on the tiniest pretense, how could any child believe she would live beyond this day, this moment? How could she hope for tomorrow? In a world of senseless death, I didn't see the purpose, couldn't grasp the meaning. If this was our collective karma, then why was I still alive? If anything, I was as guilty as those who survived and as innocent as those who died. What name then can I give to the force that carried me on? With each life taken away, a part of it passed on to me. I didn't know its name. All I could grasp was the call to remember. Remember. I lived by this word.  

After that day at the rice fields, I no longer feared guns because I no longer feared death. The brigade leader continued to threaten me. But I never answered her. Instead, silence took root in my blood. I became deaf. I became mute. I thought only of the work in front of me. Standing in the paddy, I planted the rice shoots. When eating, I could only think of eating. In sleep, I thought of nothing else. Hunger made my body frail. Many times I was punished for being too lazy. Without rice, I lived on leaves and small animals found in the mud. The tiniest I would swallow at once. Sometimes I would be punished, though I could never know when. It was futile to worry, to think of tomorrow. The life I'd once known was gone, and with it, the people. There was nothing to say, no one left for me to speak of, so I chose not to speak.  

Still, I saw. Still, I heard. In silence, I understood, and I remembered.

--Vaddey Ratner, In the Shadow of the Banyan (2012)

'Such omniscience ... would extinguish its soul'

In science greater knowledge is always and indisputably good; it is by no means so throughout all human existence. We know it from art proper, where achievement and great factual knowledge, or taste, or intelligence, are in no way essential companions; if they were, our best artists would also be our most learned academics. We can know it by reducing the matter to the absurd, and imagining that God, or some Protean visitor from outer space, were at one fell swoop to grant us all knowledge. Such omniscience would be worse than the worst natural catastrophe, for our species as a whole; would extinguish its soul, lose it all pleasure and reason for living.

—John Fowles, The Tree (1979)

Why should there not be a handle?

It is characteristic of the spirited man that he takes an expansive view of the boundary of his own stuff--he tends to act a though any material things he uses are in some sense properly his, while he is using them--and when he finds himself in public spaces that seem contrived to break the connection between his will and his environment, as though he had no hands, this brings out a certain hostility in him.  Consider the angry feeling that bubbles up in this person when, in a public bathroom he finds himself waving his hands under the faucet, trying to elicit a few seconds of water from it in a futile rain dance of guessed-at mudras.  This man would like to know :  Why should there not be a handle?  Instead he is asked to supplicate invisible powers.            

 It's true, some people fail to turn off a manual faucet. With its blanket presumption of irresponsibility, the infrared faucet does not merely respond to this fact, it installs it, giving it the status of normalcy.  There is a kind of infantilization at work, and it offends the spirited personality... 

There seems to be an ideology of freedom at the heart of consumerist material culture; a promise to disburden us of mental and bodily involvement with our own stuff so we can pursue ends we have freely chosen. Yet this disburdening gives us fewer occasions for the experience of direct responsibility. I believe the appeal of freedomism, as a marketing hook, is due to the fact it nonetheless captures something true. It points to a paradox in our experience of agency: to be master of your own stuff entails also being mastered by it.

--Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft (2009)

Metricate, American Style

This story is true. Any resemblance of the persons to fictional characters, living or dead, is coincidental.

Time: Summer 1975
Place: Chicago
Scene: Plush Lounge in Fantastic Hotel where educators at the First Annual America School Metrication Convention are meeting for a week.

Persons                    Symbol
Ms. Libby Elementri    LIB
Mr. M. Etric                MET

[...]

MET: Japan had a great effort to go metric originally in their schools, but did not have the backing of industry. It took them forty years to convert. At one time they even had three different systems going for them. England had a pretty good effort on the part of industry to metricate, but their educational program left something to be desired.

LIB: How do you see our situation

MET: I hardly even know you.

LIB: Come on, don't be funny.

MET: Well, our industries and large corporations like IBM, GM, and Ford are really leading the way, and there is this guy out in some place called Rhode Island—I think it's in New York—he's really pushing American metrication. Now it is up to our educational institutions to do what they are supposed to be expert in—educating. The whole problem is educational, no matter what sectors are involved.

LIB: What do you think our schools should do?

MET: Metricate, American style.

—John Izzi, Metrication, American Style (1974)

Miracle

The very word 'miracle' itself, and for that matter the words 'natural' and 'supernatural', are in fact symptomatic of a very different range of possible worldviews from those that were open to Galilean villagers in the first century. The evangelists use words like paradoxa, things one would not expect; dunameis, displays of power or authority; terata or semeia, signs or potents. The closest we come to 'miracle' is the single occurance of thaumasia, 'marvels', in Matthew 21:15. These words do not carry, as the English word 'miracle' has sometimes done, overtones of invasion from another world, or from outer space. They indicate, rather, that something has happened, within what we would call the 'natural' world, which is not what would have been anticipated, and which seems to provide evidence for the active presence of an authority, a power, at work, not invading the created order as an alien force, but rather enabling it to be more truly itself.

—N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (1996)