df03f2e
|
I find I am much prouder of the victory I obtain over myself, when, in the very ardor of dispute, I make myself submit to my adversary's force of reason, than I am pleased with the victory I obtain over him through his weakness.
|
|
ardor
argument
changed-mind
dispute
force
open-mind
pleasure
pride
reason
victory
weakness
|
Michel de Montaigne |
60843b4
|
A pleasant morning. Saw my classmates Gardner, and Wheeler. Wheeler dined, spent the afternoon, and drank Tea with me. Supped at Major Gardiners, and engag'd to keep School at Bristol, provided Worcester People, at their ensuing March meeting, should change this into a moving School, not otherwise. Major Greene this Evening fell into some conversation with me about the Divinity and Satisfaction of Jesus Christ. All the Argument he advanced was, 'that a mere creature, or finite Being, could not make Satisfaction to infinite justice, for any Crimes,' and that 'these things are very mysterious.' (Thus mystery is made a convenient Cover for absurdity.) [ ]
|
|
argument
cover
divinity-of-jesus
excuse
hell
infinite
mystery
|
John Adams |
92d6b3c
|
The worst part, the part, was that Lord de Worde was never wrong. It was not a position he understood in relation to his personal geography. People who took an opposing view were insane, or dangerous, or possibly even not really people. You couldn't have an argument with Lord de Worde. Not a proper argument. An argument, from , meant to debate and discuss and persuade by reason. What you could have with William's father was a flaming row.
|
|
argument
discussion
politics
|
Terry Pratchett |
0d2ece0
|
Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher decade, and shows scant sign of recovering a critical faculty--or indeed any faculty whatever, unless it is one of induced enthusiasm for a plausible consensus President. (We shall see whether it counts as progress for the same parrots to learn a new word.) And my own cohort, the left, shared in the general dispiriting move towards apolitical, atonal postmodernism. Regarding something magnificent, like the long-overdue and still endangered South African revolution (a jagged fit in the supposedly smooth pattern of axiomatic progress), one could see that Ariadne's thread had a robust reddish tinge, and that potential citizens had not all deconstructed themselves into Xhosa, Zulu, Cape Coloured or 'Eurocentric'; had in other words resisted the sectarian lesson that the masters of apartheid tried to teach them. Elsewhere, though, it seemed all at once as if competitive solipsism was the signifier of the 'radical'; a stress on the salience not even of the individual, but of the trait, and from that atomization into the lump of the category. Surely one thing to be learned from the lapsed totalitarian system was the unwholesome relationship between the cult of the masses and the adoration of the supreme personality. Yet introspective voyaging seemed to coexist with dull group-think wherever one peered about among the formerly 'committed'. Traditionally then, or tediously as some will think, I saw no reason to discard the Orwellian standard in considering modern literature. While a sort of etiolation, tricked out as playfulness, had its way among the non-judgemental, much good work was still done by those who weighed words as if they meant what they said. Some authors, indeed, stood by their works as if they had composed them in solitude and out of conviction. Of these, an encouraging number spoke for the ironic against the literal mind; for the generously interpreted interest of all against the renewal of what Orwell termed the 'smelly little orthodoxies'--tribe and Faith, monotheist and polytheist, being most conspicuous among these new/old disfigurements. In the course of making a film about the decaffeinated hedonism of modern Los Angeles, I visited the house where Thomas Mann, in another time of torment, wrote . My German friends were filling the streets of Munich and Berlin to combat the recrudescence of the same old shit as I read: The path to this concept of enlightenment is not to be found in the pursuit of self-pity, or of self-love. Of course to be merely a political animal is to miss Mann's point; while, as ever, to be an apolitical animal is to leave fellow-citizens at the mercy of Ideolo'. For the sake of argument, then, one must never let a euphemism or a false consolation pass uncontested. The truth seldom lies, but when it does lie it lies somewhere in between.
|
|
apoliticism
argument
atheism
berlin
bought-priesthood
cape-coloureds
cold-war
communism
conviction
critical-thinking
enlightenment
euphemism
eurocentricism
faith
film
george-hw-bush
george-orwell
german-people
germany
groupthink
hedonism
humanism
individualism
irony
journalism
left-wing-politics
lies
literary-criticism
literature
los-angeles
margaret-thatcher
monotheism
munich
orthodoxy
personality-politics
politics
polytheism
populism
postmodernism
potus
progress
radical-politics
religion
right-wing-politics
ronald-reagan
russia
science
sectarianism
self-love
self-pity
socialism
solipsism
south-africa
soviet-union
thomas-mann
totalitarianism
tribalism
truth
united-states
xhosa-people
zulu-people
|
Christopher Hitchens |
35a2e9e
|
"Mandy, I hardly think this was appropriate, not after... you know... after the funeral we haven't had the money for any of your weird little games and I was hoping you'd be more mature now that Jud's gone," her father had disappointedly added. "How much'd that cake cost you?" "It's paid for," Mandy had argued, but her voice had sounded tiny in the harbour wind. "I used the cash from my summer job at Frenchy's last year and I... it was my birthday, dad!" "You can't even be normal about this one thing, can you?" her father had complained. Mandy hadn't cried, she'd only stared back knowingly, her voice shaky. "...I'm normal."
|
|
argument
birthday
brother
cake
death-of-a-sibling
depression
father
funeral
grief
loss
memory
money
mourning
normal
nostalgia
parent
sibling
|
Rebecca McNutt |