Friday, July 21, 2006

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

--- T S Eliot, from The Rock, see http://www.westminster.edu/staff/brennie/wisdoms/eliot1.htm, ref from Jonathan Aronson

Tuesday, July 18, 2006

I'm an agnostic I suppose, but an Anglican agnostic, of course.

--- Poet Philip Larkin. From Philip Motion's biography, cited in David Yezzi, "A Journey From Irony to Mystery," Wall Street Journal 24 June 2006

In context from the WSJ, and another good quote:
In his biography of Larkin, Andrew Motion, England's current poet laureate,
quotes Larkin's stock reply to people curious about his faith: "I'm an agnostic
I suppose," he would say, "but an Anglican agnostic, of course."

Larkin did keep a Bible on a huge lectern in his bedroom, which he pored over when shaving. Having read it cover to cover, he pronounced it "absolute balls. Beautiful, of course. But balls."

Thursday, July 13, 2006

But the way the prophets of the twentieth century went to work was this. They took something or other that was certainly going on in their time, and then said that it would go on more and more until something extraordinary happened. And very often they added that in some odd place that extraordinary thing had happened, and that it showed the signs of the times.

[A few pages later:]

"Just as," said Dr. Pellkins, in a fine passage, "... just as when we see a pig in a litter larger than the other pigs, we know that by an unalterable law of the Inscrutable it will some day be larger than an elephant, just as we know, when we see weeds and dandelions growing more and more thickly in a garden, that they must, in spite of all our efforts, grow taller than the chimney-pots and swallow the house from sight, so we know and reverently acknowledge, that when any power in human politics has shown for any period of time any considerable activity, it will go on until it reaches to the sky."

--- G.K. Chesterton: The Napoleon of Notting Hill, 1904. Thanks to S.