“You, reading this, you’re here, alive, because your parents synced and you showed up. That’s it. Even if they planned for a child, it was still a raffle draw. A hand went in a bowl and picked you. The tree shook and a fruit fell down. If it pains you to read, then cry. It’s deeper for your mum because she probably pushed so hard her body gasped, only for your ungrateful head to come out of it.” – Eloghosa Osunde, “Good Boy”
Category: Lit & Crit
“I’m not the kind of guy who believes in hell, or in a god who imagines a lake of fire. I just can’t see it—you have a mind that’s wider than the sky and that is what you use it to picture? To me, that sounds too petty, too human, too undivine to be real. People sell all kinds of gods all the time. I know the One that moves me and it’s not the one I was raised on. To me, you can’t say you’re love, choose to roast people for eternity, and then pretend it breaks your heart. Pick a side.” – Eloghosa Osunde, “Good Boy”
“There be three kinds of unhappy men: He that hath knowledge and teacheth not ; He that teacheth and liveth not thereafter; He that knoweth not and doth not enquire to understand.” – Sir Edward Coke, Commentary on Littleton
“There is no knowledge (seemeth it at the first of never so little moment) but it will stand the diligent student in stead at one time or other.” – Sir Edward Coke, Commentary on Littleton
“Pedantry is a useless display of learning, or perhaps a display of useless learning—at any rate, the term involves the double idea of display or affectation and uselessness.” – John Marshall Gest, The Lawyer in Literature
“Now, if a man wants to have his estate properly settled, it is absolutely necessary for him to die. It is not enough for him to disappear, no matter for how long, if he neglects this simple preliminary. When he comes back unexpectedly, and makes himself generally disagreeable, his return to the scene of his former activities will disarrange the most careful administration, and even if his supposed death was mourned, his reappearance will be even more sincerely lamented.” – John Marshall Gest, The Lawyer in Literature
“That every man must work out his own damnation, is not merely a profound theological dogma and a practical rule of life, but also a fundamental canon of literary art.” – John Marshall Gest, The Lawyer in Literature
“Poets should always study law, as [Sir Walter] Scott did, but if more of them did so, there would be less poetry written.” – John Marshall Gest, The Lawyer in Literature
“The clergy live by our sins, the medical faculty by our diseases, and the law gentry by our misfortunes.” – Sir Walter Scott, Antiquary
“Law’s like laudanum, it’s much more easy to use it as a quack does, than to learn to apply it like a physician.” – Sir Walter Scott, Guy Mannering
“Women play an important role in Judges, to an extent not seen in the Bible since the early chapters of Exodus. While they barely appear in Joshua, in Judges they are present in every major narrative save that of Ehud. And the way they are painted seems to act as a moral barometer for the state of Israelite society as it was conceived of by the writers. Some female characters show strength and independence (Achsah, Deborah, Jael, and Abimelech’s killer), but others appear as the victims of violence within and beyond the patriarchal system (Jephthah’s daughter, the concubine of Gibeah, and the Benjaminite women at the end of the book—all of whom are unnamed), and even as the enemy or corrupt figures (Delilah and the Levite’s mother). These narratives do not merely reflect a patriarchal society. More often than not, they serve to set the male characters in relief, demonstrating the shortcomings of the leaders in Judges. Achsah is not shy about asserting her rights; Deborah has the self-assurance that Barak does not; Jael succeeds in the absence of her husband; Jephthah’s nameless daughter survives in cultural memory despite her early end; Delilah outsmarts the superhumanly strong Samson; and the numberless female victims in the last three chapters of the book serve to indict first a single Levite, then the tribe of Benjamin, and finally the entire people, for their crimes of abandonment, murder, rape, and abduction. If Samson and his ilk symbolize a badly faltering Israel, the female characters in the book function to sharply etch the consequences of the people’s actions.” – Everett Fox, The Early Prophets
“Ridicule is stronger than argument, caricature more powerful than a bald recital of sober facts.” – John Marshall Gest, The Lawyer in Literature
“We are not very much to blame for our bad marriages. We live amid hallucinations, and this especial trap is laid to trip up our feet with and all are tripped up first or last.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson, Conduct of Life
“When Daniel Quilp was found drowned, and the coroner’s jury found it a case of suicide, he was buried with a stake through his heart, in the centre of four lonely roads. This was a very old custom in England, but there seems to be no legal authority for it. Perhaps the place was so selected that, by the continual passage of the living, the burial-place might be trodden down and forgotten. It has been suggested that the stake was driven through the heart to keep the ghost from walking.” – John Marshall Gest, The Lawyer in Literature
“The Family is an institution that’s allowed to be bigger and more important than the people it’s meant to protect. It’s meant to be everything, to everyone, all at once: a sanctuary, a home, a source of moral authority, a replacement for social infrastructure when the state fails. The harsher and more alienating the outside world gets, the more important The Family becomes as an idea—whether or not you’re part of one. Family is meant to be a refuge from structural violence and a reason to survive it. So what do we do with the fact that family isn’t always the safest place for everyone? What happens when the home that was supposed to be a refuge turns into a trap?” – Laurie Penny, “ ‘Encanto’ is a Beautiful, Brilliant, Broken Mess.”
“Sex and drugs and violence are simple, but working through generational pain is the real grown-up shit.” – Laurie Penny, “ ‘Encanto’ is a Beautiful, Brilliant, Broken Mess.”
“Who controls the questions controls the answers. Who controls the answers controls reality.” – Luciano Floridi, “The New Grey Power”
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” – George Orwell, 1984
“Only those who have allowed their own personality (and in particular their resentment, sadism, and hunger for power) to cloud their vision will fail to grasp the plain moral facts. One such plain moral fact is that it is better to be kind than to torture. Only such people will try to evade plain epistemological and metaphysical facts through sneaky philosophical maneuvers.” – Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity
“We need to make a distinction between the claim that the world is out there and the claim that the truth is out there. To say that the world is out there, that it is not our creation, is to say, with common sense, that most things in space and time are the effects of causes that do not include human mental states. To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that human languages are human creations. Truth cannot be out there—cannot exist independently of the human mind—because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not. Only descriptions of the world can be true or false. The world on its own—unaided by these describing activities of human beings—cannot. The suggestion that truth, as well as the world, is out there is a legacy of an age in which the world was seen as the creation of a being who had a language of his own. If we cease to attempt to make sense of the idea of such a nonhuman language, we shall not be tempted to confuse the platitude that the world may cause us to be justified in believing a sentence true with the claim that the world splits itself up, on its own initiative, into sentence-shaped chunks.” – Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity
“The musical standards of popular music were originally developed by a competitive process. As one particular song scored a great success, hundreds of others sprang up imitating the successful one. The most successful hits types, and ‘ratios’ between elements were imitated, and the process culminated in the crystallization of standards. Under centralized conditions such as exist today these standards have become ‘frozen.’ That is, they have been taken over by cartelized agencies, the final results of a competitive process, and rigidly enforced upon material to be promoted. Noncompliance with the rules of the game became the basis for exclusion. The original patterns that are now standardized evolved in a more or less competitive way. Large-scale economic concentration institutionalized the standardization, and made it imperative.” – Theodor W. Adorno, “On Popular Music”
“Popular music must simultaneously meet two demands. One is for stimuli that provoke the listener’s attention. The other is for the material to fall within the category of what the musically untrained listener would call ‘natural’ music: that is, the sum total of all the conventions and material formulas in music to which he is accustomed and which he regards as the inherent, simple language of music itself, no matter how late the development might be which produced this natural language. This natural language for the American listener stems from his earliest musical experiences, the nursery rhymes, the hymns he sings in Sunday school, the little tunes he whistles on his way home from school. All these are vastly more important in the formation of musical language than his ability to distinguish the beginning of Brahms’s Third Symphony from that of his Second. Official musical culture is, to a large extent, a mere superstructure of this underlying musical language, namely, the major and minor tonalities and all the tonal relationships they imply. But these tonal relationships of the primitive musical language set barriers to whatever does not conform to them. Extravagances are tolerated only insofar as they can be recast into this so-called natural language.” – Theodor W. Adorno, “On Popular Music”
“The notion of distraction can be properly understood only within its social setting and not in self-subsistent terms of individual psychology. Distraction is bound to the present mode of production, to the rationalized and mechanized process of labor to which, directly or indirectly, masses are subject. This mode of production, which engenders fears and anxiety about unemployment, loss of income, war, has its ‘nonproductive’ correlate in entertainment; that is, relaxation which does not involve the effort of concentration at all. People want to have fun. A fully concentrated and conscious experience of art is possible only to those whose lives do not put such a strain on them that in their spare time they want relief from both boredom and effort simultaneously. The whole sphere of cheap commercial entertainment reflects this dual desire. It induces relaxation because it is patterned and pre-digested. Its being patterned and pre-digested serves within the psychological household of the masses to spare them the effort of that participation (even in listening or observation) without which there can be no receptivity to art.” – Theodor W. Adorno, “On Popular Music”
“We are, doubtless, in the main logical animals, but we are not perfectly so. Most of us, for example, are naturally more sanguine and hopeful than logic would justify. We seem to be so constituted that in the absence of any facts to go upon we are happy and selfsatisfied; so that the effect of experience is continually to contract our hopes and aspirations. Yet a lifetime of the application of this corrective does not usually eradicate our sanguine disposition. Where hope is unchecked by any experience, it is likely that our optimism is extravagant. Logicality in regard to practical matters is the most useful quality an animal can possess, and might, therefore, result from the action of natural selection; but outside of these it is probably of more advantage to the animal to have his mind filled with pleasing and encouraging visions, independently of their truth; and thus, upon unpractical subjects, natural selection might occasion a fallacious tendency of thought.” – Charles Sanders Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief”
The tribulus grows on the wall,
And cannot be brushed away.
The story of the inner chamber
Cannot be told.
What would have to be told
Would be the vilest of recitals.
The tribulus grows on the wall,
And cannot be removed.
The story of the inner chamber
Cannot be particularly related.
What might be particularly related
Would be a long story.
The tribulus grows on the wall,
And cannot be bound together.
The story of the inner chamber
Cannot be recited.
What might be recited
Would be the most disgraceful of things.
– “Ts’ëang yew ts’ze,” The She King, or, The Book of Poetry (trans. James Legge)
In the wild there is a dead antelope,
And it is wrapped up with the white grass.
There is a young lady with thoughts natural to the spring,
And a fine gentleman would lead her astray.
In the forest there are the scrubby oaks;
In the wild there is a dead deer,
And it is bound round with the white grass.
There is a young lady like a gem.
Slowly; gently, gently;
Do not move my handkerchief;
Do not make my dog bark.
– “Yay yew sze keun,” The She King, or, The Book of Poetry (trans. James Legge)
Dropping are the fruits from the plum-tree;
There are seven of them left!
For the gentlemen who seek me,
This is the fortunate time!
Dropping are the fruits from the plum-tree;
There are three of them left!
For the gentlemen who seek me,
Now is the time.
Dropt are the fruits from the plum-tree;
In my shallow basket I have collected them.
Would the gentlemen who seek me
Speak about it!
– “P ’eaou yew mei,” The She King, or, The Book of Poetry (trans. James Legge)
“The rain is what comes down from above; but when ordinances are numerous as the drops of rain, this is not the way to administer government.” – The She King, or, The Book of Poetry (trans. James Legge)
“We rise at sunrise, / We rest at sunset, / Dig wells and drink, / Till our fields and eat;— / What is the strength of the emperor to us?” – “Song of the peasants in the time of Yaou”, The She King, or, The Book of Poetry (trans. James Legge)
“There are not only true or false solutions, there are also false questions. The task of philosophy is not to provide answers or solutions, but to submit to critical analysis the questions themselves, to make us see how the very way we perceive a problem is an obstacle to its solution.” – Slavoj Žižek, “Philosophy, the ‘unknown knowns,’ and the public use of reason”