The source of the word "humorist" is one who regards human beings in terms of their humors — you know, whether they're sanguine or full of yellow bile, or whatever the four classical humors are. You stand back from people and regard them as types. And one finds, especially by the time one reaches one's fifties, that there are a limited number of types of people in the world, and you went to high school with every single one of them. You can visit the Eskimos, you can visit the Bushmen in the Kalahari, you can go to Israel, you can go to Egypt, but everybody you meet is going to be somebody you went to high school with. Source > Atlantic Unbound, August 8, 2002 (310 reads)
This lack of a sense of history has allowed us a kind of romance with race and ethnicity that is fanciful. I did a documentary some years ago about America and teenagers and the past and all these kids who were announcing themselves as wanting to recover their history, as though it was some reassurance, when everything I've ever read about American history is an embarrassment. It's filled with tragedies of all kinds. The notion that we would study history in order to feel better about ourselves is just ludicrous. But we have this romantic sense because we know it so little, our past really seems noble. I don't look to Aztec Mexico for any reassurance about my identity. I'm aware that Aztec Mexico was a decadent society; its bloodlust was so extreme that its ultimate sexual energy was its pursuit of death. There's nothing in that history for me that leads me to the romantic calendars that you see in Mexican restaurants with the Aztec, almost naked with the feathers coming out of his head, and the Aztec princess at his knees. Nothing of that is convincing to me. History is a terrible, terrible burden which we need to confront, but I don't think the search for authenticity begins there. Source > "The Browning of America", an Interview with Richard Rodriquez, (Salon.com) (378 reads)
Noting that we're all human beings can be worthwhile, but it can also be a verbal white flag for abject moral surrender. Put another way: All the great political and moral conflicts have been between human beings. To date, civilization's greatest battles — rhetorical or otherwise — have not been with Styrofoam, dog hair, gerbils, or toe jam. Nazis are human beings. Murderers and pedophiles are human beings. To say that humanity somehow exonerates rather than confers accountability is to say that humanity is in fact meaningless. Joe Blow killed a child? Well, he's just a human being — cut him some slack. Sure, Jack the Ripper was a rough chap, but he was a carbon-based life form. Source > Biology & Ideology: Do the Muslims love their children, too?, National Review, March 18, 2002 (458 reads)
Winning the race to happiness is problematic, but so is knowing where to start and finish and which direction to run. Philosophy is no help. "Very little is needed to make a happy life," said Marcus Aurelius. Tell it to the kids on a rainy day, Marco, when the DVD player is on the fritz, the Game Boy is out of batteries, and the SUV won't start. "Happiness is activity in accordance with excellence," said Aristotle, who must have been a better golfer than I am. The Epicureans would be expected to know something about pursuing happiness. Epicurus said, "Pleasure is the beginning and the end of living happily." I'll get the gin, you find some olives and vermouth. But then Epicurus went on to say, "It is impossible to live pleasurably without living wisely, well, and justly." Fine, for people who pursue their happiness by eating oat bran, reading St. Peter's Epistles, and not ducking out of jury duty. Solon of Athens declared, "Until he is dead, do not yet call a man happy." And then what do you call him? Source > "Life, Liberty, and Whoop-de-do", in Forbes ASAP, Winter 2001, "Big Issue Number Six: The Pursuit of Happiness" (367 reads)
Happiness isn't impossible to describe. But, paradoxically, no one can listen to descriptions of happiness for long. Compare Dante's Inferno with Dante's Paradiso. Dante's beloved Beatrice would have died of boredom if he had tried reading to her from Paradiso rough drafts. On a less exalted plane, let any huggy-lovey couple show you their honeymoon slides. Source > "Life, Liberty, and Whoop-de-do", in Forbes ASAP, Winter 2001, "Big Issue Number Six: The Pursuit of Happiness" (372 reads)
Nature provides no moral messages for our complex and confusing lives. But this evolutionary argument for construing the "essence" of humanity as the sum total of our variation within the discrete boundaries of our species does provide an important insight into what might be called the biological meaning of human equality. If all living humans form one distinct historical entity, not a set of stages in a continuum leading backward into our evolutionary ancestry, then we cannot order our variation into any ranking of worth based on "higher" or "lower" stages.
if we accept this common argument of natural historians, and insist that the "essence" of humanity can be defined only by the overt variation among the more than 6 billion human beings on earth, then how can we characterize ourselves at all in a world of evolutionary continuity? If we descended smoothly from the apelike common ancestor of humans and chimps, then how can humanity achieve any clear definition? Doesn't all life form a single glop of continuity, extending all the way back to primordial bacteria?Darwin answered this false problem in a wonderfully simple way in his epochal book, On the Origin of Species, published in 1859. He admitted that if species never died, all life would form an unbroken continuum without natural boundaries to define categories and entities. But the vast majority of the species that have inhabited the earth have become extinct.
Chimps and humans evolved as separate lineages, each with unbroken continuity from a common ancestor that lived some 6 million to 8 million years ago. If all these intermediary forms still lived, the earth would house a complete continuum stretching back from these two terminal points to the common ancestor?¢‚Ǩ‚Äùand true distinctions would become impossible. But, in fact, all the intermediary forms died out long ago?¢‚Ǩ‚Äùand only chimps and humans remain as two unambiguously distinct species with no confusing intermediates living between our end points. Source > "Only Human", in Forbes ASAP, October 2, 2000. (358 reads)
Because I believe in original sin, because I know that I'm capable of craving a cold beer in a village of starving kids, because I know that selfishness vies for space in our hearts with compassion, I believe we need government. A government that forces us to care about the common good even when we don't feel like it, a government that helps channel our better instincts and check our bad ones. I don't think government is good, just necessary. Source > All Too Human (Back Bay Books: 2000) (480 reads)
[W]e can take comfort from the things that have survived for 2,000 years and are likely still to be around when another thousand have passed: wine and song; dogs and ball games; parties and horoscopes; sandals and earrings; the Greek and Latin classics; lovely young ladies and obnoxious aunts; courage and hope and fear of death; the love of parents for their children. Source > "What Can We Reasonably Hope For? A Millennium Symposium", First Things 99 (Januray 2000): 14-16 (335 reads)
Is not the desire of the everlasting hills that they be saved from their everlastingness, that something new happen, that the everlasting cycle of human cruelty, of man's inhumanity to man, be brought to an end? Source > Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus (Anchor Books, 1999), p. 8. (355 reads)
Window down, transmission in neutral, he was gliding along, exhausted, under stars and sinking moon, driving at swimming speed, otter speed, watching the same moon-silvered riffles and silent glides she'd navigated moments before. And when he pictured again the way she'd watched him -- one small, rounded ear up, listening to his babble, the other ear down, listening to the world beneath the asphalt, crushed and alive, two worlds at once -- it touched something in him, unlocked something, and he felt himself fall through a kind of false bottom, felt he was driving now, down, into a vast, dark pool. A pool of sorrows, it seemed at first. And not just his own, not just crushed otters and lost Tashas. The stuff of small and large losses, and of recent and ancient ones -- poxed kakiutl and napalmed Asians, leveled cities and leveled minds, lost tribes and understandings, broken bridges between worlds -- it was all somehow suspended here. Immense sadness on all sides, yet immense depth -- there was room down here for all of it. And in his exhaustion he didn't panic, didn't try to escape, didn't close his mind around any one hurt. He just kept easing the Olds down through it all, thrashing on a gurney, Natasha laughing in a cloudburst, the one good paw scrabbling at the road. No matter how much he saw, more kept coming. Sorrows were endless; he'd always known this. But so, he discovers as he kept sinking and sinking, was the spaciousness of this great black pool. Source > The Brothers K (Bantam Books: July 1996), p. 529. (408 reads)
To describe in words makes the kingdom sound stark and empty, like the scrub desert of eastern Washington or something. But this is only because words can't explain the feeling that everything had. The fullness of things only made you notice this feeling more. The air, for instance smelled something like sea air, but whereas sea air makes you hungry, kingdom air made you full, and it wasn't a fullness like when you're stuffed from overeating: it was more like foodless fullness you get at the end of a really good movie. Like when the Captured Girl is about to be killed because she won't tell The Secret, and she takes a last look at the hills with tears in her huge brown eyes, and here comes The Hero you thought was dead, riding down out of nowhere with his sword flashing or gun blazing, making hamburger out of Evil while the music surges through you and the goose bumps shoot up and down you. That sort of fullness. Like I said, I can't explain it. Source > The Brothers K (Bantam Books: July 1996), p. 81. (436 reads)
This is the self-image of humanity: ...the sad clowns of Picasso — the frenzied monsters of his middle period — the defeated heroes and heroines of Hemingway and Sartre and Faulkner — the cosmic butcher shop (Whoa!) of Bacon — the homicidal nightmare of such arch-typical films as 'Dead End' and 'Bonnie and Clyde' and 'Chinatown' — the bums and thugs and the endless succession of self-pitying and easily-defeated rebels in virtually all the novels and plays and films that claim to be naturalistic... the apotheosis finally achieved by Beckett: man and woman in garbage cans along with the rest of the rubbish. Source > New Inquisition (New Falcon Publications: December 1994) (351 reads)
If a thing makes no difference, it is a waste of time to think about it. We should begin, then, with the question, What difference does Heaven make to earth, to now, to our lives? Only the difference between hope and despair in the end, between two totally different visions of life, between "chance or the dance." At death we find out which vision is true: does it all go down the drain in the end, or are all the loose threads finally tied together into a gloriously perfect tapestry? Do the tangled paths through the forest of life lead to the golden castle or over the cliff and into the abyss? Is death a door or a hole? Source > Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Heaven (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982), 3. (398 reads)
The first is itself the memory of a memory. As I stood beside a flowering currant bush on a summer day there suddenly arose in me without warning, and as if from a depth not of years but of centuries, the memory of that earlier morning at the Old House when my brother had brought his toy garden into the nursery. It is difficult to find words strong enough for the sensation which came over me; Milton's "enormous bliss" of Eden (giving the full, ancient meaning to "enormous") comes somewhere near it. It was a sensation, of course, of desire, but desire for what? Not, certainly, for a biscuit tin filled with moss, nor even (though that came into it) for my own past... And before I knew what I desired, the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased. It had taken only a moment of time; and in a certain sense everything else that had ever happened to me was insignificant in comparison. Source > Surprised by Joy (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: 1955), 16. (370 reads)
Jenkins seemed to be able to enjoy everything, even ugliness. I learned from him that we should attempt a total surrender to whatever atmosphere was offering itself at the moment; in a squalid town, seek out those very places where its squalor rose to grimness and almost grandeur, on a dismal day to find the most dismal and dripping wood, on a windy day to seek the windiest ridge. There was not Betjemannic irony about it; only a serious, yet gleeful, determination to rub one's nose in the very quiddity of each thing, to rejoice in its being (so magnificently) what it was. Source > Surprised by Joy (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: 1955), 199. (389 reads)
No more be grieved at that which thou hast done:
Anyone with sensitivity and concern for the world can see that man is in a great dilemma. Man is able both to rise to great heights and to sink to great depths of cruelty and tragedy. Modern man is desperately struggling with the concept of man in his dilemma. Source > The God Who Is There, (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1968), p127. (356 reads)
I prefer painting people's eyes to cathedrals, for there is something in the eyes that is not in the cathedral, however solemn and imposing the latter may be?¢‚Ǩ‚Äùa human soul, be it that of a poor beggar or of a street walker, is more interesting to me. Source > The Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh L441, Written December 19, 1885 (New York Graphic Society, 1958), 2:462. (302 reads)
Did I ever tell you about a picture by Boughton, "The Pilgrim's Progress"? It is toward evening. A sandy path leads over the hills to a mountain, on the top of which is the Holy City, lit by the red sun setting behind the gray evening clouds. On the road is a pilgrim who wants to go to the city; he is already tired and asks a woman in black, who is standing by the road and whose name is "Sorrowful yet always Rejoicing": "Does the road go uphill all the way? Yes, to the very end. And will the journey take all day long? Yes, from morn till night my friend," truly, it is not a picture, but an inspiration. Source > The Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh L74, Written August 26, 1876 (New York Graphic Society, 1958), I:66. (299 reads)
