Today’s prompt from Long and Short Reviews is “Quotations That Make You Think”. But first, WWW Wednesday!

WHAT have you finished reading recently? Nerve: Adventures in the Science of Fear.

WHAT are you reading now? Multiple things, but I’m focusing on Light Eaters because it would be nice to end the first month of the year with 3 Science Survey categories finished.

WHAT are you reading next? Bloodlands is one I’ve started nosing into. It’s a history of Europe between Berlin and Moscow in the 1930s and 1940s. It’s…grim.

And now, thought-provoking quotes!

“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.” – F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms” – Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials. – Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death. And that was published in the 1980s, long before ‘memes’ were a thing.

“You have been given questions to which you cannot be given answers. You will have to live them out – perhaps a little at a time.’
“And how long is that going to take?’
“I don’t know. As long as you live, perhaps.’
“That could be a long time.’
“I will tell you a further mystery,’ he said. ‘It may take longer.” – Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.” – C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

Over time I’m becoming convinced that our most pressing concern isn’t that social media makes us feel worse about ourselves. It’s that social media makes us worse people. […] And actually, paradoxically, I think all this is a major part of the mental health crisis. This feeling that we are all becoming worse. Our loss of empathy, our lack of regard for others, our neurotic obsession with our own image—it’s taking a toll. […] The conversation can no longer just be about how bad social media is for our mental health. It has to be how bad it is for our humanity.” – Freya India, “What’s Become of Us?” Freya’s substack GIRLS is one of the few I financially support.

But when I am in an airport, that most harried image of the eternal tarmac of Hell, crowded without community, noisy without celebration, technologically sophisticated without beauty, and see people engaged in loud conversations not with one another but with a business partner in Chicago or a spouse and children far away, I see not freedom but confinement. And above them all, as if to remind us of our unhappy state, blare the everlasting televisions, telling us What Has Just Happened and What it Means, and preventing us from ever experiencing a moment not of loneliness but of solitude, not of idleness but of peace. It too is a tool of the Anticulture. For culture by its nature is conservative. It remembers, it reveres, it gives thanks, and it cherishes. A farmer tilling the land his father tilled, whistling an air from of old, in the shadow of the church where his people heard the word of God and let it take root in their hearts—that is a man of culture. He might live only fifty years, but he lives them in an expanse of centuries; indeed, under the eye of eternity. How thin and paltry our four score and ten seem by comparison! For we are imprisoned in irreverence. Our preachers are neither the birds nor the old pastor peering over Holy Writ, but the nagging, needling, desire-pricking, noisome voice of the mass educator, or of the headline, or of the television, which could never have won our attention without encouraging in us amnesia, indifference, petulance, and scorn, all destroyers of culture. – Anthony Esolen, from a First Things article that’s evidently since been removed. Need to get more diligent about copying and saving every interesting article I read….

Born in 1948, I have lived my entire life in America’s high imperial moment. During this epoch of stupendous wealth and power, we have managed to ruin our greatest cities, throw away our small towns, and impose over the countryside a joyless junk habitat which we can no longer support. Indulging in a fetish of commercialized individualism, we did away with the pubic realm, and with nothing left but private life in our private homes and private cars, we wonder what happened to the spirit of community. We created a landscape of scary places and became a nation of scary people. – Jim Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere

“The spiritual life is this,” a monastic elder from the Egyptian desert once said, “I rise and I fall. I rise and I fall”. – Judith Valente, How to Live.

“…the great paradox of morality is that the very vilest sort of fault is exactly the most easy kind. We read in books and ballads about the wild fellow who might kill a man or smoke opium, but who would never stoop to lying or cowardice or ‘anything mean’. But for actual human beings opium and slaughter have only occasional charm; the permanent human temptation is the temptation to be mean. The circle of the traitors is the lowest of the abyss, and the easiest to fall into. That is one of the ringing realities of the Bible, that it does not make its great men commit grand sins; it makes its great men (such as David and St. Peter) commit small sins and behave like sneaks.” – GK Chesterton, preface to Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations