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(he once noted that humor is akin to philosophy for they are both viewpoints born of a large perspective of life),
We cannot live long in that celestial realm of all genius without becoming a little finer than we were.And though we shall not find there the poignant delirium of youth,we shall know a lasting, gentle happiness, a profound delight which time cannot take from us until it takes all.
As his pupil Mencius put it: “That whereby man differs from the lower animals is little. Most people throw it away.” The greatest fortune of a people would be to keep ignorant persons from public office, and secure their wisest men to rule them.
We do not know how profound a thinker Copernicus was, except through this immeasurable influence of his work. With him modernity begins.With him secularism begins.With him reason makes its French Revolution against a faith immemorially enthroned, and man commences his long effort to rebuild with thought the shattered palace of his dreams.
But Darwin, without attacking any creed, described what he had seen. Suddenly the world turned red, and nature, which had been so fair in the autumn’s colors under the setting sun, seemed to be only a scene of slaughter and strife, in which birth was an accident, and only death a certainty.
Copernicus had reduced the earth to a speck among melting clouds; Darwin reduced man to an animal fighting for his transient mastery of the globe.
“all things are with more spirit chased than enjoyed”
The law of Tuscany required that bodies thrown up by the sea must be burnt to avoid pestilence. So Byron and Hunt and Trelawney built a pyre, and when the body was half consumed, Trelawney snatched the heart out of the flames. The widow had the heart buried near Keats in the Protestant Cemetery at Rome, under a slab bearing the simple words, Cor cordium—“heart of hearts.”
Life without music, as Nietzsche said, would be a mistake.
Read Part One of Faust,but let no historian of literature—not even the great Brandes—lure you into Part Two: it is a senile hotch-potch of nonsense worthy of Edward Lear.
Skip through Les Miserables,
Pass from England to Scandinavia and—ignoring Ibsen’s other plays’read Peer Gynt, the greatest poem since Faust
It is always easier to love the weak than the strong; the strong do not need our love, and instinctively we look for flaws in their irritating perfection; every statue is a provocation.
as we read Jean Christophe, the supreme novel of our century, we catch the feeling of the artist, as against that of the scientist—the sense not of helplessness but of creation.
Life is better than literature, friendship is sweeter than philosophy, and children reach into our hearts with a profounder music than comes from any symphony, but even so these living delights offer no derogation to the modest and secondary pleasures of our books. When life is bitter, or friendship slips away, or perhaps our children leave us for their own haunts and homes, we shall come and sit at the table with Shakespeare and Goethe, and laugh at the world with Rabelais, and see its autumn loveliness with John Keats. For these are friends who give us only their best, who never answer back,
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