iosephvs bibliothecarivs > Recent Status Updates

2/2 "We feel guilty for all that we have not yet read, but overlook how much better read we already are than Augustine or Dante, thereby ignoring that our problem lies squarely with our manner of absorption rather than with the extent of our consumption."

1/2 "We are presented with infinitely more [books & information] than we can ever assimilate and we struggle to hold on to what matters most to us.... If we lament our book-swamped age, it is because we sense that it is not by reading more, but by deepening and refreshing our understanding of a few volumes that we best develop our intelligence and our sensitivity."

2/2 "...these centres of learning have never offered the kind of guidance that churches have focused on, from a belief that academia should refrain from making any associations between cultural works and individual sorrows. It would be a shocking affront to university etiquette to ask what Tess of the Durbervilles might usefully teach us about love...."

1/2 "While it was first hoped by [Matthew] Arnold and [John Stuart] Mill and others that universities could deliver secular sermons that would tell us how to avoid bigotry and find helpful things to say when visiting ill people..."

"We have implicitly charged our higher education system with a dual and possibly contradictory mission: to teach is how to make a living and to teach is how to live. And we have left the second of these two aims recklessly vague and unattended."

"It seems clear that the origins of religious ethics lay in the pragmatic need of the earliest communities to control their members' tendencies towards violence, and to foster in them contrary habits of harmony and forgiveness. Religious codes began as cautionary precepts, which were then projected into the sky and reflected back to earth in disembodied and majestic forms."

2/2 "But this argument, while apparently atheistic in nature, owes a strange, unwarranted debt to a religious mindset - for only if we truly believed at some level that God had once existed, and that the foundations of morality were therefore in their essence supernatural, would the recognition of his present non-existence have any power to shake our moral principles."

1/2 "Much of modern moral thought has been transfixed by the idea that a collapse in belief must have irreparably damaged our capacity to build a convincing ethical framework for ourselves."

"...we tend too be imprisoned within tribal ghettos based on education, class and profession and may come to view the rest of humanity as an enemy rather than as a sympathetic collective we would aspire to join. It can be extraordinary and odd to start an impromptu conversation with an unknown person in a public space. Once we are past the age of thirty, it is even somewhat surprising to make a new friend."

2/2 "As I walked around I felt I was in a low-church Protestant Scandinavian city. I could not feel the weight of the Catholic Church, even in the churches themselves. In the airiness of the city, the lightness, it was hard to find any sense of religion at all. It was a city which had been constructed for the convenience of its citizens rather than as a way of establishing the authority of its rulers or its deities."

1/2 [In Ljubljana, Slovenia] All morning people sat at windows eating cake and drinking coffee. There was nothing magnificent in the city; everything was perfectly to scale. If it were an imaginary city, then its imagined politics would have the same respect for scale, for the citizen as pedestrian; would praise the ordinary, the small civic virtues, order and tolerance.

Visiting England (adapted from Tóibín):

If you come from the USA, a country which the Romans never bothered with, nor the Vikings, nor the Normans, there is something overwhelming and daunting about England which was conquered by the Romans, and grew under the Anglo-Saxons, and was attacked by the Vikings and Normans. It was a dream-world I had known only from books. Thus the real thing was impressive beyond belief.

"If you come from Ireland, an island which the Romans never bothered with, nor Napoleon, nor the Nazis, there is something overwhelming and daunting about cities on the Danube which were conquered by the Romans, and grew under the Holy Roman Empire, and were visited by Napoleon and saw the rise and fall of Hitler. It was a dream-world I had known only from books. Thus the real thing... [was] impressive beyond belief"

"He loathed the communist system because of Chernobyl. He had learned most of his English from the BBC World Service, and he had heard about the explosion in the hours before dawn on the radio.... In the days after the accident at Chernobyl there were no official warnings from the state, no announcements, merely rumors, and large numbers were placed in danger as a result.... He could never forgive them for this."

"Ireland and Lithuania had much in common, he said; in fact there were no two countries more similar. Both were roughly 85,000 square kilometres in size; they had more or less the same population.... Both countries grew potatoes and manufactured linen; both had a huge diaspora, which arose from terrible poverty in the 19th century; both had big powerful neighbors. And then there was Catholicism...."

2/2 "The Soviets, he said, decided to attack the radio and television building, and there were fourteen killed in the battle, but they were clumsy and arrogant and did not know that there was a second TV station. In a couple of hours the Lithuanians, with the help of the Finns, had found a connection with another satellite and all the world saw the Soviet tanks in Vilnius."

1/2 "He was thinking aloud, his eyes flashing when he recalled the early days of the resistance. They used strikes, and organized food lines. They spoke about separation from the Soviet Union on the newly liberalized television station. They were aware that Gorbachev planned to smash independence with military force but believed they could defeat him with moral force...."

2/2 "But there was something different about this scene. Something was missing. There was nothing for sale. Once I was outside the hotel I could buy nothing....The Poles seemed happy enough idling up and down the pier without the flush and excitement of exercising their purchasing power. They seemed mild and easy-going, as we all would, perhaps, in a world where there was nothing for sale."

1/2 "To the side of the hotel was a long pier, and all afternoon families walked up and down here. In the bright stillness of the early afternoon the waves broke in small curls without much energy. It could have been Easter Sunday in any seaside town in the north of Europe."

'We need a whole new way of thinking.... We must stop competing with each other, we need to cooperate and work together and share the resources of the planet in a fair way. We need to start living within the planetary boundaries, focus on equity and take a few steps back for the sake of all living species.'

"The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals."

"Most of us still have a lingering belief that every choice, even every political choice, is between good and evil, and that if a thing is necessary it is also right. We should, I think, get rid of this belief, which belongs in the nursery. In politics one can never do more than decide which of two evils is the lesser...."

"The distinction that really matters is not between violence and non-violence, but between having and not having the appetite for power."

"It is a great thing to die in your own bed, though it is better still to die in your boots."