Scriptor Ignotus > Recent Status Updates

Time to get into the Christmas spirit!

The way the Lakota bullied the Arikara in the early nineteenth century is so terrible it's almost funny.

*Drinks Kool-Aid*

"A clear line ran from Nietzsche's work Beyond Good and Evil to the assertion by U.S. Supreme Court justice Anthony Kennedy, in the 1992 decision Planned Parenthood v. Casey, that liberty is 'the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.'"

Nietzsche deserved better successors.

"Never before [have] millions of people, indistinguishable from each other, using the same patterns of thinking...oblivious to any other way of viewing the political world...not only...proclaim[ed] the unchallenged superiority of pluralism, but also want[ed] to enforce the same simplistic and tediously predictable orthodoxy on the entire world as the ultimate embodiment of the idea of multiplicity."

"...But wanting to humble him, he beat him and said, 'You fool, have you brought me that silly dog?' and he immediately untied her, and drove her away."

"...and the lioness rushed at him. He obeyed the hermit and ran to catch her, so the lioness turned and fled. John chased her, shouting, "Wait! My abba told me to tie you up.' He caught her and tied her up. The hermit sat a long time waiting for him, and was getting very anxious because he was late. But at last John came, and brought the lioness with him, tied up. Paul marvelled at the sight...

"They said of John, the disciple of Paul, that he was full of the virtue of obedience. There was a tomb in which lived a dangerous lioness. Paul saw the dung of the lioness lying round and said to John, 'Go and fetch that dung.' John said to him, 'What shall I do, abba, about the lioness?' The hermit said, as a joke, 'If she comes at you, tie her up and bring her here.' So john went there in the evening...

"...where he had heard she was buried. He dug in the place, and wiped the blood from her corpse on his cloak and when he returned he kept it in his cell. When it smelt too bad, he put it in front of him and said to his temptation, 'Look, this is what you desire. You have it now, be content.' So he punished himself with the smell until his passions died down."

That's pretty metal.

"A brother was tested by temptation in Scetis. The enemy brought into his mind the memory of a beautiful woman which troubled him deeply. By God's providence it chanced that a visitor came from Egypt and arrived in Scetis. When they met to talk, he told the brother that his wife was dead (she was the woman about whom the monk was tempted). When he heard the news, he put on his cloak at night and went to the place...

"...and one of them said, 'That's mine.' The other said, 'No; it's mine.' He answered, 'Yes it's yours. Take it away." They were unable to argue with each other."

"Two hermits lived together for many years without a quarrel. One said to the other, 'Let's have a quarrel with each other, as is the way of men.' The other answered, 'I don't know how a quarrel happens.' The first said, 'Look here, I put a brick between us, and I say, That's mine. Then you say, No, it's mine. That is how you begin a quarrel.' So they put a brick between them...

"God is a mystery to all beings. God is in us, and that is why we are a mystery to our own selves."

- Fr. Thaddeus of Vitovnica

Plague reading

"Get you gone, you dwarf,
You minimus of hindering knot-grass made,
You bead, you acorn."

- Lysander roasting his ex-girlfriend for being short

Absolutely rekt

Pretty much done with this beast.

Really good so far.

"Even if we could be learned with other men's learning, at least wise we cannot be except by our own wisdom."

- Of Pedantry

The ebook is free on Verso's website, if anyone's interested.

"Nothing noble is done without risk."

- "Various Outcomes of the Same Plan"

"Habituation puts to sleep the eye of our judgment. Barbarians are no more marvelous to us than we are to them, nor for better cause...Human reason is a tincture infused in about equal strength in all our opinions and ways, whatever their form: infinite in substance, infinite in diversity."

- Of Custom...

"People are right to notice the unruly liberty of this member, obtruding so importunately when we have no use for it, and failing so importunately when we have the most use for it, and struggling for mastery so imperiously with our will, refusing with so much pride and obstinacy our solicitations, both mental and manual."

- "Of the Power of the Imagination"

'It is uncertain where death awaits us; let us await it everywhere. Premeditation of death is premeditation of freedom. He who has learned to die has unlearned how to be a slave. Knowing how to die frees us from all subjection and constraint. There is nothing evil in life for the man who has thoroughly grasped the fact that to be deprived of life is not an evil.'

-"That to Philosophize is to Learn to Die"

"...[Ayn Rand's] business boosterism was of the sort that some Americans have perennially mistaken for a philosophy...Her characters were all domineering, headstrong, the inheritors of big companies and good genes, and above all didactic, even when they were discussing cigarettes...They liked sex, which in certain circumstances could be so thrilling it resembled business management..."

Roasted.

Soon.

I WILL FINISH THIS BOOK