Adrian Buck’s Reviews > After Many a Summer > Status Update

"Because, after all, it doesn't really matter what politicians do; nationalism will always produce one war per generation." - in fairness to the politicians of our generation - Orbán, Trump, Johnson - they're trying their best.

"Iagos don't exist. People will do everything Iago did; but they"ll never say they're villains" - I usually use Hitler (I probably didn"t know anything of Iago when I read this), but definitely one of my moral ideas I picked up from Huxley.

"Good is a matter of moral craftsmanship. It can't be produced, except by individuals" - nice Aristotlean idea, somewhat at odds with the idea that the personality is the root of all evil that Propter has otherwise been promoting.

"No, a good satire was much more deeply truthful and, of course, much more profitable than a tragedy." - Huxley defends his early work?

"...and now that he was a Papist, as happy as a lark, working away at the precise spot where he could the maximum amount of harm to the greatest number of people." - I don't remember that Huxley specifically attacked Roman Catholicism in Grey Eminence, but he certainly has it in mind here, strange considering how Thomist Propter's philosophy seems in this novel.

"Can't you beleive in Jefferson and have your current wired in from the city?" - you can with an internet of energy.

The fact that people have a lot of virtues...doesn't prove anything about the goodness of their actions" - a spiritual utilitarianism? If Huxley is serious about this, it changes my take on Grey Eminence, his next book.

"Actual good is outside time." - kill 'em all let God sort 'em out.

"Could the intestinal flora of a carp be transferred to the gut of a mammal? And if transferable, would it achieve the same chemical and biological results?" - Huxley is bang on the money here.

180 year old carp, was that a thing in 1939, or more fiction?