Nostalgia Quotes

“Charles Ryder, the successful dilettante, the antiquarian, the Bohemian poseur, is finally woven into what is a true culture. Brideshead is his home, not because he grew up there (he did not), but because it has placed him, as if he were a stone, in an ancient edifice of meaning. He is in communion with the Crusaders who fought at Acre, now in ruins, and Jerusalem, also in ruins. He is in communion with the friend of his youth, the alcoholic Sebastian, now an exile, a pilgrim, and a man with a home, half in and half out of a community of monks in North Africa, where one morning, as his sister Cordelia foretells, “after one of his drinking bouts, he’ll be picked up at the gate dying, and show by a mere flicker of the eyelid that he is conscious when they give him the last sacraments. It’s not such a bad way of getting through one’s life.”12 It beats secular exhaustion and a shot of morphine. This being home is not a sentiment. It is a felt reality, and from this day on it gives form to Charles’s life. “You’re looking unusually cheerful today,” a soldier tells him in the last line of the book.”
― Anthony Esolen, Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World

“Employing the engine of compulsory and universal education, we have turned the school into a factory for the production and propagation of political opinion, uniform and relentless. If you cannot persuade the parents, you can stamp the children, as you would stamp molten wax with the same seal, hundreds at a time.”
― Anthony Esolen, Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World

“What James Hilton wants is a monastery without monks, the good of prayer without prayer, contemplation without a God to contemplate, and, as Flannery O’Connor will put it in her uncompromising way, the Church of Christ Without Christ. It cannot be. A blandly warm affection for the good things of the past is no match for the modern progressive’s ferocious drive to obliterate them or for the “evolutionary” social theories that prey upon man like monsters of the deep.”
― Anthony Esolen, Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World

“I once angered a number of students at the university where I taught by suggesting that “multiculturalism” is a sham. There is nothing “multi” about its uniform politics, I said, and it is too rootless and shallow to be a culture. When I met with some of them, I showed them Millet’s Angelus. They grew uneasy. They did not want to concede that we were looking at what was essentially cultural. That was because they knew in their hearts that what I said about contemporary man is true: he has no home. One of them complained that I was imposing my view of culture upon them, but he had no reply when I said that my description fits every known culture until what, for want of a more accurate term, we call our own.”
― Anthony Esolen, Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World

“until what, for want of a more accurate term, we call our own.”
― Anthony Esolen, Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World

“[H]owever dim the recollection of the association may have become in men’s minds, a feast “without gods,” and unrelated to worship, is quite simply unknown. It is true that ever since the French Revolution attempts have been repeatedly made to manufacture feast days and holidays that have no connection with divine worship, or are sometimes even opposed to it: “Brutus days,” or even that hybrid, “Labor Day.” In point of fact the stress and strain of giving them some kind of festal appearance is one of the very best proofs of the significance of divine worship for a feast; and nothing illustrates so clearly that festivity is only possible where divine worship is still a vital act—and nothing shows this so clearly as a comparison between a living and deeply traditional feast day, with its roots in divine worship, and one of those rootless celebrations, carefully and unspontaneously prepared beforehand, and as artificial as a maypole.”
― Anthony Esolen, Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World

“seek to measure my works by its high standard and pass it on to my children with love. The iconoclast—the icon-smasher—is not generally a lover of mankind. Here let me add something that is hard to see when we are thinking only of selves and their survival. It is that the longing to go home, to a real culture, is also a longing not to be alone anymore.”
― Anthony Esolen, Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World

“For example, the hand-held telephone with internet connections allows us to speak easily with people far beyond the distance we can cross by shouting or waving flags or sending smoke signals. But when the use of such telephones shuts down communication with people three feet away from us, then we are talking about a tool whose use—if we do not learn to restrain ourselves—damages the very faculty that it is supposed to assist. It has become a suicide machine. Or if a student’s laptop computer prevents him from acquiring the patience and the mental silence necessary to read a good book, then it is weakening the very faculty for which, presumably, it was adopted in the first place. It too becomes a suicide machine. It will not matter that the computer can place before the student’s eyes many thousands of books he could otherwise never open. He will lack the mental habits to read them.”
― Anthony Esolen, Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World

“A dangerous enterprise, given the insufficiency of the individual man: We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages. Many of our men of speculation, instead of exploding general prejudices, employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them. If they find what they seek, and they seldom fail, they think it more wise to continue the prejudice, with the reason involved, than to cast away the coat of prejudice and to leave nothing but the naked reason . .”
― Anthony Esolen, Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World

“Pleasure is not the point. Pleasure is what he enjoys now, with Calypso. The hedonist does not go home, because it is too arduous a journey, and”
― Anthony Esolen, Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World

“We must rule out all merely sentimental reasons. Calypso’s island is more beautiful than Ithaca is. Calypso is more beautiful than is Odysseus’ wife, Penelope. Odysseus has been told that when he reaches Ithaca, he will have to deal with more than a hundred suitors for Penelope, who have descended upon his estate like an invading army. They have devoured his goods and turned his home into a banquet hall and brothel. He has no idea what kind of young man his son, Telemachus, has become. He cannot depend upon the loyalty of any single person; even his wife, who he supposes will have been true to him, is not utterly beyond suspicion. He cannot depend upon the citizens of Ithaca. Many of them will wish that he had starved on an unknown shore or been cut down in battle. The goddess Athena has told him that he will return and will succeed, but she is a crafty liar, as he himself is, and in any case, if you trust the gods, you will deserve what you get. Odysseus wants to go home because it is his home. It is as simple as that.”
― Anthony Esolen, Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World

“The progressive dreams of a city that does not exist and can never exist. He ends up building what Edward Banfield called the “Unheavenly City.” I am far from the first to make this observation. The progressive has turned original sin, which afflicts all mankind, into political error, which conveniently afflicts his opponents and not himself. To be saved, in his mind, is not to be transformed by God into newness of life. It is to vote for the right program. How gray, how small! It is to applaud the raising of New Babel, a city of what he imagines to be perfect justice, to be recognized and administered by man, man the foolish, vain, greedy, slothful, vindictive, violent, and lecherous. Miniver may look in the mirror and detest what he sees. The progressive does not own such a mirror. He does not repent of his sins. He turns to a new political candidate. The old and worn-out may then be disposed of, like Trotsky, in blood, or like the mild Hubert Humphrey, in dismissal and oblivion.”
― Anthony Esolen, Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World

“Says Cicero’s Cato: “I can think of nothing more agreeable than an old age surrounded by the activities of young people in their prime. For surely at the very least we must concede age the capacity to teach and train young men and fit them for jobs of every kind.”
― Anthony Esolen, Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World