"When law and duty are one, united by religion, you never become fully conscious, fully aware of yourself. You are always a little less than an individual."
"The Guild navigators, gifted with limited prescience, had made the fatal decision: they’d chosen always the clear, safe course that leads ever downward into stagnation."
"The eye that looks ahead to the safe course is closed forever."
"Try looking into that place where you dare not look! You'll find me there, staring out at you!"
- Dune: Book 3
Cold Weasel
Gender : Posts : 275 Join date : 2012-05-25 Age : 39 Location : East via West
"By tradition, culture, heritage, education and outlook I am Latin and Hellenic. I thus feel perfectly comfortable with expressing what Europeans consciously or unconsciously expect from the Germanic spirit, which extends far beyond the borders of Germany. What are the 'ancient' Germanic qualities that have long contributed to shape Europe?
"Firstly, a democratic fibre--understood in the etymological sense of the term, as the situating of the will of the people above any judge's decrees, whereby it is this will that is the basis of the law and not vice-versa. Communitarian solidarity is here regarded as more important than socio-economic hierarchies. Respect for women, the keeping of one's word ('frankness'), honesty in business, punctuality, active dynamism, creative inventiveness, skill in collective organization and scientific rigor: these are all Germanic qualities.
"Yet the Germanic soul also has its drawbacks, which is why it should be tempered with the different mental dispositions of its European cousins. Take its Romantic tendency to 'go to the very end of things,' . . . so aptly identified in the early Nineteenth century. This excess can lead to both exacerbated nationalism and organized, suicidal and masochistic laxity . . . to statism as much as anarchy, suicidal militarism as much as suicidal pacifism, self-exaltation as much as self-flagellation, and complete materialism on the part of individual consumerists--homo BMW--as much as disembodied and inert spirituality.
"The fact remains that the block of Germanic populations lies at the axial centre of our continent (which is currently undergoing a difficult process of unification) and contributes to shape many vast regions. The Germanic soul permeates the most dynamic aspects of all European countries. 'Germanic,' however, means more than merely 'German.' De Gaulle's plan for European independence, the Ariane rockets, the Concorde and the Airbus are all components of a political project whose cultural essence is Roman (the will to imperial power), while also being informed by Celtic ardor and Germanic rigor and engineering skill."
---
"Two versions of revolutionary thought exist, as Lenin--following Machiavelli--had perfectly grasped. The first is the siege approach, which leads to failure. It is the strategy of the lion which ends up dying a brave death, pierced by lances. This strategy rejects all tactical alliances and temporary compromises in the name of a misleading notion of doctrinal purity. One sees oneself here as being under siege rather than as a conqueror. He leads the assault with gaudy red trousers, his moustache in the wind, only to be hacked down by enemy machine-guns.
"The second revolutionary approach is attack. The means used here are subordinate to one's end. This is the strategy of the fox which always manages to steal the hens at night. Those who adopt it are willing to sign alliances with useful idiots and turncoats, and know how to hide a sword under their toga to strike all the harder. They know how to lay ambushes and show patience and steadfastness, and to conceal their radical aims. They know how to make temporary concessions without forgetting about their genuine objectives, sustained by an iron will. They practice the art of deception which Nietzsche commended. Like good sailors, they know how to steer clear of obstacles and sail against the wind without losing sight of the harbour, their final destination.
"The former revolutionary perspective is Romantic: it stems from our Germanic and Celtic roots. The latter is Classical: it stems from our Greek and Roman roots. The former perspective cannot lead to the seizing of power; but once power has been seized, it will find its rightful place once more."
--Guillaume Faye, Archeofuturism
I like this idea of the Classical spirit as cunning; it brings to mind the metis discussed in Detienne and Vernant's Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society, which Lyssa recommended.
Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37248 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
The costs for a one-sided eroticization are high. In reality, the "darkening" of the thymotic dimension makes human behavior incomprehensible. This is a surprising result, considering this darkening could have only been reached through psychological enlightenment. Once one subscribes to this mistaken view, it becomes impossible to understand human beings in situations of tension and struggle. As usual, this failure to understand supposes the failure everywhere, just not in one's own field of vision. The moment that "symptoms" such as pride, indignation, rage, ambition, overzealous self-assertiveness, and acute readiness to fight occur, the member of the thymos-forgetting therapeutic culture retreats into a belief that the aggressive people must be victims of a neurotic complex. Therapists, according to this assumption, stand in the tradition of Christian moralists. These moralists speak of the natural disease of self-love as soon as thymotic energies begin to openly reveal themselves. Had Europeans not heard about pride— or likewise rage—from the days of the church fathers, when such impulses would have been taken as signs pointing to the abyss for those cast away? Indeed, since the time of Gregory I, pride, also known by the name of superbia, is at the top of the list of cardinal sins. Almost two centuries earlier St. Augustine had described pride as the matrix for a revolution against the divine. For the church fathers superbia signified a conscious state of not wanting as the Lord wants (an impulse whose more frequent appearance in monks or civil servants seems understandable). To claim that pride is the mother of all vices expresses the conviction that human beings have been created to obey, and every inclination that leads out of hierarchical relationships could only mean a step toward corruption.
The shift toward eroticism to explain human behavior cannot have been lead by anybody but a Jew: Freud. This shift totally neglects the masculine psychology, and more importantly stops at eros, not going further into the reason why eros, sexuality, comes about to begin with.
Death is the "problem" sex addresses, and so man is totally given over to his rejection of it, using an instinctive, automatic drive; one that oftentimes reduces reason, the higher cognitive mind, to no more than a spectator.
Thymos,, that rage, rage against the night, is not an illness a man must he healed of.
What precedes growth, reproduction, creating and procreating? Yes, self-maintenance, self-sustenance, conservation of what already exists, agon, war, struggle against what degrades, disorders, decomposes, decays, chaos measured by time.
This means that if we are to play by our own rules, we have to develop our own way of communicating our ideas. This begins by developing our own terminology. We do not use the enemy’s words, let alone negations of those words. We do not say we are “inegalitarian”; we say we celebrate difference. What are the Lefties going to say? That they are anti-difference? And if they say they are anti-difference, does not that make them totalitarian? And if they are totalitarian, WILL THEY APOLOGIZE FOR THE GULAGS? We set the rules and we put them on the back foot." [Alex Kurtagic]
wisdom
OhFortunae
Gender : Posts : 2311 Join date : 2013-10-26 Age : 30 Location : Land of Dance and Song
"A man who knows the court is a master of his gestures, of his eyes, and of his face: He is profound, impenetrable; he dissimulates bad offices, smiles at his enemies, controls his irritation, disguises his passions, belies his heart, speaks and acts against his feelings'' (Oeuvres completer [Paris: Bibliotheque de la Pleiade, 1951], 235). – Jean de La Bruyere, 1645-1696
''A woman is easily governed by any man who takes the trouble. The same man may even govern several women; he cultivates their mind and their memory, fixes and determines their religion; he even undertakes to rule their hearts. They will approve and disapprove, praise and condemn, only after having consulted his gaze and his expression. He is entrusted with their joys and sorrows, their desires, jealousies, hatreds and loves; he makes them break with their lovers; he estranges husbands and wives, and then brings about reconciliations, and takes advantage of the interregnum. He looks after their business affairs, promotes their lawsuits, and visits their judges; he provides them with his own doctor, his tradesmen, his workmen; he takes it upon himself to choose their homes and furniture, their carriage and horses. He may be seen beside them in their coaches, in the city streets and walks, as well as in their pew at a sermon and in their box at the play; he goes visiting with them; he accompanies them to the baths, to watering-places, on journeys; he has the most comfortable room in their country house. He grows old with his authority undiminished; a little wit and much time to waste enable him to preserve it; children, heirs, the daughter-in-law, the niece, the servants, all depend on him. He began by making himself respected; he ends by making himself feared. This oldest, most necessary of friends dies unwept; and ten women over whom he tyrannized inherit freedom by his death.''
''Most women have no principles; they follow their hearts, and depend for their morals on the men they love.''
Les caractères, Jean de La Bruyere
Cold Weasel
Gender : Posts : 275 Join date : 2012-05-25 Age : 39 Location : East via West
Quotes from Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men:
Sheriff Bell:
"We come here from Georgia. Our family did. Horse and wagon. I pretty much know that for a fact. I know they's a lot of things in a family history that just plain aint so. Any family. The stories gets passed on and the truth gets passed over. As the sayin goes. Which I reckon some would take as meanin that the truth cant compete. But I dont believe that. I think that when the lies are all told and forgot the truth will be there yet. It dont move about from place to place and it dont change from time to time. You cant corrupt it any more than you can salt salt. You cant corrupt it because that's what it is. It's the thing you're talkin about. I've heard it compared to the rock--maybe in the bible--and I wouldnt disagree with that. But it'll be here even when the rock is gone. I'm sure they's people would disagree with that. Quite a few, in fact. But I never could find out what any of them did believe.
"You always tried to be available for your social events and I would always go to things like cemetary cleanins of course. That was all right. The women would fix dinner on the ground and of course it was a way of campaignin but you doin somethin for folks that couldnt do it for theirselves. Well, you could be cynical about it I reckon and say that you just didnt want em comin around at night. But I think it goes deeper than that. It is community and it is respect, of course, but the dead have more claims on you than what you might want to admit or even what you might know about and them claims can be very strong indeed. Very strong indeed. You get the feelin they just don't want to turn loose. So any little thing helps, in that respect."
---
"You're askin me to believe what you say. But you're the one sayin it."
---
"I wont talk about the war neither. I was supposed to be a war hero and I lost a whole squad of men. Got decorated for it. They died and I got a medal. I dont even need to know what you think about that. There aint a day I dont remember it. Some boys I know come back they went on to school up at Austin on the GI Bill, they had hard things to say about their people. Some of em did. Called em a bunch of rednecks and all such as that. Didn't like their politics. Two generations in this country is a long time. You're talkin about the early settlers. I used to tell em that havin your wife and childred killed and scalped and gutted like fish has a tendency to make some people irritable but they didn't seem to know what I was talkin about. I think the sixties in this country sobered some of em up. I hope it did. I read in the papers here a while back some teachers come across a survey that was sent out back in the thirties to a number of schools around the country. Had this questionnaire about what was the problems with teachin in the schools. And they come across these forms, they'd been filled out and sent in from around the country answerin these questions. And the biggest problems they could name was things like talkin in class and runnin in the hallways. Chewin gum. Copyin homework. Things of that nature. So they got one of them forms that was blank and printed up a bunch of em and sent em back out to the same schools. Forty years later. Well, here come the answers back. Rape, arson, murder. Drugs. Suicide. So I think about that. Because a lot of the time ever when I say anything about how the world is going to hell in a handbasket people will just sort of smile and tell me I'm gettin old. That it's one of the symptoms. But my feelin about that is that anybody that cant tell the difference between rapin and murderin people and chewin gum has got a whole lot bigger of a problem than what I've got. Forty years is not a long time neither. Maybe the next forty of it will bring some of em out from under the ether. If it aint too late.
"Here a year or two back me and Loretta went to a conference in Corpus Christi and I got set next to this woman, she was the wife of somebody or other. And she kept talkin about the right wing this and the right wing that. I aint even sure what she meant by it. The people I know are mostly just common people. Common as dirt, as the sayin goes. I told her that and she looked at me funny. She thought I was sayin somethin bad about em, but of course that's a high compliment in my part of the world. She kept on, kept on. Finally told me, said: I dont like the way this country is headed. I want my granddaughter to be able to have an abortion. And I said well mam I don't think you got any worries about the way the country is headed. The I see it goin I dont have much doubt but what she'll be able to have an abortion. I'm going to say that not only will she be able to have an abortion, she'll be able to have you put to sleep. Which pretty much ended the conversation."
---
Llewellyn Moss:
"Things happen to you they happen. They dont ask first. They dont require your permission."
"It's not about knowin where you are. It's about thinkin you got there without takin anything with you. Your notions about startin over. Or anybody's. You dont start over. That's what it's about. Ever step you take is forever. You cant make it go away. None of it. . . . You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday dont count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it's made out of. Nothin else. You might think you could run away and change your name and I dont know what all. Start over. And then one mornin you wake up and look at the ceilin and guess who's layin there?"
Cold Weasel
Gender : Posts : 275 Join date : 2012-05-25 Age : 39 Location : East via West
Some more from Dune Messiah, the one Anfang was quoting:
Quote :
A feeling came over [Paul] that the city out there had been translated into an odd symbol for his universe. The buildings he could see had been erected on the plain where his Fremen had obliterated the Sardaukar legions. Ground once trampled by battles rang now to the rushing clamor of business.
Keeping to the balcony's outer edge, Paul strode around the corner. Now his vista was a suburb where city structures lost themselves in rocks and the blowing sand of the desert. Alia's temple dominated the foreground; green and black hangings along its two-thousand-meter sides displayed the moon symbol of Muad'dib.
A falling moon.
Paul passed a hand across his forehead and eyes. The symbol-metropolis oppressed him. He despised his own thoughts. Such vacillation in another would have aroused his anger.
He loathed his city!
Rage rooted in boredom flickered and simmered deep within him, nurtured by decisions that couldn't be avoided. He knew which path his feet must follow. He'd seen it enough times, hadn't he? Seen it! Once . . . long ago, he'd thought of himself as an inventor of government. But the invention had fallen into old patterns. It was like some hideous contrivance with plastic memory. Shape it any way you wanted, but relax for a moment, and it snapped into the ancient forms. Forces at work beyond his reach in human breasts eluded and defied him.
Paul stared out across the rooftops. What treasures of untrammeled life lay beneath those roofs? He glimpsed leaf-green places, open plantings amidst the chalk-red and gold of the roofs. Green, the gift of Muad'dib and his water. Orchards and groves lay within his view--open plantings to rival those of fabled Lebanon.
"Muad'dib spends water like a madman," Fremen said.
Paul put his hands over his eyes.
The moon fell.
He dropped his hands, stared at his metropolis with clarified vision. Buildings took on an aura of monstrous imperial barbarity. They stood enormous and bright beneath the northern sun. Colossi! Every extravagance of architecture a demented history could produce lay within his view: terraces of mesa proportion, squares as large as some cities, parks, premises, bits of cultured wilderness.
Superb artistry abutted inexplicable prodigies of dismal tastelessness. Details impressed themselves upon him: a postern out of most ancient Baghdad . . . a dome dreamed in mythical Damascus . . . an arch from the low gravity of Atar . . . harmonious elevations and queer depths. All created an effect of unrivaled magnificence.
A moon! A moon! A moon!
Frustration tangled him. He felt the pressure of mass-unconscious, that burgeoning sweep of humankind across the universe. They rushed upon him with a force like a gigantic tidal bore. He sensed the vast migrations at work in human affairs: eddies, currents, gene flows. No dams of abstinence, no seizures of impotence nor maledictions could stop it.
Muad'dib's Jihad was less than an eye-blink in this larger movement. The Bene Gesserit swimming in this tide, that corporate entity trading in genes, was trapped in the torrent as he was. Visions of a falling moon must be measured against other legends, other visions in a universe where even the seemingly eternal stars waned, flickered, died . . .
What mattered a single moon in such a universe?"
Anfang
Gender : Posts : 3989 Join date : 2013-01-23 Age : 40 Location : Castra Alpine Grug
"When you see a woman who can go nowhere without a staff of admirers, it is not so much because they think she is beautiful, it is because she has told them they are handsome." - Jean Giraudoux
"Peace is a lie, there is only passion. Through passion, I gain strength. Through strength, I gain power. Through power, I gain victory. Through victory, my chains are broken. The Force shall free me." -- Darth Bane
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
"As early as the earliest Brahmans, an extremism of abstinence came about, driven by the fantastic belief that the metabolism is but one of the illusions with which Maya, the sensuous veil maker, makes fools of humans. By expanding abstinence from food to a somatic-spiritual technique, they transformed hunger into a voluntary act of fasting; they turned a humiliating passivity into an ascetic action. The dis empowerment of hunger led directly to the emancipation from the compulsion to work. Whoever chooses abstinence exits the producing life and knows only exercises. The early cultures of beggar monks in Asia and Europe prove that for their fellow humans, the spectacle of the spirit's superiority to the minimized body was worth a sacrifice: alms were the entrance fee for the theatre of spiritual triumphs. One could say that those who made donations to the monks were falling for priestly deception, but the psychological reality was very differ ent. The ancient beggar economy belongs to the realm of the search for autonomy, even for the poorest of the poor: someone who has almost nothing, yet shares the most frugal meal with someone else, partiCipates in the ascetic victory over the law of scarcity. ...Let us note that the old workers' movement in Europe still knew something about the first rebellion against the tyranny of need. Whether starving or eating: solidarity..." [Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life]
"Like the hunger artist, the athletes have a message for the psychologically poorest and the physically weakest that is worth sharing in: the best way to escape from exhaustion is to double the load. Even someone who cannot imagine following this maxim literally should still draw inspiration from it. The theory that there is always room to go higher is one that concerns everyone."[ib.]
"Some time ago I wrote that of the two greatest dangers confronting Europe - Americanism and Communism. The first is the more insidious. " - Baron Evola
The Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation. If I were an atheist, and believed blind eternal fate, I should still believe that fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing the nations.
John makes a good point here.
But what is a civilized man? Is he not a tamed man? A broken-in man?
A defeated man?
Anfang
Gender : Posts : 3989 Join date : 2013-01-23 Age : 40 Location : Castra Alpine Grug
Then people start to believe that the map is the territory, still later, they change the map and start to believe that they changed the territory. When enough people mistake the map for the territory then changing the shared map changes the territory for them - so they believe. All references to the outside are lost and the mind is now free to roll down the path of least resistance.
Thank you for the quote.
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
"Levelling at its maximum is like the stillness of death, where one can hear one's own heartbeat, a stillness like death, into which nothing can penetrate, in which everything sinks, powerless. One person can head a rebellion, but one person cannot head this levelling process, for that would make him a leader and he would avoid being levelled. Each individual can in his little circle participate in this levelling, but it is an abstract process, and levelling is abstraction conquering individuality." [Kierkegaard, The Present Age]
"If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple." - (Luke 14:26)
Jeeessus...
perpetualburn
Gender : Posts : 955 Join date : 2013-01-04 Location : MA
"A main fact in the history of manners is the wonderful expressiveness of the human body. If it were made of glass, or of air, and the thoughts were written on steel tablets within, it could not publish more truly its meaning than now. Wise men read very sharply all your private history in your look and gait and behavior. The whole economy of nature is bent on expression. The tell–tale body is all tongues. Men are like Geneva watches with crystal faces which expose the whole movement. They carry the liquor of life flowing up and down in these beautiful bottles, and announcing to the curious how it is with them. The face and eyes reveal what the spirit is doing, how old it is, what aims it has. The eyes indicate the antiquity of the soul, or, through how many forms it has already ascended. It almost violates the proprieties, if we say above the breath here, what the confessing eyes do not hesitate to utter to every street passenger...
The eyes of men converse as much as their tongues, with the advantage, that the ocular dialect needs no dictionary, but is understood all the world over. When the eyes say one thing, and the tongue another, a practised man relies on the language of the first. If the man is off his centre, the eyes show it. You can read in the eyes of your companion, whether your argument hits him, though his tongue will not confess it. There is a look by which a man shows he is going to say a good thing, and a look when he has said it. Vain and forgotten are all the fine offers and offices of hospitality, if there is no holiday in the eye. How many furtive inclinations avowed by the eye, though dissembled by the lips! One comes away from a company, in which, it may easily happen, he has said nothing, and no important remark has been addressed to him, and yet, if in sympathy with the society, he shall not have a sense of this fact, such a stream of life has been flowing into him, and out from him, through the eyes. There are eyes, to be sure, that give no more admission into the man than blueberries. Others are liquid and deep, — wells that a man might fall into; — others are aggressive and devouring, seem to call out the police, take all too much notice, and require crowded Broadways, and the security of millions, to protect individuals against them. The military eye I meet, now darkly sparkling under clerical, now under rustic brows. ‘Tis the city of Lacedaemon; ‘tis a stack of bayonets. There are asking eyes, asserting eyes, prowling eyes; and eyes full of fate, — some of good, and some of sinister omen. The alleged power to charm down insanity, or ferocity in beasts, is a power behind the eye. It must be a victory achieved in the will, before it can be signified in the eye. ‘Tis very certain that each man carries in his eye the exact indication of his rank in the immense scale of men, and we are always learning to read it. A complete man should need no auxiliaries to his personal presence. Whoever looked on him would consent to his will, being certified that his aims were generous and universal. The reason why men do not obey us, is because they see the mud at the bottom of our eye."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
_________________ And here we always meet, at the station of our heart / Looking at each other as if we were in a dream /Seeing for the first time different eyes so supreme / That bright flames burst into vision, keeping us apart.
OhFortunae
Gender : Posts : 2311 Join date : 2013-10-26 Age : 30 Location : Land of Dance and Song
''Hierarchies are celestial. In hell all are equal.''
''In societies where everybody believes they are equal, the inevitable superiority of a few makes the rest feel like failures. Inversely, in societies where inequality is the norm, each person settles into his own distinct place, without feeling the urge, nor even conceiving the possibility, of comparing himself to others. Only a hierarchical structure is compassionate towards the mediocre and the meek.''
Revolutions are carried out in order to change the ownership of property and the names of streets.
Las revoluciones se hacen para cambiar la tenencia de los bienes y la nomenclatura de las calles.
Revoluties zijn bedoeld om het beheer over de goederen en de namen van straten te veranderen.
Falsifying the past is how the left has sought to elaborate the future.
La falsificación del pasado es la manera como la izquierda ha pretendido elaborar el futuro.
Vervalsing van het verleden is de manier waarop links geprobeerd heeft vorm te geven aan de toekomst.
Nicolás Gómez Dávila: Le Réactionnaire Authentique
''Hierarchies are celestial. In hell all are equal.''
''In societies where everybody believes they are equal, the inevitable superiority of a few makes the rest feel like failures. Inversely, in societies where inequality is the norm, each person settles into his own distinct place, without feeling the urge, nor even conceiving the possibility, of comparing himself to others. Only a hierarchical structure is compassionate towards the mediocre and the meek.''
Revolutions are carried out in order to change the ownership of property and the names of streets.
Las revoluciones se hacen para cambiar la tenencia de los bienes y la nomenclatura de las calles.
Revoluties zijn bedoeld om het beheer over de goederen en de namen van straten te veranderen.
Falsifying the past is how the left has sought to elaborate the future.
La falsificación del pasado es la manera como la izquierda ha pretendido elaborar el futuro.
Vervalsing van het verleden is de manier waarop links geprobeerd heeft vorm te geven aan de toekomst.
Nicolás Gómez Dávila: Le Réactionnaire Authentique
I disagree; a society where hierarchy is not promoted or structured will make the weak feel better as the few who are superior are outnumbered by the inferior. Sure, feelings of inferiority will still arise, but they won't be as intense as a hardcore hierarchical society where they will constantly be reminded of their inferiority. Non-egalitarian civilizations were often rather brutal to the inferior stock, relegating them to archetypal slaves. Now don't confuse this with me being pro-egalitarian as I am not. Just stating my mind. Also, why do you think weaklings are so die-hard for their liberalisms and egalitarianisms?
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
"Our Envy always lasts longer than the good Fortune of those we envy." [Rochefoucauld, Moral Maxims and Reflections, 478]
-
"Two monks were returning to the monastery in the evening. It had rained and there were puddles of water on the road sides. At one place a beautiful young woman was standing unable to walk accross because of a puddle of water. The elder of the two monks went up to a her lifted her in his alms and left her on the other side of the road, and continued his way to the monastery.
In the evening the younger monk came to the elder monk and said, "Sir, as monks, we cannot touch a woman?"
The elder monk answered "yes, brother".
Then the younger monk asks again, " but then Sir, how is that you lifted that woman on the roadside?"
The elder monk smiled at him and told him, "I left her on the other side of the road, but you are still carrying her "
"First he pointed out to me as matter of fact that there was no more striking feature of the modern and humane as compared with the ancient and barbaric world than the constantly growing tendency of the most civilized races to apotheosize womanhood. The virgin ideal had been set up by the larger part of Christendom as the object of divine honors. The age of chivalry had translated for all time the language of love into that of worship. Art had personified under the feminine form every noble and affecting ideal of the race, till now it was in the name of woman that man's better part adjured his baser in every sort of strife towards the divine. Is it alleged that it is man's passion for woman that has moved him thus in a sort to deify the sex? Passion is no teacher of reverence. Moreover, it is as the race outgrows the dominion of passion that it recognizes the worshipfulness of woman. The gross and sensual recognize in her no element of sacredness. It is the clear soul of the boy, the poet, and the seer which is most surely aware of it. Equally vain is it to seek the explanation in any general superiority of woman to man, either moral or mental. Her qualities are indeed in engaging contrast with his, but on the whole no such superiority has ever been maintained. How, then, were we to account for a phenomenon so great in its proportions that either it indicates a world-wide madness infecting the noblest nations while sparing the basest, or else must be the outcome of some profound monition of nature, which, in proportion as man's upward evolution progresses, he becomes capable of apprehending? Why this impassioned exaltation by him of his tender companion? What is the secret spring that makes her the ceaseless fountain of lofty inspiration she is to him? What is the hint of divinity in her gentle mien that brings him to his knees? Who is this goddess veiled in woman whom men instinctively reverence yet cannot name?
"The adoration of woman, which may almost be called the natural religion of the modern man, springs from his recognition, instinctive when not conscious, that she is in an express sense, as he is not, the type, the representative, and the symbol of the race from which he springs, of that immortal and mystical life in which the secret of his own is hid. She is this by virtue, not of her personal qualities, but of the mother-sex, which, overbearing in part her individuality, consecrates her to the interests of the race, and makes her the channel of those irresistible attractions by which humanity exists and men are made to serve it. As compared with woman's peculiar identification with the race, man's relation to it is an exterior one. By his constitution he is above all an individual, and that is the natural line of his development. The love of woman is the centripetal attraction which in due time brings him back from the individual tangent to blend him again with mankind. In returning to woman he returns to humanity. All that there is in man's sentiment for woman which is higher than passion and larger than personal tenderness--all, that is to say, which makes his love for her the grand passion which in noble hearts it is--is the fact that under this form his passion for the race finds expression. Mysterious ties, subtending consciousness, bind him, though seemingly separate, to the mighty life of humanity, his greater self, and these are the chords which, when 'Love took up the harp of life,'... 'passed in music out of sight.' In woman humanity is enshrined and made concrete for the homage of man. This is the mighty indwelling which causes her to suggest something more august than herself, and invests her with an impersonal majesty commanding reverence." -Edward Bellamy
_________________ And here we always meet, at the station of our heart / Looking at each other as if we were in a dream /Seeing for the first time different eyes so supreme / That bright flames burst into vision, keeping us apart.
perpetualburn
Gender : Posts : 955 Join date : 2013-01-04 Location : MA
"The foundation of a Nabeshima samurai should be in know- ing this fact; in being deeply resolved to return this blessing by being useful; in serving more and more selflessly when treated kindly by the master ; in knowing that being made a ronin or being ordered to commit seppuku are also forms of service ; and in aiming to be mindful of the clan forever, whether one is banished deep in the mountains or buried under the earth. Although it is unfitting for someone like me to say this, in dy- ing it is my hope not to become a Buddha. Rather, my will is permeated with the resolution to help manage the affairs of the province, though I be reborn as a Nabeshima samurai seven times. One needs neither vitality nor talent. In a word, it is a matter of having the will to shoulder the clan by oneself"
"There is a saying that even though one burns up a mamushi seven times, it will return each time to its original form. This is my great hope. I have always been obsessed with one idea: to be able to realize my heart’s desire, which is that, though I am born seven times, each time I will be reborn as a retainer of my clan."
-Hagakure: Book of the Samurai Yamamoto Tsunetomo
_________________ And here we always meet, at the station of our heart / Looking at each other as if we were in a dream /Seeing for the first time different eyes so supreme / That bright flames burst into vision, keeping us apart.
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
"One human life is deeper than the ocean. Strange fishes and sea-monsters and mighty plants live in the rock-bed of our spirits. The whole of human history is an undiscovered continent deep in our souls. There are dolphins, plants that dream, magic birds inside us. The sky is inside us. The earth is in us." [Ben Okri, The Famished Road]
"Plato's notion [of an original chaos] has puzzled critics who are obsessed with the Semitic theory of a wholly transcendent God creating out of nothing an accidental universe. Newton held the Semitic theory. [His] Scholium made no provision for the evolution of matter – very naturally, since the topic lay outside its scope. The result has been that the non-evolution of matter has been a tacit presupposition throughout modern thought." [A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality]
"Error is the mark of the higher organisms, and is the schoolmaster by whose agency there is upward evolution. For example, the evolutionary use of intelligence is that it enables the individual to profit by error without being slaughtered by it." [A.N.Whitehead, Process and Reality]
"Finally, there remains one direct consequence of the democratic idea to consider, and this is the negation of the idea of an elite; it is not for nothing that a ‘democracy’ is opposed to ‘aristocracy’, for this latter word, at least when taken in its etymological sense, means precisely the power of the elite. The elite can by definition only be the few, and their power, or rather their authority, deriving as it does from their intellectual superiority, has nothing in common with the numerical strength on which democracy is based, a strength whose inherent tendency is to sacrifice the minority to the majority, and therefore quality to quantity, and the elite to the masses. Thus the guiding function exercised by a true elite, and its very existence – since of necessity it plays this role if it exists at all – is utterly incompatible with democracy, which is closely bound up with the egalitarian conception, and therefore with the negation of all hierarchy; the very foundation of the democratic idea is the supposition that one individual is as good as another, simply because they are equal numerically and in spite of the fact that they can never be equal in any other way. A true elite, as we have already said, can only be an intellectual one; and that is why democracy can arise only where pure intellectuality no longer exists, as is the case in the modern world. However, since equality is in fact impossible, and since, despite all efforts towards leveling, the differences between one man and another cannot in practice be entirely suppressed, men have been brought, by a curious logic, to invent false elites – of several kinds moreover – that claim to take the place of the one true elite; and these false elites are based on a variety of totally relative and contingent points of superiority, always of a purely material order. This is obvious from the fact that the social distinction that counts most in the present state of things is that based on wealth, that is to say on a purely outward superiority of an exclusively quantitative order, the only superiority in fact that is consistent with democracy, based as it is on the same point of view. It may also be added that even those who set themselves up as opponents of this state of affairs are incapable of producing any real remedy for the disorder, and may even aggravate it by going even further in the same direction, because they also make no appeal to any principle of a higher order. The struggle is merely between different varieties of democracy, with more or less emphasis on the egalitarian tendency, just as it is, as we have said above, a struggle between varieties of individualism, which amounts to exactly the same thing." [Rene Guenon, The Crisis of the Modern World]
Eukoline shoved her veil off her head and turned on Gorgo to ask in a tone that mixed disapproval with amazement, “Why are you Spartan women the only ones who rule your men?” She did not mean it as a compliment.
“Because we are the only women who give birth to men!” Gorgo snapped back.
“As if I hadn’t given birth to two sons?” Eukoline retorted indignantly. “Athens has five times the number of citizens Sparta has!” she added proudly.
“Athens has 40,000 males who think that making clever speeches is the pinnacle of manliness.” All Gorgo’s pent up anger at what she had seen since her arrival [in Athens] boiled over. “That’s why they are afraid to educate their daughters and keep their women in the dark ― physically and mentally!” Gorgo could not resist adding, “Sparta’s men prove their manhood with their spears and need not dismiss good advice just because it comes from the mouths of women!” [Helena P. Schrader, Leonidas of Sparta: A Heroic King]
Most men ebb and flow in wretchedness between the fear of death and the hardships of life; they are unwilling to live, and yet they do not know how to die. –Seneca Epistles
