Bygone Conclusions

“Without stepping out the door,
You can know the world.

Without looking through the window,
You can see Heaven's Way.

The longer you travel, the less you know.”
― Tao Te Ching - Chapter 47

“literature, not academic treatises, affords a truer insight into an understanding of the human condition. While professors are busy strangling everything with jargon and footnotes, novels and poems are out there doing the real work: showing us what it actually feels like to be alive.....Literature is a better moral compass because it throws us into the vivid chaos of individual lives, instead of forcing human experience into some procrustean theoretical framework. Sometimes a single sentence from Orwell, or Solzhenitsyn, or Camus tells us more about integrity, honour, cruelty and hope than a thousand pages of scholarly ‘analysis’ ever could...”
― Michael Rainsborough

“The events in Bologna in 1920 were to provide the fascist movement, and then the regime, with one of their most powerful propaganda weapons, the equivalent of Hitler’s use of the Reichstag fire. Bologna,
they could state, had been in the hands of murderous ‘reds’. The trade unions and labour offices were, to quote the Bolognese fascist
Dino Grandi (and Mussolini): ‘a state within a state’. Bologna thus justified fascist violence (even though in many ways the events of
that day would not have taken place without fascist violence). Democracy could not be entrusted to ‘the reds’ and Bologna became
the blueprint not just for the destruction of local democracy, but for the overturning of democracy in general, and of the socialist and
trade union movement.”
― John Foot - Blood and Power

“And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.”
― Philip Larkin, Collected Poems