Joshua Baker

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“Yes. What I haven’t made sense of yet, I never will.’ ‘You’re more right than you know,’ he said. ‘But that’s something you won’t understand until you’re my age.’ ‘Understand what?’ ‘That we never get older, not really. It just looks that way. Inside, we’re still nineteen, all of us.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, The Wolves of Eternity: A Novel

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“The United States used to be, like China, an engineering state. But in the 1960s, the priorities of elite lawyers took a sharp turn. As Americans grew alarmed by the unpleasant by-products of growth—environmental destruction, excessive highway construction, corporate interests above public interests—the focus of lawyers turned to litigation and regulation. The mission became to stop as many things as possible. As the United States lost its enthusiasm for engineers, China embraced engineering in all its dimensions.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

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“But I will tell you Squire that having read even a few dozen books in common is a force more binding than blood.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

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“The melancholy of the antique world seems to me more profound than that of the moderns, all of whom more or less imply that beyond the dark void lies immortality. But for the ancients that ‘black hole’ is infinity itself; their dreams loom and vanish against a background of immutable ebony. No crying out, no convulsions—nothing but the fixity of the pensive gaze.

With the gods gone, and Christ not yet come, there was a unique moment, from Cicero to Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone. Nowhere else do I find that particular grandeur.”
― Flaubert Gustave

tags: atheism, classical, death, humanity, immortality, modernism, nihilism, religion, rome

36 likes

“A great empire cannot bring freedom by its own decay to those corners in it where a subject people are prevented from discussing the fundamentals of life. The people feel like children turned adrift to fend for themselves when the imperial routine breaks down; and they wander to and fro, given up to instinctive fears and antagonisms and exaltation until reason dares to take control. I had come to Yugoslavia to see what history meant in flesh and blood. I learned now that it might follow, because an empire passed, that a world full of strong men and women and rich food and heady wine might nevertheless seem like a shadow-show: that a man of every excellence might sit by a fire warming his hands in the vain hope of casting out a chill that lived not in the flesh.”
― Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

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