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“The great prophetic work of the modern world is Goethe’s Faust, so little appreciated among the Anglo-Saxons. Mephistopheles offers Faust unlimited knowledge and unlimited power in exchange for his soul. Modern man has accepted that bargain. . . .
I believe in what the Germans term Ehrfurcht: reverence for things one cannot understand. Faust’s error was an aspiration to understand, and therefore master, things which, by God or by nature, are set beyond the human compass. He could only achieve this at the cost of making the achievement pointless. Once again, it is exactly what modern man has done.”
― The Collected Strange Stories of Robert Aickman, vol. I
I believe in what the Germans term Ehrfurcht: reverence for things one cannot understand. Faust’s error was an aspiration to understand, and therefore master, things which, by God or by nature, are set beyond the human compass. He could only achieve this at the cost of making the achievement pointless. Once again, it is exactly what modern man has done.”
― The Collected Strange Stories of Robert Aickman, vol. I
“Think how much less stupefying the last fifty years might have been if people had actually read Marx.”
― The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought
― The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought
“The name Alaska is probably an abbreviation of Unalaska, derived from the original Aleut word agunalaksh, which means "the shores where the sea breaks its back." The war between water and land is never-ending. Waves shatter themselves in spent fury against the rocky bulwarks of the coast; giant tides eat away the sand beaches and alter the entire contour of an island overnight; williwaw winds pour down the side of a volcano like snow sliding off a roof, building to a hundred-mile velocity in a matter of minutes and churning the ocean into a maelstrom where the stoutest vessels founder.”
― Where the Sea Breaks Its Back: The Epic Story of the Early Naturalist Georg Steller and the Russian Exploration of Alaska
― Where the Sea Breaks Its Back: The Epic Story of the Early Naturalist Georg Steller and the Russian Exploration of Alaska
“The first step towards mastering time is always to make time meaningless”
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“The way we speak and think of the Puritans seems to me a serviceable model for important aspects of the phenomenon we call Puritanism. Very simply, it is a great example of our collective eagerness to disparage without knowledge or information about the thing disparaged, when the reward is the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved. And it demonstrates how effectively such consensus can close off a subject from inquiry.... Unauthorized views are in effect punished by incomprehension, not intentionally and not to anyone's benefit, but simply as a consequence of a hypertrophic instinct for consensus.”
― The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought
― The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought
Allan’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Allan’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
3,587 books
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113 friends
5,568 books
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975 friends
669 books
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116 friends
1,549 books
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337 friends
785 books
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92 friends
755 books
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37 friends
1,372 books
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592 friends
1,239 books
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182 friends
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