Status Updates From Democracy / Esther / Mont S...

True ignorance approaches the infinite more nearly than any amount of knowledge can do, and, in our case, ignorance is fortified by a certain element of nineteenth-century indifference which refuses to be interested in what it cannot understand; a violent reaction from the thirteenth century which cared little to comprehend anything except the incomprehensible.

Reading The Education of Henry Adams.

"For a hundred years, between 1793 and 1893, the American people had hesitated, vacillated, swayed forward and back, between two forces, one simply industrial, the other capitalistic, centralizing, and mechanical. In 1893, the issue came on the single gold standard and the majority at last declared itself, once for all, in favor of the capitalistic system with all its necessary machinery."

"That , two thousand years after Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, a man like Grant should be called—and should actually and truly be—the highest product of the most advanced evolution, made evolution ludicrous." 😂

___"The Education of Henry Adams"

"...as long as life lasted, he found himself invariably taking for granted, as a political instinct, without waiting further experiment, —as he took for granted that arsenic poisoned, —the rule that a friend in power is a friend lost. "

"This was the boy's first lesson in practical politics, and a sharp one; not that he troubled himself with moral doubts, but that he learned the nature of a flagrantly corrupt political bargain in which he was too good to take part but not too good to take profit."

"Any schoolboy could see that man as a force must be measured by motion from a fixed point. Psychology helped here by suggesting a unit—the point of history when man held the highest idea of himself as a unit in a unified universe."

"Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore the ideally free individual is responsible only to himself.This principle is the philosophical foundation of anarchism, and ... is fatal to all society and is especially hostile to the State."

And on that note... I am about to begin, at last , that great classic—for which I had selected this volume—"The Education of Henry Adams"

"...every earthly throne had been repeatedly shaken or shattered, the Church had been broken in halves, faith had been lost, and philosophies overthrown, the Virgin still remained and remains the most intensely and the most widely and the most personally felt, of all characters, divine or human or imaginary, that ever existed among men. Nothing has even remotely taken her place."

___"Mont Saint Michel and Chartres"

"People who suffer beyond the formulas of expression, — who are crushed into silence , and beyond pain, — want no display of emotion, — no bleeding heart, — no weeping at the foot of the Cross, — no hysterics, — no phrases ! They want to see God, and to know that he is watching over his own. "

"...you or any other lost soul, could, if you cared to look and listen, feel a sense beyond the human ready to reveal a sense divine that would make that world more intelligible, and would bring the Virgin to life again, in all the depth of feeling which she shows here...but what is still more convincing, he could, at will, in an instant, shatter the whole art by calling into it a single motive of his own." _Chartres

"An artist, if good for anything, foresees what his public will see; and what his public will see is what he ought to have intended—the measure of his genius...No matter how simple or ignorant we are, we ought to feel a discord or a harmony where the artist meant us to feel it..."

Reading the 3rd title in the volume... absolutely horrible 🤣 , thinking "there must be something of value here".

"I am not one of those who are happy in political life. I am a politician because I cannot help myself; it is the trade I am fittest for, and ambition is my resource to make it tolerable. In politics we cannot keep our hands clean. I have done many things in my political career that are not defensible. To act with entire honesty and self-respect, one should always live in a pure atmosphere ..."

My intention : to read "The Education..." looks like it's going to be the LOA volume in its entirety. 😂

"The Senator from Illinois rose to this gaudy fly like a huge , two-hundred-pound salmon; his white waistcoat gave out a mild silver reflection as he slowly came to the surface and gorged the hook. He made not even a plunge, not one perceptible effort to tear out the barbed weapon..."
("Democracy")