Greg > Recent Status Updates

In a continent where the heat in certain regions reaches 40 [degrees] in the shade, should our African ‘emancipation’ consist of the three-piece all-wool suit and the bottle of scotch? Should it not rather have its source in our own deep roots in that distant past, and, at the same time, in the opening-up of our new frontiers to universal values?

In a word, we appear to assign an arbitrarily chosen and strictly pendulumlike rhythm to realities to which such regularity is entirely alien. It is an impossible task. Naturally we do very badly at it. We must look for something better.

A word is valued much less for its etymology than for the use to which it is put.

The textbooks, always admirable tools of sclerosis…

We have acquired the right of disbelief, because we understand, better than in the past, when and why we ought to disbelieve. And it is by this means that science has succeeded in throwing off the dead weight of a great many spurious problems.

Anyone who took part in the Battle of Waterloo knew that Napoleon was beaten. Any witness so singular as to deny the defeat we should regard as a liar. Moreover, if we confine ourselves to the simple, blunt statement, there are not very many different ways of saying that Napoleon was beaten at Waterloo.

Romanticism wished to steep itself in the living spring of the primitive, as well as in that of the popular. So it was that the periods which were the most bound by tradition were also those which took the greatest liberties with their true heritage. It is as if, in a curious compensation for an irresistible creative urge, that were naturally led, by sheer force of their veneration of the past, to invent it.

Our War College and General Staff are not the only institutions in France which have preserved the mentality of the oxcart in the age of the automobile.

Misunderstanding of the present is the inevitable consequence of ignorance of the past. But a man may wear himself out just as fruitlessly in seeking to understand the past, if he is totally ignorant of the present.

In a world where absolute data and information are the vital currency—you might say, a world where absolute data and information are the gods—we do well, I am convinced, to remember the power of the non-absolute, the power of story, myth, ceremony, ritual, and symbol. I see myself appearing a thousand times in the Greek myths—as fool, bungler, criminal, lover, villain, and—very rarely—hero.

You always know when the gods are angry. You don’t always know why.

I can conceive of no higher praise for a writer than to be able to speak in the same tone to savants and schoolboys alike, but so noble a simplicity is the privilege of the select few.

Starkbier ist Kindernahrung

Der kloane Maxl mit fünf Jahr geht mit Vater und Mutter zum Starkbier.
Die Kellnerin bringt unaufgefordert zwei Maß. Sagt der Maxl: ,Ja wieso? Trinkt d’Muatta heut nix?‘

Already our worst poetasters are making money with vulgar verses that cast my friend Orestes as either an avenging hero or a bloody assassin. Neither role is fair or just. He is a man, a son, and a brother who has been a puppet of fate since the day he was born.

Ein Herr Benthein,
einjetroffen aus Berlin,
neben sich noch seine Braut,
bstellt si: „Weißwürstel mit Kraut
und dazu nen Schlach Püree,
Brot, ein Wein und eine Tee!“

„Ja um Goodswuin!, schreit a Mo,
„Was duasd du de Weißwürstel o!
Doch weilsd mir sympatisch bist,
sag i dir, wia ma die ißt:
Mit’m Messer quer hoibiert,
dann da wenig im Senf rumgeschmiert,
(bloß an groben ,Müncher’ fei!)
und dann zuzlt mit’m Mei…“

Mankind, if it is to survive, must choose its leaders by the test of their intellectuality; and, contrarily, leadership must justify itself by its detachment, moderation and power of analysis. Hopes of transition to such a style of leadership need not be based on mere wish.

Government is complex: its practice requires an endless and subtle manipulation of the skills of inducement, persuasion, coercion, compromise, threat and bluff. Command, by contrast, is ultimately quite straightforward; its exercise turns on the recognition that those who are asked to die must not be left to feel that they die alone.

For all the cosmetic Futurism of [Hitler’s] style, he remained a creature of his youth and its vanishing background, in which command emanated from an unseen All-Highest to whom the simple soldier owed the duty of strictest obedience and by whom was owed noting in return but the guarantee that his orders would bring victory.

…he knew that Americans were two peoples, and could be made one only through the defeat of the minority by the majority. Even after he had come to that conclusion, however, he persisted in seeing beyond the war’s end to the necessity of victors and vanquished learning to live together in harmony. That was the vision of ‘commingling’ he held thenceforward to the end of his life.

In only one advanced country was the title of military rank confined to those qualified to hold it by professional education. That country was the United States, which in 1802 founded what may well be regarded as the most significant of the world’s officer-training institutions, its Military Academy at West Point.

Generals as far apart in time as Caesar…and, as we have seen, Wellington himself – all were driven by an ethic, of which the heroic was still a strong element, to share the common soldier’s predicament and, if bullet hit or steel scored, to undergo his fate.

[Alexander] destroyed much and created little or nothing…His dreadful legacy was to ennoble savagery in the name of glory and leave a model of command that far too many men of ambition sought to act out in the centuries to come.

To such men a blow from a superior was a deadly insult, a denial of manhood, which could be expunged only by violence in return. Hence the relative frequency with which British officers in Indian or Arab regiments were murdered by subordinates. The explanation was almost always an ill-considered affront to a man’s dignity.

…he could vent his fury against the judicial system – “justice exists only in our imagination” and “the best excuse for prostitutes is that Mrs. Justia is one of them.”

So you see that even though I am myself a sort of worthless brooding instrument. I have sense enough to realize and appreciate others’ worth. Avis à la lectrice [Take notice dear reader].

Zeus sighed heavily. ‘I wish, all those years ago, Prometheus hadn’t persuaded me to make mankind,’ he said. ‘I knew it was a mistake.’

Nothing was harder on Alfred than to have doubts cast upon his integrity and honor. When the French authorities, through various means, had let him understand that he no longer was persona grata, Alfred realized how he could be a helpless victim in the face of malevolence and slander.

There are those (Robert Graves among them) who have suggested Thersites is usually portrayed as ugly and deformed because he has the guts to speak truth to power…It is the powerful who write (or commission) history, of course.

...to the Greeks and Trojans those dead bodies were living symbols of the imperishable reputation of the heroic souls that inhabited them. As much as their companions fought to rescue, reclaim, and honor the bodies of their fallen friends, their foes would fight to keep, mutilate, and defile them, and to take their armor as a prize of war or as treasure to be ransomed from the fallen’s family and friends.

In December of 1867, Alfred wrote an article in the Times in which he emphasized again that the true causes of almost every explosive incident were carelessness and ignorance. To be safe, people simply needed to be informed.