Chris Chapman > Recent Status Updates

No, the wretchedness of the poor lies below hunger and nakedness. It consists in their incessant incertitude and fear, the drudging succession of shift and scheme and subterfuge, the labouring in the quicksand where every step that takes hold of the firm ground is also a step into the danger of condemnation. Not cold and hunger but Law and Justice are the bitterest affliction of the poor.

Four days later, when news came that a vagrant man called Jack Nonesuch, also Jack the Latiner, also Jackie Pad, had been seized in Waxelby and cast into jail, her satisfaction was terrible to witness. She guffawed, she cracked jokes, she scratched herself, she suggested having a Te Deum sung for the occasion: it was as if all her de Stapledon forebears, so pious over property, so ruthless over flesh and blood...

When the car at last drew up, she came slowly down the steps, took a last and most longing look back at the house, gave her head the breath of a toss and entered the car.

I turned back to the forlorn river, to the scrappy breeze that rippled an evening cold across it, to the barges and the tugs that no longer looked busy and plucky but now soot-poor and tired.

It was a six-bedroom affair built in the twenties, retired enough in its three acres of rhododendron, birch and fir. But retired only in that it was hidden among trees – in itself it was a formidable amalgam of many telling styles: one felt that the railways had managed a direct line falsewards into the Wars of the Roses.

Eve picked up with her slender red fingernails a T-square, her nails slid about the brown wood like lacquered weevils.

The "relationship of people to food" involves systems of power, property and law. Conflict over entitlement to food in the market might be seen as a forum of class struggle, if most historians were not too prissy nowadays to use the term.

A few Gaelic ones revolted, who were quelled later, but in the main the partisans like Robin were glad to settle down. They were sick of the anarchy that had been their portion under Uther Pendragon. Sick of overlords and feudal giants, of knights who did what they pleased, of racial discrimination, and of the rule of might is right.

Et je remerciais les dieux, puisqu'ils m'avaient accordé de vivre à une époque où la tâche qui m'était échue consistait à réorganiser prudemment un monde, et non à extraire du chaos une matière encore informe, ou à se coucher sur un cadavre pour essayer de le ressusciter.

When you see a system change once, it’s not that difficult to believe that it can change again. Fighting cynicism and political apathy turns into what some might call a moral duty. To me, it’s more of a debt that I feel I owe to all the people of the past who sacrificed everything because they were not apathetic, they were not cynical, they did not believe that things fall into place if you just let them [...]

Je chassai les fonctionnaires incapables; je fis exécuter les pires. Je me découvrais impitoyable.

The bread would do for tomorrow. The belly is a rascal. It doesn't remember how well you treated it yesterday, it'll cry out for more tomorrow.

He said that people who did not know the country - did not know nature and did not stay close to it - could never understand the loss that they were feeling.

Not to go to you is to precipitate the dark and yet I hesitate. It is not that I do not crave the light. Rather, it is the certainty of the eventual dark.

...the clubhouse itself was surrounded by a churned mass of red mud. It was the cloistral hour, the hour of silence, as if the very fact that in the trees, and in the veld that was no more than half a mile's walk distant, the little creatures and birds were sinking into sleep aroused, in these people, though briefly, the memory of that other cycle submerged in their blood.

Founders' Street was narrow and shabby; and, although it was named to commemorate those adventurers, who had come riding over the veld to plant the Union Jack, regardless of the consequences to themselves or to anybody else, it was now synonymous in the minds of the present citizens with dubious boarding houses and third-rate shops.

By and large, the popular theatre for which Shakespeare wrote, was in favour of monogamous, wedded love; the aristocratic coterie theatre was more cynical and contemptuous in its attitude towards women. This may in the main be attributed to a rise in economic importance of those middling sized households, in town and country, in which the wife was a junior partner in the business.

John Boggis of Great Yarmouth asked in January 1646, 'Where is your God, in heaven or in earth, aloft or below, or doth he sit in the clouds, or where doth he sit with his arse?'

In a remarkable passage, Winstanley suggested that the doctrine of election was a mirror of the unequal social order: 'kingly government hath made the election and rejection of brethren from their birth to their death, or from eternity to eternity'.

State, power, armies, laws, and the machinery of 'justice', prisons, the gallows, all exist to protect the property which the rich have stolen from the poor. Exploitation, not labour, is the curse, we must abolish wage labour if we are to restore prelapsarian freedom.

Winstanley reversed the traditional formula: it was not the Fall that caused property, but property that caused the Fall. When self-love began to arise in the Earth, then man must fall. 'When mankind began to quarrel about the Earth, and some would have all, and shut out others, forcing them to be servants; this was Man's fall'.

Private property is likewise a consequence of sin; but since it inevitably exists, it must be defended against the greediness of the unpropertied, who must be held in subordination. The Tudor state took over many of the functions of the mediaeval church.

If Adam's Fall had not brought sin into the world, men would have been equal, property would have been held in common. Since the Fall, covetousness, pride, anger, and all the other sins have been transmitted to his posterity. [...] A coercive state is one consequence of the Fall, necessary to prevent sinful men from destroying one another.

Men emancipated themselves from priests, but not from the terrors of sin, from the priest internalised in their own consciences. [...] And it left a problem of social control. Protestant doctrines emphasised the separation of the elect from the unregenerate mass. Confession and absolution were abolished.

And the multitude of those who believed were of one heart and of one soul; neither said any one of them that any of the things which he possessed was his own, but they had all things in common. (Acts 4:32)

He felt as if he had been found out in a weakness beyond remedy. Did they all know of the dogs and beasts and shapeless voids which came to prise his self from him in the night?

While this kingly power reigned in one man called Charles, all sorts of people complained of oppression... Thereupon you that were the gentry, when you were assembled in Parliament, you called upon the poor common people to come and help you... That top bough is lopped off the tree of tyranny, and the kingly power in that one particular is cast out.

The power of enclosing land and owning property was brought into the creation by your ancestors by the sword; which first did murder their fellow creatures, men, and after plunder or steal away their land, and left this land successively to you, their children. And therefore, though you did not kill or thieve, yet you hold that cursed thing in your hand by the power of the sword.

It was not clear why she should have been exiled to solitude on that wall, for she obviously belonged to the Leinsdorf family, and her young powdered face resembled the Count's as closely as a footprint in dry snow resembles a footprint in wet clay.