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"إن المذنب لا يحسد البريء، إنه يكرهه، ويحس بهزكأنه ضميره، و كأن الضمير هو الجزء البريء في قلب المذنب، و سناء ذلك الجزء، ذلك ركن الخامس البريء في المكتب كانت قد اصبحت كالضمير المقيم الذي لا يتحرك، والذي لا تخفي عليه خافية، والذي يقابل كل ما يدور أمامه بالصمت و السكون."

يوسف ادريس، العيب، س. ٥٨

"But You are still the same, and all tomorrows and what is beyond them, and all yesterdays and what is behind them, You make to be in Your today. What does it matter to me, even if none of us can understand this? Let us rejoice and say, 'What is this?' Let us be content by not understanding to find You, rather than by understanding not to find You."

The ennui and angst of promiscuity, fornication, and adultery, all upheld from falling into the abyss of self-examination by a gnostic/Freudian sense of self-superiority and a colonialist privilege.

My first introduction to Penelope Fitzgerald. She is great and agreeable enough. I had more sympathy for her female characters in this novel. Her fun in exposing male chauvinism had a brilliance to it but I wonder if it showed a limit to her sympathy for men.

Philosopher, What luck to have the tree in your street, Your thoughts will be less arduous, your eyes Freer, your hands more desirous of less night. - Yves Bonnefoy, from The Anchor's Long Chain, pg. 79.

The Tree on the Rue Descartes Passerby, Look at this tall tree, look through it, It may suffice. For even in tatters, soiled, a street tree It is all of nature, the whole sky, Birds perch in it, in it wind moves, the sun Speaks of the same hope, in spite of death...

It is not bigotry but compassion and common sense to insist on laws and public policies that maximize the likelihood that children will grow up with a mom and a dad. Too many of our neighbors haven’t heard our arguments, and they seem unwilling to respect our rights, because they don’t understand what we believe. It’s up to us to change that perception.

Jane Austen as a precocious teenager. Peter Leithart notes that it is when we first hear her voice and it is indeed a comic voice. There is something eternally fresh and the mirthful satires she wrote for the benefit of her family members.

Also, "pagan Valdabrun" is described as being "raised from the font" by King Marsile, the Muslim king, although he of course would not have been baptized and hence, "raised from the font," since infant baptism is a practice of some Christians, not a Muslim one.

I an noticing an amount of parochialism as I read on the account. For example, the author puts in the mouths of a Saracen Muslim calling out to his ranks, "Strike, pagans, to break up their ranks." (119: 1543) Of course, a Muslim would not refer to his fellow soldiers as "pagans."

"....(The first liberals) believed they were freeing Europe from the fanaticism of 'pious cruelty.'...Manent has argued that liberalism has fundamentally failed to understand itself." -Daniel Mahoney explaining Pierre Manent's thought in the introduction to Modern Liberty and Its Discontents by Pierre Manent (pg. 7).

"...They, of course, go far beyond modern liberalism in their effort to forge human ties that have no natural or traditional supports. They aim to destroy or replace prosaic bourgeois society, but at the same time they reveal the impossibility of the project for a freedom divorced from or all natural or social determination. The totalitarianisms thus embody the self-destruction of Machiavellian modernity.."

Manent "The totalitarianism of the twentieth century, Nazism and communism, are simultaneously reactions against and intensifications of modern individualism. Despite their repeated claims to be harbingers of a new kind of community and a new kind of individual both were 'actually unprecedentedly virulent promoters of ... the absence of the of the natural human bond' ('On Modern Individualism')..."

...and who hypocritically uses societal stereotypes of Jews to ridicule the Jew and also to extort money through people's prejudicial belief in the Jew's heartlessness by using the Jew as a front for his business. I wonder what the Nazis thought of this novel, but not really. I am sure they couldn't stand it's virtues.

Something very good to discover in Charles Dicken's final novel Our Mutual Friend is his attack on anti-Semitism by his depiction of a good Jew who is used and abused by a non-Jew who himself fulfills the stereotype of a Jew as a heartless money grubber ...

"(Jane Austen) was not absent from her fiction, but her presence was subtle enough to pay readers her greatest compliment- her confidence that we could figure out what we are supposed to think based on what she told us. Her narrative style is a humble style, which make it artistic." -Peter Leithart, Jane Austen, pg. 114