March 2026
stock images
28 March 2026, around 11.50.
A melancholic patient is filled through and through with intensely painful emotion about himself. He is threatened, he is guilty, he is doomed, he is annihilated, he is lost. His mind is fixed as if in a cramp on these feelings of his own situation, and in all the books on insanity you may read that the usual varied flow of his thoughts has ceased. His associative processes, to use the technical phrase, are inhibited; and his ideas stand stock-still, shut up to their one monotonous function of reiterating inwardly the fact of the man’s desperate estate. And this inhibitive influence is not due to the mere fact that his emotion is painful. Joyous emotions about the self also stop the association of our ideas. A saint in ecstasy is as motionless and irresponsive and one-idea’d as a melancholiac. And, without going as far as ecstatic saints, we know how in everyone a great or sudden pleasure may paralyze the flow of thought. Ask young people returning from a party or a spectacle, and all excited about it, what it was. ‘Oh, it was fine! it was fine! it was fine!’ is all the information you are likely to receive until the excitement has calmed down. Probably every one of my hearers has been made temporarily half idiotic by some great success or piece of good fortune. ‘Good! good! GOOD!’ is all we can at such times say to ourselves until we smile at our own very foolishness.
Adversaria (36)
31 March 2026, around 4.05.
‘…the unchallengeable opinions of the accredited expounders of Christianity carried infinitely greater weight with their illiterate hearers than, say, those of the press lords with their readers today. Competition had not yet reduced man’s opinion of the value of the commodity supplied.’ —Christopher Hill (The Century of Revolution, p. 77)
‘…a cynical unscrupulousness in high places is not incompatible with a general belief in the validity of moral standards which are contradicted by it.’ —R.H. Tawney (Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, p. 19)
‘…when we don’t have a name for what we’re experiencing, it’s hard to talk about it with any specificity’ —Allison Daminger (What’s on Her Mind, 16%)
There is a magic mirror in which each order and organ of society, as the consciousness of its character and destiny dawns on it, looks for a moment, before the dust of conflict or the glamour of success obscures its vision. In that enchanted glass, it sees its own lineaments reflected with ravishing allurements; for what it sees is not what it is, but what in the eyes of mankind and of its own heart it would be. […] Then an air stirred and the glass was dimmed. It was long before any questioned it again.