April 2026
wayfinding
6 April 2026, around 9.06.
However heroic resistance may be, in most cases it enjoys only limited success, chipping away at the forces of oppression, slowing the advance of superior power, or obstructing the operation of infernal machinery, but only for a while.
It has been a long while since we walked along the river in the morning with the dog, what with one thing and another. We went this morning and were startled to see a large stretch of riverbank had been washed away in the winter storms, which tore away the first stretch of path and a good patch of someone’s yard. (The next storm will undermine the house itself, but, for their sake, that is hopefully a few years away.) Now, instead of a low sandy rise of vegetation above the water, there is now a stretch of river stone and sand and fallen trees. We made our way through the debris and, a little ways along, found the rest of the familiar path again, mostly unscathed, with a fresh layer of sand in stretches, as though in consolation for its change of course.
academical lol-poops
9 April 2026, around 9.48.
Decay of learning. Before the warr wee had scholars that made a thorough search in scholasticall and polemicall divinity, in humane authors, and naturall philosophy. But now scholars studie these things not more than what is just necessary to carry them throug the exercises of their respective colleges and the Universitie. Their aime is not to live as students ought to do, viz. temperat, abstemious, and plaine and grave in the apparell; but to live like gent., to keep dogs and horses, to turne their studies and coleholes into places to receive bottles, to swash it in apparell, to weare long periwigs, etc.; and the theologists to ride abroad in grey coats with swords by their sides.
- The word ‘lol-poop’ is taken from slightly earlier in the book, and indicates, according to the OED, ‘A lazy, idle drone.’ This seems a rather cranky way of referring to the warden of a college, but Wood was apparently a cranky sort of fellow.[↩]
Adversaria (37)
30 April 2026, around 4.35.
‘When a man decided to become a wandering preachers, whether orthodox or dissenting, he often started by going into a forest and living for some time as a hermit. During this period of ascetic training he would acquire the spiritual power for his mission; he might also acquire a reputation as a holy man and attract his first followers’ —Norman Cohn (The Pursuit of the Millennium, p. 45)
‘And one fact about the Millennium which emerges with great clarity is that it is to be strongly anti-capitalist’ —Norman Cohn (The Pursuit of the Millennium, p. 122)
‘The old religious idiom has been replaced by a secular one, and this tends to obscure what otherwise would be obvious. For it is the simple truth that, stripped of their original supernatural sanction, revolutionary millenarianism and mystical anarchism are with us still’ —Norman Cohn (The Pursuit of the Millennium, p. 286)