Adversaria (30)
‘Some people were in the park pretending it was warm, exercising that necessary Scottish thrift with weather which hoards every good day in the hope of some year amassing a summer’ —William McIlvanney (Laidlaw, 10%)
‘I noted all my findings on index cards. I valued the cards as signifiers of serious scholarship, and boosted my spirits with several packs’ —Michelle de Kretser (Theory & Practice,, p. 33)
‘We always need both freedom and order. We need the freedom of lots and lots of small, autonomous units, and, at the same time, the orderliness of large-scale, possibly global, unity and coordination’ —E.F. Schumacher (Small Is Beautiful, p. 69)
‘It was the room in the house where he spent most time and it was furnished with the debris of past attitudes. Those attitudes were an unresolvable argument in which he was a very tired chairman’ —William McIlvanney (Laidlaw, 9%)
‘She does not like the exclusion of opposition, the idea of the absolute, the positive distinction between mind and matter; she prefers the notions of complementarity, or circulation, influx, of action at a distance, of a model, and the idea of order as an organic totality’ —Jacques Gernet (A History of Chinese Civilization, trans. Foster & Hartman, p. 32)
‘Just as history is not made by the brute facts but by the natural dynamism immanent in them which the historian must seek to grasp by intuition, so the true object of painting does not reside in the concrete representation of the visible but in the apprehension of the metamorphoses of being’ —Jacques Gernet (A History of Chinese Civilization, trans. Foster & Hartman, p. 344)
‘I have no doubt that it is possible to give a new direction to technological development, a direction that shall lead it back to the real needs of man, and that also means: to the actual size of man. Man is small, and therefore, small is beautiful. To go for giantism is to go for self-destruction.And what is the cost of a reorientation? We might remind ourselves that to calculate the cost of survival is perverse. No doubt, a price has to be paid for anything worth while: to redirect technology so that it serves man instead of destroying him requires primarily an effort of the imagination and an abandonment of fear’ —E.F. Schumacher (Small Is Beautiful, p. 169)
‘He was a good middleweight before he became two middleweights. But he was never as good as they told him he was. That’s why his brains are omelette. But he’s a good man’ —William McIlvanney (Laidlaw, 82%)
‘History is such an interested business that it is tempting to think it has no truth at all’ —Paul Hamilton (‘Byron, Clare, and Poetic Historiography’ in Rethinking British Romantic History, p. 225)
‘The wise man had to be useful to the world and take everyday realities as the starting-point of his reflections, not walk about with his head in the clouds’ —Jacques Gernet (A History of Chinese Civilization, trans. Foster & Hartman, p. 440)