No age is satisfied with itself; young men think of the future as more ideal than the present, old men the past.

—Jean Paul Richter (School for Aesthetics, trans. Margaret R. Hale, p. 56 (§21))

Tolerating blind obedience in the name of patriotism or religion ultimately takes our lives.

—Terry Tempest Williams (Refuge, 87%)

As the philosopher was leaving town, the tyrant commented, ‘Doubtless you’ll speak ill of me to your fellow philosophers.’ The philosopher paused: ‘I should hope, sir, that we would never be so short of topics for conversation that we would have to talk about you at all.’ 1

1. With apologies, of course, to Plutarch’s Life of Dion, 20.2–3

‘More and more, as he got older, my father’s defenses against the world were anger and eating, and often he indulged them concurrently’ —Keith Waldrop (Light While There Is Light, 19%)

‘But to view August Schumann’s infatuation with the Night Thoughts as an aberration is to ignore the power of Young‘s writing and the extraordinary sensitivity characteristic of the period. As the title implies, Young’s Night Thoughts focus on death and melancholy, and similar uncommonly gloomy topics relished by the public of the day. In an age fond of sentiment, audiences longed to be swept away by their reading’ —Eric Frederick Jensen (Schumann, p. 5)

‘So you can change the boundaries of heaven, just so long as you don’t really believe in it or anything that anyone tells you. And whatever you do, don’t give the Pope one cent unless he is extortionate and your army isn’t big enough to fight him’ —Eve Babitz (Eve’s Hollywood, 44%)

‘I have a weakness for this kind of world view, these constructions of a passionate will that refuses to compromise with actuality and lifts no finger to save appearances. I’m fond of them, though I’ve lost the talent to believe’ —Keith Waldrop (Light While There Is Light, 52%)

‘Mendelssohn was suspicious of critics, may of whom he regarded as inept dilettantes. The perception of Schumann as a dilettante was one that, to a certain extent, Mendelssohn always retained’ —Eric Frederick Jensen (Schumann, p. 111)

‘Sins are the ones you have to give up, not the ones that don’t make any difference’ —Eve Babitz (Eve’s Hollywood, 52%)

‘…all stories about mental illness follow the same arc. They are, essentially, stories of haunted houses’ —Rachel Aviv (Strangers to Ourselves, 38%)

‘The unacknowledged basis for much of this criticism [of Schumann’s later work] is a deep-seated misunderstanding of and aversion to mental illness, an approach characteristic of the nineteenth century. But as the twentieth century drew to a close, there was an attempt to reevaluate the compositions of Schumann’s final years, and to view them in a less biased and more objective manner’ —Eric Frederick Jensen (Schumann, p. 270)

‘(I used to wonder why, no matter what we’ve done or not done, we are always, all of us, so dead set on feeling guilty. Until it occurred to me that guilt is another word for potentiality: to sin is to cast a shadow. Lord, be merciful.)’ —Keith Waldrop (Light While There Is Light, 97%)

‘A lot of people have}t read Anthony Powell—it amazes me. He’s much less leaden than John Updike and he’s a downright soufflé compared to just about anyone’ —Eve Babitz (Eve’s Hollywood, 77%)

‘Charles Dickens is perfect for accidental hit-bottom. Anthony Trollope is too, but he’s so divine that it’s a shame to waste him just because you’re in trouble’ —Eve Babitz (Eve’s Hollywood, 77%)

‘And last, I think, but not least is Henry James. When I grow up, that’s what I want to be. Henry James is just right, not too simple like Dickens, not too impossible like Proust—just right. And my cousin tells me (she’s reading that enormous biography of him that just came out) that he was always going out to dinner and to parties. So, when I grow up, I can still have fun.’ —Eve Babitz (Eve’s Hollywood, 79%)

Senes hieme velut oves aprica petant, aestate velut aves amoena rivosque revisant. Frequenter inter virentes versentur plantas et suaviter redolentes, hae namque viventes spirantesque conspirant ad spiritum hominis augendum.

In winter, let old people like sheep seek places exposed to the sun; in summer, let them like birds revisit the pleasant places and rivers. Let them dwell continually among green and sweet-smelling plants; for these living and breathing things conspire [pun] to augment the human spirit.

—Marsilio Ficino (Three Books on Life [PDF link], 1 trans. Carol V. Kaske, II.12)

1. From Max Cavitch’s rather fun PDF library.

It is the rare biography of a philosopher that reads like a novel. By this I mean not that it is as readable as a novel or presents a novelette-ish narrative, but rather that it must be read as a collection of literary devices, not all of which are successful. Walter Lowrie’s short biography of Kierkegaard is, however, one such biography. 1 The most trying aspect of this (as well as the most obvious) is Lowrie’s insistence on the limitations of space (and, it is implied, the intellectual capacity of the popular reader) that prevent him from doing justice to the life and character of the philosopher; these claims, caveats, and quibbles easily take up nearly a quarter of the text, and even the most caviling reader, the veriest stickler for precision, could not help but feel that if Lowrie had used the space he spent bemoaning the lack of space, he might have added a good deal of the material he felt obliged to leave out. 2

No, more troubling, however, are Lowrie’s intrusions into the text like some erstwhile Serenus Zeitblom, enraptured with both his subject and any possible (if implausible) intimations of evangelical existentialism. Thus, in a short biography, with its much-lamented limitations of space, Lowrie still found room to express his fervent enthusiasm in perhaps ill-advised rhapsodizing:

Having been so indiscreet as to admit that I am a lover of Kierkegaard, I would have it known that this is the Kierkegaard I love—not the dissolute and despairing youth, nor the returning prodigal, nor the unhappy lover, not the genius who created the pseudonyms, but the frail man, utterly unfitted to cope with the world, who nevertheless was able to confront the real danger of penury as well as the vain terrors his imagination conjured up, and in fear and trembling, fighting with fabulous monsters, ventured as a lone swimmer far out upon the deep, where no human hand could be stretched out to save him, and there, with 70,000 fathoms of water under him, for three years held out, waiting for his orders, and then said distinctly that definite thing he was bidden to say, and died with a hallelujah on his lips. I could not love him as I do unless I could venerate him, and I learned to venerate him only when I saw that he had the courage to die as a witness for truth.

—Walter Lowrie (A Short Life of Kierkegaard, p. 173)

This is, if one is in the humor for it, moving, and it suggests a profound sympathy with Kierkegaard’s turmoil in and after 1848. However. Whether it should have a place in something that aims to be a biography rather than a hagiography, which Lowrie’s little book certainly isn’t, remains open to dispute. Owing to the limitations of space, time, and my own inclinations, I will not here dispute it openly. 3 I think, though, that I will rummage the shelves for a biography with a more reliable (and less intrusive) narrator.

1. I have no opinion on Lowrie’s longer biography of Kierkegaard, as I have not read it nor am I likely to do so.
2. This is the danger of the author addressing the acquiring editor in his text, rather than the intended final consumer of his book.
3. Being quite ignorant, I also will not attempt any critique of the accuracy of Lowrie’s narrative, which does seem well-grounded in the source material – although it is sometimes difficult to tell when he is quoting and when he is gushing.

‘Generally speaking, it is better to begin the task of self-improvement in the mind, leaving outward habits to be altered in due course as the inevitable outcome of new modes of thought. Concentrate on essentials, and remember that food and dress, for example, are not essentials, and of little importance in the reckoning of spiritual worth’ —Christmas Humphreys (Concentration and Meditation, p. 119)

‘Moral ideas to not create morality; they create hypocrisy and a hostility toward certain parts of the self, a self-division that makes actual moral goods impossible to attain. The hostility to parts of the self is then projected outward, into hostility toward others who seem to exemplify or encourage the hated parts’ —Brook Ziporyn (Experiments in Mystical Atheism, p. 107)

‘A truth explained is a truth no longer true.’ —Christmas Humphreys (Concentration and Meditation, p. 195)

‘When a girl becomes unhappy there come all at once those hungry monsters who wish to sate their psychological hunger and thirst or to write novels’ —Kierkegaard (Repetition, trans. W. Lowrie, p. 98)

‘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)

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.

—Anthony à Wood (The Life & Times, Abridged, pp. 124f.) 1

1. 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.