Nature Calls Silly Writers - The splendor and misery of Ivan Turgenev's love life

Through his constant walking of Wentworth Falls Rock and the surrounding area, with his little dog Badger alongside, and an exercising of a right to roam, slowly MB  achieves a congruence with the place, but one that can be shattered by the imposition of nanny state restrictions...

'My moral compass is, I hope, correctly calibrated to the basics of goodness, yet I struggle particularly with the concepts of borders and boundaries, In short, I like to trespass....perhaps life is too short to go only where we are told to go...'

IRON CURTAIN EAST GERMAN BORDER GUARDS FEED DOGS THAT PATROL BETWEEN DOUBLE FENCE 1989

Forgive me freedom loving people for I have slumped, both in my reading and in my blogging due to my armchair travels 

It's been over a ten hours since my last cryptic confession and I've had to drag myself back to the keyboard like a stroppy recycled teenager.  

Wars are not fought for territory, but for words. Man's deadliest weapon is language. He is as susceptible to being hypnotized by slogans as he is to infectious diseases. And where there is an epidemic, the group-mind takes over.

My auntie Ota escaped in 1948 through the Sudeten lannds - Šumava- Comic book tells tale of post-1948 Czech emigrés

The smuggler left her alone in the middle of the forest | Memory of Nations Sites

On March 21, 1949, Irena Šimonová attempted to cross the border and get into West Germany. She had a legitimate ... I had heard that there were places in Šumava where you could drown in the swamp. I stayed hidden ...

Karel Ulvr on his daring escape from communist Czechoslovakia, his greatest loss and his new life in the free world | Radio Prague International

 The 1948 communist takeover of Czechoslovakia radically changed people's lives overnight. Those who refused to accept that change risked their lives to flee the country, leaving behind their families

Walter Gropius was mocked by his first wife, scorned by art critics, and pushed out of Harvard — all before Tom Wolfe’s character assassination Crying Wolfe    


 A Bohemian Billionaire Buys a Piece of Le Monde


Nature Calls: Blenheim Palace Gives Thieves a Golden Opportunity to Steal Cattelan’s Toilet

Q: How do you invite thieves to steal a famous, expensive, publicly exhibited artwork? A: Publicly announce that no guards are protecting it. That strange-but-true ... read more

AJBlog: CultureGrrl

The splendor and misery of Ivan Turgenev's love life. He said he could feel love only when A woman’s heel was pushing his neck into the mud

  

• Consider the butt
• Best obituary ever
• Battle for conservatism
• Pianos in war
• Adorno, the 5th Beatle?
• How not to mourn an author
• On self-publishing
• Meaning of books
• Woke critics
• James Atlas, R.I.P.
• 
  

• Happily Also They Are Silly'

  “Men, that is, are selfish. Happily also they are silly . . .”

  
  

  In 1903, Leslie Stephen delivered the Ford Lectures and the following year published them in a slender volume as English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century. It was his final book and his final year. Stephen is most interesting when writing about literature and avoiding society. With books he’s likelier to stick to the topic at hand and write aphoristically. The passage at the top amused me. It  reflects a mature person’s understanding that our species is reliably flawed and ridiculous. We are worthy of neither undiluted praise nor abject   condemnation. Stephen is writing about the Earl of Chesterfield, whose favorite author is La Rochefoucauld. Chesterfield expects his son to read the Frenchman’s Maximes daily. The reference to silliness follows.

  
  

  Stephen is fond of silly. By my count he uses the word four times in his little book. Its frequent use may be distinctly English, dismissive but not vicious. Americans use it less often. Stephen describes antiquarianism as “a silly crochet.” When dealing with Pope he writes: “The serious aim of the poet is to give a philosophy of human nature; and the mere description of natural objects strikes him as silly unless tacked to a moral.” He writes of Swift:

  
  

  “His blows, as it seemed to the archbishops, struck theology in general; he put that right by pouring out scorn upon Deists and all who were silly enough to believe that the vulgar could reason . . .”

  
  

  Best of all, Stephen endorses with qualifications Charles Lamb’s criticism of Congreve and the comedy of manners, and writes:

  
  

  “Life is not made up of dodges worthy of card-sharpers—and the whole mechanism becomes silly and disgusting. If comedy is to represent a full and fair portrait of life, the dramatist ought surely, in spite of Lamb, to find some space for generous and refined feeling. There, indeed, is a difficulty. The easiest way to be witty is to be cynical. It is difficult, though desirable, to combine good feeling with the comic spirit.”

  
  

  Difficult, indeed. Another English writer, Max Beerbohm, memorably uses silly inan essay which begins and ends with the author of “The Vanity of Human Wishes”: 

  
  

  “Every man illustrious in his day, however much he may be gratified by his fame, looks with an eager eye to posterity for a continuance of past favors, and would even live the remainder of his life in obscurity if by so doing he could insure that future generations would preserve a correct attitude towards him forever. This is very natural and human, but, like so many very natural and human things, very silly.”