From Jeremy Adelman’s (2013) Wordly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman:

When Ursula once insisted that individual acts of resistance violated the norms of being “useful to the movement,” that it was better to wait for “objective conditions” to be ripe for action, Guia laughed back: “How important your language is for you! There is more value in one who rises and speaks out than in all your wise net of illegals [referring to refugees] who don’t open their mouths but murmur the news into each other’s ears.” Then came a fatal jab. When Ursula explained that the working class was defining the premises of revolutionary actions, he reminded her of the history of passivity wrapped in theory: “To hell with your working class! It seems to me the moment has come to lose a bit of faith…. Twelve million organized Socialists and Communists, the most powerful working class movement in Europe… then comes Hitler and all stand still, nobody moves! Is that your discipline? What is it worth?”

New at IWP Books: Constructive Citizenship (1927) by L. P. Jacks. “The chapters on Skill, Labour, and Leisure should be written in letters of gold on the tables of the heart.” Dorothy L. Sayers, Begin Here

“…when some months ago Huckleberry Finn was dropped from library lists by the New York board of education as likely to aggravate race prejudice, only two letters of protest appeared in the Times. The great hive of intellect which is New York buzzed on without notice. This was criminal negligence.” (Jacques Barzun, The House of Intellect)

“A barrister made a long speech in the course of which a boy fell asleep in the gallery and fell into the well of the court and broke his neck. At common law the instrument with which a murder was committed was forfeited to the Crown. Hence the indictment had to charge and the jury had to find its value. The barrister was indicted in the Circuit Grand Court for murder with a certain dull instrument, to wit, a long speech of no value.” (Roscoe Pound, The Lawyer from Antiquity to Modern Times)

What is a real book? “Quite simply: it is a book one wants to reread. It can stand rereading because it is very full – of ideas and feelings, of scenes and persons real or imagined, of strange accidents and situations and judgments of behavior: it is a world in itself, like and unlike the world already in our head. For this reason, this fullness, it may well be ‘hard to get into.’ But it somehow compels one to keep turning the page, and at the end the wish to reread is clear and strong: one senses that the work contains more than met the eye the first time around.” (Jacques Barzun, Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning)

From Doing the Right Thing by Albert Jay Nock:

To make the case clearer, let us introduce a couple of parallels from one, by the way, who is the unquestioned master in the art of showing “what goes on in a person’s mind” – from Tourgueniev. First Love, to begin with, is a story of low people; only one person in it, the narrator, is anything but a very poor affair. The heroine, Zinaida, is a flapper of seventeen or so. Here you have the real thing in flappers and the real thing in trollops. Qua flapper and qua trollop, Zinaida makes the candidates put forward by our contemporary literature look like Confederate money. The bare story is squalid and repulsive; a journalistic report of it would be unreadable. But as Tourgueniev unfolds it, the great goddess Lubricity gets not a single grain of incense. Not one detail is propounded for the satisfaction of prurience. The people, dreadful as they are, and the drama, weighted as it is with all that is unnatural and shocking in Zinaida and her paramour, are more than interesting; they are profoundly moving, they release a flow of sympathy that effaces all other emotions, and one lays down the book with a sense of being really humanized and bettered by having read it. Let the reader get it in Mrs. Garnett’s excellent translation, and experiment for himself. Then let him go even farther, and try Torrents of Spring. This is a story of the antecedents and consequences of adultery plus seduction, brought about under inconceivably loathsome circumstances. The three principal characters are detestably low. The foremost among them, Maria Nikolaevna, in my judgment the most interesting woman in the whole range of fiction – what would one not give to see her and talk with her for an hour? – is the world’s prize slut, if ever there were one. But the author has not the slightest preoccupation with her sluttishness, and hence he communicates none to the reader, and the great goddess Aselgeia goes begging again.

“L. P. Jacks: The Art of Living Together. Originally published under the title Constructive Citizenship. The chapters on Skill, Labour, and Leisure should be written in letters of gold on the tables of the heart.” Dorothy L. Sayers, Begin Here: A War-Time Essay

Jacques Barzun on Multiple Choice Tests (The House of Intellect):

They should go. They are an insult to Intelligence, except when played with as parlor games. And something else must go at the same time; I mean the form of such tests. Every man of education ought to take a solemn vow that he will never ‘check’ anything on a printed list. Students should not be asked to pass so-called objective examinations, which are the kind composed of mimeographed questions to be marked Yes or No, or to be solved by matching the right name with a definition. I have kept track for some ten years of the effect of such tests upon the upper half of each class. The best men go down one grade and the next best go up. It is not hard to see why. The second-rate do well in school and in life because of their ability to grasp what is accepted and conventional, the ‘ropes’ of the subject. They become pillars of society and I have no quarrel with them. But first-rate men are rarer and equally indispensable. They see into situations quickly, and with the fresh, clear eye of Intelligence, and they must be encouraged to continue. To them, a ready-made question is an obstacle. It paralyzes thought by cutting off all connections but one. Or else it sets them thinking and doubting whether in that form any possible answers really fits. Their minds have finer adjustments, more imagination, which the test deliberately penalizes as encumbrances. This basic difficulty occurs no matter how carefully the questions are drafted and how extensive their coverage. I sat and worked on a committee that prepared objective questions in history for the so-called Graduate Record Examination, which is now widely used to test college seniors’ readiness for graduate work. In committee, it was revealing to see how a question that seemed ‘foolproof’ and ‘obvious’ to two or three men, thoroughly trained in their field, struck others of the same caliber as ‘ambiguous’ or ‘misleading.’ Add modifiers and you can make the question so unwieldy that it can hardly be grasped at one reading; simplify and you reduce it to bare common fact. Neither extreme, moreover, brings anything out of the student’s mind; yet the power to relate, to think up, to see into, is what distinguishes the first rank from the second in all walks of life. The results of the Graduate examination no doubt correlate very satisfactorily with other indices, but they scarcely give data for the most needful kind of diagnosis. Nor have they ever been tried on the masters of the profession, which would be the test of tests, provided running comments were allowed. When one courageous man proposed just this at an institution that thrives on endless testing, the idea was dismissed as a joke in poor taste.

Tristram Shandy on Writing (Book VIII, Chapter II): “That of all the several ways of beginning a book which are now in practice throughout the known world, I am confident that my own way of doing it is the best. – I’m sure it is the most religious, – for I begin with writing the first sentence, – and trusting the Almighty God for the second.”

Agnes Repplier on Horace:

That a poet should survive two thousand years is not remarkable. Whatever changes two thousand more may bring about, they will not affect the standing of Homer or of Virgil. ‘Ce n’est que le premier pas qui coûte.’ If you survive your first thousand, the others will fall into line. But that a poet writing two thousand years ago should today be the helpmate and spokesman of humanity is in the nature of a miracle. It can be accounted for only by the fact that Horace was a man wholly disillusioned, and wholly good-tempered.

No word in our language has been so misused in the past nineteen years as the word ‘disillusionment.’ It has come to mean the perpetual grouch of men still deeply resentful that the World War was not in the nature of a garden party, and that the World Peace was not a highway to Utopia. Every crime and every folly have been excused on this ground. Even the kaleidoscopic divorces of Reno, the suspension of privacy, the repeal of reticence, have been accounted for by the disillusionment of youth at the way the world was run when it was too young to run it, as the natural result of a war which saw greater acts of heroism and of supreme self-sacrifice than had ever before purified the souls of men.

The disillusionment of Horace was not of this order. It meant that he had awakened from the noble dreams of youth to the equally noble realities of manhood. He saw life as a whole, and this educational process taught him that it is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and that it is not possible to find it elsewhere. Reason, moderation, content, a wide mental horizon, a firm foundation of principle – these were the gifts of the gods (and Horace reverenced his gods) to men of good purpose and sobriety.

Essay at IWP Articles.

New at IWP Articles: “Horace” (1937) by Agnes Repplier.

New at IWP Books: Our Enemy, The State (1935) by Albert Jay Nock.

Also at JAYS (John Jay Chapman and Albert Jay Nock).

New at IWP Books: On Doing the Right Thing (1928) by Albert Jay Nock.

Also at JAYS (John Jay Chapman and Albert Jay Nock).

Yoshino Cherry, Kew Gardens

Israel, April 2023

“The Super-Milk by Glaxo,” 1920, Welcome Collection, London

New at IWP Books: The Book of Journeyman (1930) by Albert Jay Nock.

From The Book of Journeyman (1930) by Albert Jay Nock:

I have always lived close to the windward side of poverty, sometimes in pretty squalid surroundings, but I thank the Lord that I never had to live in a real-estater’s model suburb. I passed through one the other day, and I must say it was one of the most depressing sights I ever saw. Rows of houses built exactly alike on plots of ground as uncompromising in their uniformity as the squares of a chess-board. The only departure from uniformity was, as you would expect, where it would show most – in the color of the roofs. These were painted in glaring red, blue, purple, green, yellow, but no two adjacent roofs painted the same color.

It struck me then that here was the stock answer to the charge that American life is standardized and mechanized clear out of humanity’s reach. “Do you call us standardized?” These houses would say in indignation, “Just look at our roofs! You can see the signs of our sturdy individualism a mile away.” One wonders whether the interiors of these houses are all alike. Do the same pieces of golden oak furniture, turned out by the same factory, occupy the same relative positions in the same rooms? Moreover, is the life that expresses itself in these straitly limited ways as straitly regularized? Do all hands follow the same routine, internal and external, think the same thoughts, live, move and have their being, spiritual and physical, on the same terms? It is not improbable. Some budding Ph.D. in the social sciences might take for his thesis, “The Real-Estater as a Spiritual Force,” and make quite a good thing of it – good enough to astonish his professors, at least.

New at IWP Books: The State of the Union by Albert Jay Nock.

Rabelais (Gargantua, ch. 27, ed. Pléiade):

En l’abbaye estoit pour lors un moine claustrier nommé frere Jean des entommeures, jeune gallant: frisque : de hayt : bien à dextre, hardy : adventureux, deliberé : hault, maigre, bien fendu de guele, bien advantagé en nez, beau despacheur d’heures, beau desbrideur de messes, vray croteur de vigiles, pour tout dire sommairement, vray moyne si oncques en feut depuys que le monde moynant moyna de moynerie.

Sir Thomas Urquhart (1653):

There was then in the abbey a claustral monk called Friar John of the Funnels, young, gallant, frisk, lusty, nimble, quick, active, bold, adventurous, resolute, tall, lean, wide-mouthed, long-nosed, a rare mumbler of matins, unbridler of masses, and runner-over of vigils; and to conclude summarily, in a word, a right monk, if ever there were any, since the monking world monked a monkery.

W. F. Smith (1893):

In the abbey at that time was a cloistered monk named Friar John of the Trencherites, young, gallant, frisky, lusty, very handy, bold, adventurous, resolute, tall, lean, with a rare gaping mouth and a mighty prominent nose, a fine mumbler of matins, unbridler of masses, and a scourer of vigils; to say everything summarily, a very monk, if ever there was one, since the monking world monked a monkery.

Samuel Putnam (1946):

In the abbey, there happened to be at this time a cloistered monk by the name of Friar John Hackem, young, gallant, spruce, good-natured, quite handy, bold, adventurous, level-headed, tall, lean, with a good chin and plenty of nose, a fine dispatcher of prayers and masses, an expert blinker of vigils – in short, a true monk, if ever there was one since this monking world of ours first monked a monkery.

J. C. Powys (1948):

But there chanced to be at that very crisis in this fortunate Abbey a cloistered monk called Friar John of the First Cut, or, if you prefer, of the Meat-Choppers, a monk who was young, gallant, lively, bold, adventurous, sturdy, tall and lean; a monk who had a big mouth and huge nose, a monk who was a mighty despatcher of canonical hours, a glorious rusher-through of masses and rattler-off of prayers, and indeed to sum it all up, as true and veritable a monk as there has ever been upon earth since a monking world first monked its monkeries.

J. M. Cohen (1955):

There was in the abbey at that time a cloister monk, named Friar John of the Hashes, a young, gallant, sprightly, jovial, resourceful, bold, adventurous, resolute, tall, and thin fellow with a great gaping mouth and a fine outstanding nose. He was grand mumbler of matins, dispatcher of masses, and polisher of vigils, and, to put it briefly, a true monk if ever there has been one since the monking world monked its first monkery…

Burton Raffel (1990):

Now, at that time there resided in the abbey a cloistered monk, Brother John Mincemeat – young, strong, lively, always in a fine humor, good with his hands, bold, adventurous, thoughtful, tall, lean, noisy, with a handsome nose, who knew the breviary inside out and could read it like a flash (and could say a mass, too, without wasting any time), who got through vigils in the twinkling of an eye – in short, a true monk if ever there monked one since the days when monks first practiced monking through this unmonkish world of ours…

Donald Frame (1991):

In the abbey at the time there was a claustral monk named Frere Jean des Entommeures (Friar John of the Hashes), young, gallant, frisky, cheerful, very deft, bold, adventurous, resolute, tall, thin, with a wide open throat, well fixed for a nose, a great dispatcher of hours, a great unbridler of masses, a fine polisher-off of vigils, to sum it all up briefly a real monk if ever there was one since the monking world first monked in monkery…

M. A. Screech (2006):

There was at this time in that abbey a cloistered monk called Frere Jean des Entommeures, young, gallant, lively, lusty, adroit, bold, daring, resolute, tall, slim, loud-mouthed, endowed with an ample nose, a galloper through of matins, an unbridler of masses (and a polisher-off of vigils): in short, a trued monk if ever there was one since the (monking) world first monked-about (with monkery…)

Jacques Barzun (From Dawn to Decadence) on Rabelais:

His great work is in five ‘books’ and the authenticity of the fifth has been questioned because it was published posthumously. That any forger could have imitated style and thought and carried out the indicated scheme as perfectly as we find it done is not credible. Writing is not like painting, an art in which mechanical skill can deceive. Of all the translations of Rabelais into English, the first, by Urqhart and Motteux, should be at least browsed in. It is not altogether faithful, but it is the only one that re-creates the atmosphere of verbal exuberance.

“…among the two trios of thinkers whom Barzun was always to acknowledge as mentors – Montaigne, Rabelais, Pascal, ‘with Nietzsche and Ortega in tow,’ and Shaw, Whitehead, and James – only James did Barzun call ‘my master.’”Michael Murray, Jacques Barzun: Portrait of a Mind.