From Theodor Haecker’s (1950) Journal in the Night:

The fact that language does not permit of calling machines ‘wonderful’ and ‘divine’ rests upon a generally accepted feeling. It is clear that these words cannot be used to describe the products of the machine, unlike so many products of man’s hand, and in particular, works of art. The human hand is a wonderful instrument by means of which the spirit, and at times even the Holy Spirit, with an absolutely immaterial intention, creates the difference between a mediocre mechanical work and a work of genius.

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From Theodor Haecker’s (1950) Journal in the Night: “When he was ninety years old Prince Eugene said to a forester as old as himself: We still feel quite fresh and sound and healthy, and we hardly notice we are so old. – We do not, Your Royal Highness, but others do.”

Covers by Jan Tschichold

From Theodor Haecker (1950), Journal in the Night: “A curse on every wish that blurs the sight, paralyses the tongue, cramps the hand and prevents the truth being seen, said and written.”

From Theodor Haecker’s (1950) Journal in the Night:

When I am told that the German youth of today, the official youth, know nothing of two thousand five hundred years of Christian and adventist history, know nothing of it, do not wish to know anything of it and cannot be moved by it, I know it is true and I am sad. But when I am told that there is none among them who in his inmost being is moved by it, then I feel cheerful once again, for I do not believe it, and it is not true. They exist, and they are the aristocracy of the youth of this country. They will live under a cloud, as I do. But they will stand in the glory of an eternal light, as I shall do. And they will know it, as I too do.

From Theodor Haecker’s (1950) Journal in the Night:

Qua soldier, the German soldier is the strongest and most frightful in the world because he does not need to know what he is fighting for, and in point of fact, under the Prussian hegemony, never has known. It does not occur to him to ask. He is simply hypnotised by his favourite calling, for which he has an immense talent. And even the most depraved creature can catch his imagination at this point, and lead the nation into the direst suffering with absolute certainty. But it doesn’t matter. The German soldier will continue to function immeasurably better than his machines, themselves quite good enough.

Two on Book Binding: (1) Repair, Fascinating #13 “Book”; (2) Japanese Book Binding. One on Arion Press.

Recommended: Pizza Toast & Coffee (Thanks to Alan Jacobs, @ayjay)

The Devotees of Expediency

From Albert Jay Nock’s (1937) Free Speech and Plain Language: I had a desultory talk with one devotee of expediency not long ago, a good friend and a thoroughly excellent man. He was all worked up over the activities of Communists and what he called pink Socialists, especially in the colleges and churches. He said they were corrupting the youth, and he was strong for having them coerced into silence.

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From Theodor Haecker’s (1950) Journal in the Night: “There are periods when men are skeptical of the deductions which their reason is capable of drawing. Today that is not so. The consequences deduced from the most threadbare ‘scientific’ hypothesis are looked upon as though they were eternal truths.”

From Theodor Haecker’s (1950) Journal in the Night: “Beware of the terrible light-hearted simplifiers – both theoretical and practical. They create the most hopeless confusion imaginable, in the long run.”

(Soon at IWP Books)

Man, Suffering, Striving, Doing

From the Introduction (by Alexander Dru) to Haecker’s Journal in the Night: It is here that the importance of Burckhardt can hardly be exaggerated. Burckhardt composed no universal history, though his Reflections have been included under that heading. But in everything he wrote, and particularly in his Greek Culture, he is concerned with the unity of history framed, as it were, between the alpha and the omega, between the origins and the end.

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Alan Jacobs (@ayjay) on Illusions and Their Removal.

Wisdom Weighed

From Liberal Humanism’s Lost World by Michael Knox Beran: Trilling cataloged the self-deceptions of the progressives. First, they mistook their desire for power — an “impulse toward moral aggrandizement” — for virtue. Second, they pretended that their effort to rethink American culture was constructive. In their “growing intellectuality — or rather, intellectualism,” they put every “aspect of existence” under a microscope. “Not only politics, but child-rearing, the sexual life, the life of the psyche, the innermost part of existence was subject to ideation,” to a rationalizing effort to make culture conform to abstract ideas.

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From Allan Janik & Stephen Toulmin’s (1973) Wittgenstein’s Vienna:

When Kraus called for a critique of language, as the crucial instrument of thought, he did so with a moral hatred for that slovenliness in thought and expression which is the enemy of individual integrity, and leaves one defenseless against the political deceptions of corrupt and hypocritical men. But Kraus’s one-man crusade to restore the honesty of social debate had wider implications also. Very soon it woke echoes in other fields of intellectual and artistic activity, and broadened into the demand for a critique of the means of expression used in all fields – for example, for a stripping-away of all that conventional and meaningless decoration with which sentimentality had encumbered the creative arts, so as to restore the expressive capacities they needed in order to fulfill their original and proper functions once again. How could any ‘medium’ be adequate to any ‘message’? How could anything whatever serve as a means of expressing or symbolizing anything else? All over the artistic and intellectual field, we find men taking up this same critique. In what sense if any could music (for example), or painting, or architecture, or everyday language, be regarded as a ‘representation,’ or Darstellung? And what alternative ‘symbolic function’ could it be said to have? All those issues which Marshall McLuhan has popularized in the last few years were debated with far greater seriousness and rigor in the Vienna of Kraus and Boltzmann, Loos and Schonberg.

Currently Reading: Wittgenstein’s Vienna by Allan Janik & Stephen Toulmin 📚

Arrived: Thomas Browne: Selected Writings 📚

Ted Gioia: “This is James Daunt’s super power: He loves books.”

Not a Leg to Stand On by Theodore Dalrymple.

Soon at IWP Books: Theodor Haecker’s (1950) Journal in the Night.

From Theodor Haecker (1950) Journal in the Dark: “The essence of modern dictatorship is the combination of one-dimensional, flat thinking with power and terror.”

The Voice of Wisdom

From Erwin Chargaff’s (1986) Serious Questions: An ABC of Skeptical Reflections: In earlier days, when I was still what they call teaching at a university, I was sometimes asked questions that showed me the depth of misery over which the seemingly carefree, youthful mind was suspended. Not being a licensed guru I refrained from advice but, occasionally, out of the not very bulky fullness of my own experience, I could say a few words.

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New at IWP Books: Erwin Chargaff’s (1986) Serious Questions: An ABC of Skeptical Reflections.