From Theodor Haecker’s (1950) Journal in the Night: “The soul of the man who only has ears for the noise of these times will soon be miserably impoverished. He will soon be found to be deaf to all reasonable language.”
From Erwin Chargaff’s (1986) Serious Questions: “Clearly, a chase has been declared on that odious three-letter word, and I expect soon to encounter woperson for woman, huperson for human, personhole for manhole, to personage for to manage, etc. I find the idea that you can scrabble your way to a new consciousness ridiculous. If this form of linguistic Luddism is not stopped by its own absurdity, we may still hear of Hebrews and Shebrews.”
From Erwin Chargaff’s (1986) Serious Questions: “…I fear that, if we continue our efforts in the direction that we have given them during the last fifty years, the prediction made by Thomas Love Peacock more that one hundred and twenty years ago may well come true: ‘I almost think it is the ultimate destiny of science to exterminate the human race.’”
From Theodor Haecker’s (1950) Journal in the Night: “What is the most difficult thing for men? Measure: ‘the golden mean’. And this is true in theory, in teaching as in practice, in doing and acting. And that makes one despair that things will go better after this war. Those with a sense of measure will not have the power to make the peace, and those who have the power will make peace without ‘measure’.”
From Theodor Haecker’s (1950) Journal in the Night: “It is difficult enough to know one’s way about in one’s own thoughts; how much more difficult where one’s feelings are concerned.”
Alan Jacobs (@ayjay): “Please read this from Anne Snyder about all the cool and important things she is (we are) doing with Comment.”
More or Less Complete Rubbish
From Erwin Chargaff’s (1986) Serious Questions (Soon at IWP Books): I know many people who, besides listening to the radio, spend at least three hours a day before the television set. That means that they spend nearly one month and a half in a year on this form of amusement. If they do that for fifty years, they have expended six and a quarter years of their lives sitting before that box, imbibing more or less complete rubbish.
In Prayer and in Leadership
From Theodor Haecker’s (1950) Journal in the Night: Man, it seems, is not equal to setting up a just social order on his own. He is hardly able even to perceive the two principles upon which he has to build, namely that men are equal and unequal and consequently that he must be true to both principles. As a rule he prefers the easier way and takes only one as his starting point: either equality, or inequality.
Jewish Portraits by Klaas Berghout: Erwin Chargaff; Fritz Stern; Hans Jonas; Erika Landau; Yeshayahu Leibowitz; &c.
Rio Negro, Amazon, 2022
Arrived: The Third Walpurgis Night by Karl Kraus 📚
Arrived: Lessons of the Masters by George Steiner 📚
A Learned Ignoramus
“Previously, men could be divided simply into the learned and the ignorant, those more or less the one, and those more or less the other. But your specialist cannot be brought in under either of these two categories. He is not learned, for he is formally ignorant of all that does not enter into his speciality; but neither is he ignorant, because he is ‘a scientist,’ and ‘knows’ very well his own tiny portion of the universe.
Stupendous Floods of Information
“Today the number of facts which are accessible are prodigious. Newspapers, radios, libraries pour over us every moment of our lives their stupendous floods of information so that perhaps the greatest educational problem of today is how to teach people to ignore the irrelevant, how to refuse to know things, before they are suffocated. For too many facts are as bad as none at all. Were I ever to write a volume for that famous How To series, it would be on How not to read more than 1500 words a day.
The Intellectual Life
IWP Books: Philip Gilbert Hamerton, 1875, The Intellectual Life (PDF). About which Jacques Barzun wrote: “There is on my shelves a book of late Victorian aspect which I once picked up at a secondhand shop for a very small sum, and which I occasionally dip into for pleasure and wisdom. It is called The Intellectual Life, and was written by Philip Gilbert Hamerton, around 1875…. The combination of ludicrous primness and outspoken good sense in Hamerton’s pages makes the work an ideal bedside book, but it is for the deliberate treatment of his subject as a whole that I respect and value him.
The Confusion of Language
From Erwin Chargaff’s (1986) Serious Questions: The most direct sign of decay is, for me at any rate, the confusion of language. I am not thinking of the present-day Tower of Babel in which it is only natural that innumerable, mutually unintelligible specialist jargons of science and scholarship are heard. But consider the language of advertising, which is also that of politics, the language of daily life, the language in which letters are written now.
The Devil's Doctrine
From Erwin Chargaff’s (1977) Voices in the Labyrinth (PDF): I should now like to introduce you to what I call the “Devil’s doctrine.” It says: What can be done must be done. This innocent-sounding and useful maxim – it abolishes with one stroke all problems of conscience and free will – is of comparatively recent origin. Even during the industrial revolution, when the unholy marriage between science and technology was consummated, the brutalization of the scientific imagination, so characteristic of our time, progressed only slowly.
Auguste Rodin, 1882, Grief. Tel Aviv Museum of Art
Alberto Giacometti, 1958, Small Bust of Diego. Tel Aviv Museum of Art
Finished Reading: Diary of the Dark Years, 1940-1944: Collaboration, Resistance, and Daily Life in Occupied Paris by Jean Guéhenno 📚
Currently Reading: Anti-Freud: Karl Kraus’s Criticism of Psycho-analysis and Psychiatry by Thomas Szasz 📚
Currently Reading: Serious Questions: An ABC of Skeptical Reflections by Erwin Chargaff 📚
Soon an IWP Book.
Books by John Jay Chapman, Albert Jay Nock, G. Lowes Dickinson, Anne Goodwin Winslow & More at IWP Books.
“Conspiracies of well-meaning people frequently end by the conspirators meaning less and less well.” Erwin Chargaff