John C. Wright's Journal

I found a comment on Twitter I would like to share:
Wei Wu 吴伟

@WuWei113

Abortion not good. Why? In China once was one child policy. This mean family only can have 1 child. Many abort kid of girl. I’m lucky. My family do not abort me when find out I’m girl. I’m Alice because my family do not conduct abortion.

i’m alive. not i’m alice. this is typing error.

My comment: just a reminder that deep wisdom can be spoken in plain words, in an unfamiliar tongue, even with typing error.

A quote from CS Lewis’ ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY EXCLUDING DRAMA. Here is the speaking of the sudden cessation of Scottish poetry.

But however we explain the phenomenon, it forces on our minds a truth which the incurably evolutionary or developmental character of modern thought is always urging us to forget. What is vital and healthy does not necessarily survive. Higher organisms are often conquered by lower ones. Arts as well as men are subject to accident and violent death.

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This is GK Chesterton in ORTHODOXY wryly noting the self imposed difficulties of Nietzsche and Tolstoy, whom he compare with a saint, namely, Joan of Arc.

[The] attempt to evade intellectualism ends in intellectualism, and therefore in death. The sortie has failed. The wild worship of lawlessness and the materialist worship of law end in the same void. Nietzsche scales staggering mountains, but he turns up ultimately in Tibet. He sits down beside Tolstoy in the land of nothing and Nirvana. They are both helpless—one because he must not grasp anything, and the other because he must not let go of anything.

The Tolstoyan’s will is frozen by a Buddhist instinct that all special actions are evil. But the Nietzscheite’s will is quite equally frozen by his view that all special actions are good; for if all special actions are good, none of them are special. They stand at the crossroads, and one hates all the roads and the other likes all the roads. The result is—well, some things are not hard to calculate. They stand at the cross-roads.

… By the accident of my present detachment, I can see the inevitable smash of the philosophies of Schopenhauer and Tolstoy, Nietzsche and Shaw, as clearly as an inevitable railway smash could be seen from a balloon. They are all on the road to the emptiness of the asylum. For madness may be defined as using mental activity so as to reach mental helplessness; and they have nearly reached it. He who thinks he is made of glass, thinks to the destruction of thought; for glass cannot think. So he who wills to reject nothing, wills the destruction of will; for will is not only the choice of something, but the rejection of almost everything.

… Joan of Arc was not stuck at the cross-roads, either by rejecting all the paths like Tolstoy, or by accepting them all like Nietzsche. She chose a path, and went down it like a thunderbolt. Yet Joan, when I came to think of her, had in her all that was true either in Tolstoy or Nietzsche, all that was even tolerable in either of them.

I thought of all that is noble in Tolstoy, the pleasure in plain things, especially in plain pity, the actualities of the earth, the reverence for the poor, the dignity of the bowed back. Joan of Arc had all that and with this great addition, that she endured poverty as well as admiring it; whereas Tolstoy is only a typical aristocrat trying to find out its secret.

And then I thought of all that was brave and proud and pathetic in poor Nietzsche, and his mutiny against the emptiness and timidity of our time. I thought of his cry for the ecstatic equilibrium of danger, his hunger for the rush of great horses, his cry to arms. Well, Joan of Arc had all that, and again with this difference, that she did not praise fighting, but fought. We KNOW that she was not afraid of an army, while Nietzsche, for all we know, was afraid of a cow.

Tolstoy only praised the peasant; she was the peasant. Nietzsche only praised the warrior; she was the warrior. She beat them both at their own antagonistic ideals; she was more gentle than the one, more violent than the other.

Yet she was a perfectly practical person who did something, while they are wild speculators who do nothing.

I wrote (or stole) this snatch of doggerel verse as a mnemonic to recall the hierarchy of angelic choirs, and for an aid when praying the final decade of the Glorious Mysteries.

I offer it here to my readers to honor the Feast Day of St. Darerca of Ireland, the sister of St. Patrick.

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“Woke” ideology aka Cultural Marxism as summed up by conservative commentator Jon Gabriel:
A religion with many paths to damnation, but none to redemption.

“The Dark Ages are a myth. The long centuries between the fall of Rome and the full emergence of a Christian Europe were incomparably the greatest period of moral improvement in human history. In the Classical world, such practices as infanticide, abortion, pederasty, sodomy, slavery, suicide, and crucifixion were everyday facts of life. Public entertainment in Rome included going to the Colosseum to watch gladiators kill each other or wild animals tear helpless people apart.

“As Christianity gained ascendancy, all these things were abolished by law. By the end of the so-called Dark Ages they had been banned throughout Christendom and ceased to exist, except insofar as they could be performed illicitly. Until recently we took their non-existence so much for granted that we forgot our huge debt to the Dark Ages — the very name of which signifies our modern ingratitude.

“The Dark Ages understood virtue and built a civilization; the progressive age doesn’t understand virtue and is tearing down the civilization it inherited.” – Joe Sobran

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A truly inspired insult is a work of art.

The stageplay has a different version, both in English and the original French. This is the wording as appeared in the 1950 version of CYRANO starring José Ferrer and directed by Michael Gordon. For the record, Edmond Rostand wrote the stageplay,  Brian Hooker the English translation, and Carl Foreman the screenplay.

***   ***   ***

Vicomte de Valvert: Monsieur, your nose… your nose is rather large.

Cyrano de Bergerac : Rather?… Is that all?

Vicomte : Well of course…

Cyrano : Oh, no, young sir. You are too simple. Why, you might have said a great many things. Why waste your opportunity?

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A recent discussion in this space touched on the topic of how, before there is one sovereign power to hold all tribes, tongues, and nations in awe, the conquest of land over generations is a tragic reality human law cannot ameliorate.

I mentioned in passing that the urge to deracinate the current landholders to return terrain to descendants of older claimants is an urge with no appeal to me, nor has been since my youth.

For better or worse, my first impression of the topic was informed by, of all things, a science fiction novel by the underrated and unfairly neglected grandmaster Jack Vance. I have seen no reason to revisit the issue. The attempt to effect a restitution for evils that befell before the current reign and realm of a prince or parliament was established is in vain, and, moreover, is pernicious if the attempt engenders evils equally as great.

Here is a quote from the Jack Vance science fiction book published as THE GRAY PRINCE, later, republished under the author’s preferred title THE DOMAINS OF KORYPHON.

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