the less he said

. . . Later, I came to see that Mr. Dickens and Mr. Wordsworth were thinking of men like me when they wrote their words. But most of all, I believe that Williamson Shakespeare was. Mind you, I cannot always make sense of what he says, but it will come.

It seems to me the less he said, the more beauty he made. Do you know what sentence of his I admire the most? It is 'The bright day is done, and we are for the dark.'

I wish I'd known those words on the day I watched those German troops land, plane-load after plane-load of them - and come off ships down in the harbor! All I could think of was damn them, damn them, over and over. If I could have thought the words 'the bright day is done and we are for the dark,' I'd have been consoled somehow and ready to go out and contend with circumstance - instead of my heart sinking to my shoes.

p. 63, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows.

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civil-ization

Civilization has never been the product of armies and factories. It is the fruit of the always tenuous marriage of the farmer and the merchant.

Andrew Kern, Quiddity blog, May 10, 2009

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the frailty of modern science

The only science we have or can have is human science; it has human limits and is involved always with human ignorance and human error. It is a fact that the solutions invented or discovered by sciece have tended to lead to new problems or to become problems themselves . . . Our daily lives are a daily mockery of our scientific pretensions.

p. 32-33, An Essay Against Modern Superstition, Wendell Berry.

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