Propose to an Englishman any principle, or any instrument, however admirable, and you will observe that the whole effort of the English mind is directed to find a difficulty, or an impossibility in it. If you speak to him of a machine for peeling a potato, he will pronounce it impossible: if you peel a potato with it before his eyes, he will declare it useless, because it will not slice a pineapple.
- Charles Babbage
The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal—God is the Omnipotent Father—hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates.
- Gore Vidal
Excerpts from The News, Alain de Botton:
- "Properly told, stories are able to operate on two levels. On the surface, they deal with particulars involving a range of facts related to a given time and place, a local culture and a social group - and it is these specifics that tend to bore us whenever they lie outside our own experience. But then, a layer beneath the particulars, the universals are hidden: the psychological, social and political themes that transcend the stories' temporal and geographical settings and are founded on unvarying fundamentals of human nature."
- "The problem is that the reporting methodologies developed by the modern news media - which privilege factually accurate, technologically speedy, impersonal, crisis-focused coverage to the near exclusion of any other kind - have by error led to a sort of globalized provincialism, whereby we at once know a good deal and don't care very much."
- "This, Auden wants to tell us, is what artists do: they notice stuff; the small and unobtrusive stuff that other people - ploughmen and shepherds, you and me, and journalists in a hurry - miss and yet that is essential to halting our usual indifference and callousness."
- "A contented resignation to a modest condition has come to seem not only a grave error, but possibly a sign of mental illness."
- "This is part of the reason we must keep checking the news in the first place: we might at any moment be informed of some extraordinary development that will fundamentally alter reality."
- "The news hub has the institutional amnesia of a hospital's accident and emergency department: nightly the bloodstains are wiped away and the memories of the dead erased."
- "But we will have nothing substantial to offer anyone else so long as we have not first mastered the art of being patient midwives to our own thoughts."
Excerpts from The News, Alain de Botton:
- "Rather than an impression of political possibility, an encounter with the news may usher in an impression of our nothingness in an unimprovable and fundamentally chaotic universe."
- "Before we despair at the calamities that apparently surround us on all sides, we should remember that the news is ultimately only one set of stories about what is happening out there, no more and no less."
- "It invites us to the conference table and into the parliament, it introduces us to the key players, then it shows us nothing but inexplicable delays, strange compromises and maddening evasions. It can feel as though we are daily being invited to watch helplessly while a close friend drowns behind a plate-glass window."
- "The man who shouts every time he loses his house keys is betraying a beautiful but rash faith in a universe in which house keys never go astray."
- "Here was a homogenizing force in danger of stamping out all the productive oddities of interior life and of turning the rich, idiosyncratic handcrafted kitchen gardens of the mind into rolling, mechanized, insipid wheatfields."
Excerpts from The News, Alain de Botton:
- "Yet for all its determined pursuit of the anomalous, the one thing the news skilfully avoids training its eye on is itself, and the predominant position it has achieved in our lives."
- "It fails to disclose that it does not merely report on the world, but is instead constantly at work crafting a new planet in our minds in line with its own often highly distinctive priorities."
- "Once our formal education is finished, the news is our teacher."
- "The news, however dire it may be and perhaps especially when it is at its worst, can come as a relief from the claustrophobic burden of living with ourselves, of forever trying to do justice to our own potential and of struggling to persuade a few people in our limited orbit to take our ideas and needs seriously."
- "What an achievement a moment of calm is now, what a minor miracle the ability to fall asleep or to talk undistracted with a friend - and what monastic discipline would be required to make us turn away from the maelstrom of news and listen for a day to nothing but the rain and our own thoughts."
- "News organizations are coy about admitting that what they present us with each day are miniscule extracts of narratives whose true shape and logic can generally only emerge from a perspective of months or even years - and that it would hence be often wiser to hear the story in chapters rather than snatched sentences. They are institutionally committed to implying that it is inevitably better to have a shaky and partial grasp of a subject this minute than to wait for a more secure and comprehensive understanding somewhere down the line."
James Matthew Barrie (1860-1937), the beloved Scottish playwright who created one of literature's iconic characters, Peter Pan, formed an unlikely friendship with Arthur Conan Doyle that survived many years and vast differences between two of the most popular writers of their time.
Conan Doyle was a sportsman. Fond of skiing, he has been credited with introducing that vigorous activity to Switzerland. An aficianado of pugilism, he was praised for his skills as a boxer and wrote two books with boxing themes: Rodney Stone (1896), which focused on bare-knuckle fighting during the Regency era, and The Croxley Master: A Great Tale of the Prize Ring (1907), about a boxing medical student. Famously, Conan Doyle was asked to referee the racially charged Jack Johnson-Jim Jeffries heavyweight championship fight in 1910. Johnson, the new champion, was an arrogant black man, so Jeffries, the old former champion, was called out of retirement in the interest of white supremacy. Conan Doyle declined the offer, stating that it was more likely to foster bigotry than combat it.
Barrie, on the other hand, stopped growing when he was still quite small (5'3" according to his passport), was extremely introverted, and though he was married, his relationship was apparently uncomssumated. "Boys can't love," he explained to his wife.
Nonetheless, Barrie and his friends, Jerome K. Jerome, Conan Doyle, P.G. Wodehouse, and others, founded a cricket club, called Allahakbarries. Conan Doyle was the only member who could actually play cricket.
- from Otto Penzler's introduction to J.M Barrie's Sherlock Holmes pastiche, "The Late Sherlock Holmes", in The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories.
