Quotes: 5 December 2025
Lots to ponder
We must turn, in other words, to the French and the American Revolutions, and we must take into account that both were played in their initial stages by men who were firmly convinced that they would do no more than restore an old order of things that had been disturbed and violated by the despotism of absolute monarchy or the abuses of colonial government. They pleaded in all sincerity that they wanted to revolve back to old times when things had been as they ought to be.
This has given rise to a great deal of confusion, especially with respect to the American Revolution, which did not devour its own children and where therefore the men who had started the ‘restoration’ were the same men who began and finished the Revolution and even lived to rise to power and office in the new order of things. What they had thought was a restoration, the retrieving of their ancient liberties, turned into a revolution, and their thoughts and theories about the British constitution, the rights of Englishmen, and the forms of colonial government ended with a declaration of independence. But the movement which led to revolution was not revolutionary except by inadvertence . . . .
Arendt, Hannah. On Revolution (Penguin Classics) (p. 34). (Function). Kindle Edition.
As James Baldwin observed in 1962, “The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed that collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace.”
The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy
The decline of nations is closely linked, in turn, to the global decline of the middle class. Ever since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the fortunes of the nation-state have been bound up with those of the trading and manufacturing classes. The founders of modern nations, whether they were exponents of royal privilege like Louis XIV or republicans like Washington and Lafayette, turned to this class for support in their struggle against the feudal nobility. A large part of the appeal of nationalism lay in the state’s ability to establish a common market within its boundaries, to enforce a uniform system of justice, and to extend citizenship both to petty proprietors and to rich merchants, alike excluded from power under the old regime.
The weaknesses of the Articles seem readily apparent, at least if the end product was to be a central state and unified country. Yet viewed from the early 1780s, this was not necessarily the case. The rebellion against British rule built on growing suspicions of consolidated and distant power, and the political horizons of much of the leadership did not stretch beyond their states and localities. That was where meaningful power relations were constructed, deployed, and contested; where webs of patronage were spun; where the boundaries of rights were defined. We must also remember that successful rebellions in the Western Hemisphere against Spanish imperial rule—in Bolivia, Chile, Venezuela, and Mexico among them—made for a collection of republics rather than for a large one, and that the centrifugal forces in North America would remain formidable and politically consequential.
Acquisitive in the sense that his cravings have no limits, he does not accumulate goods and provisions against the future, in the manner of the acquisitive individualist of nineteenth-century political economy, but demands immediate gratification and lives in a state of restless, perpetually unsatisfied desire.
The only way out of the impasse of narcissism is the creation of cultural objects, “transitional objects,” that simultaneously restore a sense of connection with mothers and with Mother Nature and assert our mastery over nature, without denying our dependence on mothers or nature. It is precisely this compensatory activity, however, that is condemned by the party of the ego ideal—the party of Narcissus—on the grounds that substitute-gratifications are inherently pathological.
Memory, the mind’s power of having present what is irrevocably past and thus absent from the senses, has always been the most plausible paradigmatic example of the mind’s power to make invisibles present. By virtue of this power,the mind seems to be even stronger than reality; it pits its strength against the inherent futility of everything that is subject to change; it collects and re-collects what otherwise would be doomed to ruin and oblivion. The time region in which this salvage takes place is the Present of the thinking ego, a kind of lasting “todayness” (hodiemus, “of this day,” Augustine called God’s eternity), the “standing now” (nunc stans) of medieval meditation, an “enduring present” (Bergson’s présent qui dure), or “the gap between past and future,” as we called it in explicating Kafka’s time parable.
Just as Aristotle maintained we need both theoretical and practical reasoning, the same may be said of “monologic” (systemic) and dialogic conceptions of truth. Ethics and cultural understanding, but not mathematics or astronomy, require empathy. “The monologic way of perceiving cognition and truth is only one possible way. It arises only where consciousness is placed above existence.”
I was attracted to the unfashionable genre of biography, which captures some of the unpredictability that is essential to history—to what actually happened. Individuality tends to get washed out by retrospective accounts of what must have been according to the schemes we happen to believe right now. Writing about individuals restores some of the richness of the past and makes the present and future seem more open to choice.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
A motorcycle functions entirely in accordance with the laws of reason, and a study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself.
As interiority expands we move more easily into the small rooms of late-stage quarters, taking up less space in the world.