Works Cited

One day, Churchill entered a men's room in the House of Commons and noticed Attlee at a urinal. Without saying anything, Churchill chose a urinal at the opposite side of the room. When Attlee took notice of Churchill, he said, "Feeling a bit standoffish today, Winston?" Churchill, who may have been waiting for this moment for years, replied: "That's right, Clement. Every time you see something big, you want to nationalize it."

Marcus Grothe, Viva la Repartee

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By some miraculous insight Plato seems to have foreseen, on the basis of what must have been very sparse evidence indeed at that time that: on the one hand, mathematics must be studied and understood for its own sake, and one must not demand completely accurate applicability to the objects of physical experience; on the other hand, the workings of the actual external world can ultimately be understood only in the terms of precise mathematics--which means in terms of Plato's ideal world 'accessible via the intellect'!

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It is a striking fact that all the established departures from the Newtonian picture have been, in some fundamental way, associated with the behaviour of light... It is reasonable to speculate that Newton himself would have been ready to accept that deep problems for his picture of the world lay hidden in the mysterious behaviour of light.

Roger Penrose, The Emperor's New Mind

Works Cited

["]But, Warren, please remember how it is:
He’s come to help you ditch the meadow.
He has a plan. You mustn’t laugh at him.
He may not speak of it, and then he may.
I’ll sit and see if that small sailing cloud
Will hit or miss the moon."

It hit the moon.
Then there were three there, making a dim row,
The moon, the little silver cloud, and she.

Robert Frost, The Death of the Hired Man

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Why then is there so much confidence in these numbers for the accurate description of physics, when our initial experience of the relevance of such numbers lies in a comparatively limited rage? This confidence--perhaps misplaced--must rest (although this fact is not often recognized) on the logical elegance, consistency, and mathematical power of the real number system, together with a belief in the profound mathematical harmony of Nature.

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How 'real' are the objects of the mathematician's world? From one point of view it seems that there can be nothing real about them at all. Mathematical objects are just concepts; they are the mental idealizations that mathematicians make, often stimulated by the appearance and seeming order of aspects of the world about us, but mental idealizations nevertheless. Can they be other than mere arbitrary constructions of the human mind? At the same time there often does appear to be some profound reality about these mathematical concepts, going quite beyond the mental deliberations of any particular mathematician. It is as though human thought is, instead, being guided towards some external truth--a truth which has a reality of its own, and which is revealed only partially to any one of us.

Roger Penrose, The Emperor's New Mind

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10. A Prayer in Spring


OH, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.

Oh, give us pleasure in the orchard white,
Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night;
And make us happy in the happy bees,
The swarm dilating round the perfect trees.

And make us happy in the darting bird
That suddenly above the bees is heard,
The meteor that thrusts in with needle bill,
And off a blossom in mid air stands still.

For this is love and nothing else is love,
The which it is reserved for God above
To sanctify to what far ends He will,
But which it only needs that we fulfil.

Robert Frost, A Boy's Will

Works Cited

In his memoir of the Sixties, Radical Son (1997), David Horowitz says that when a friend found out that Horowitz had never taken LSD, he said, "You have to take LSD. Until you've dropped acid, you don't know what socialism is."

Stephen Miller, Conversation: A History of a Declining Art

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At first glance it would seem that contemporary society in the West suffers mainly from a lack of politeness... Reviewing a contemporary memoir, a critic in an English newspaper said: "Frey [the author] can really write. Brilliantly. And if you don't think so, f*** you."

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In the mid-twentieth century many writers--among them Jean-Paul Sartre and Mary McCarthy--praised neo-Spartan regimes (China and North Vietnam) but preferred to live in Neo-Athenian regimes.

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Addison and Steele refer to many fictitious clubs. There is the Widow-Club, where the conversation "often turns upon their former Husbands, and it is very diverting to hear them relate their several Arts and Stratagems, with which they amused the Jealous, pacified the Cholerick, or wheedled the Good-natured Man, 'till at last, to use the Club-phrase, They sent him out of House with his Heels foremost." There is the Lawyers Club, whose members discuss "several Ways of abusing their Clients, with the Applause... given to him who has done it most Artfully."

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When the Earl once said to Wilkes: "You will die, sir, either on the gallows or from the pox," Wilkes replied: "That depends, sir, on whether I embrace your principles or your mistress."

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In Ben Jonson's Epicene (1609), a fatuous windbag and lecher named Sir Amorous La Foole brags of his French ancestry. Listening to his blather, another character says: "Did you ever hear such a wind-fucker as this?"

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After implying that the Apostles often were pompous bores, Woolf says their conversation improved immeasurably as a result of a peculiar incident, though she jokingly says that she may have invented the incident... "Suddenly the door opened and the long and sinister figure of Mr Lytton Strachey stood on the threshold... He pointed his finger at a stain on Vanessa's white dress. 'Semen?' he said." The word changed things utterly, Woolf says. "We burst out laughing. With that one word all barriers of reticence and reserve went down. A flood of the sacred fluid seemed to overwhelm us."

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Washington is a city of conversation because there is "a social indifference to the vulgar vociferous Market... Nobody was in 'business'--that was the sum and substance of it; and for the one large human assemblage on the continent of which this was true the difference made was huge."

...Going to Washington, he says, makes one "forget an hour the colossal greed of New York." Yet James may not have been as enamored of Washington as he claimed. Writing to Mrs. William James, he confesses: "to live here would be death and madness."

Stephen Miller, Conversation: A History of a Declining Art

Works Cited

I have met many intellectuals whose conversation was bad for my mind: Marxists, existentialists, postmodernists. A Marxist colleague at the National Enquirer, where I worked for several months in the mid-1960s, never stopped ranting about the evils of "the System." (He had a Ph.D. in history.) A colleague at a Washington think tank, where I worked in the mid-1970s, talked continually about the negative effects of modernity. (He had a Ph.D. in philosophy.) If I hear someone say modernity or dialectical or existential or psychoanalytical, I can no longer pay attention, for I am thinking--perhaps unfairly--that this person is going to bore me to death.

Stephen Miller, Conversation: A History of a Declining Art

Works Cited

I might as well give you my opinion of these two kinds of sin as long as, in a way, against each other we are pitting them,

And that is, don't bother your head about the sins of commission because however sinful, they must at least be fun or else you wouldn't be committing them.

It is the sin of omission, the second kind of sin,

That lays eggs under your skin.

The way you really get painfully bitten

Is by the insurance you haven't taken out and the checks you haven't added up the stubs of and the appointments you haven't kept and the bills you haven't paid and the letters you haven't written.

Also, about sins of omission there is one particularly painful lack of beauty,

Namely, it isn't as though it had been a riotous red-letter day or night every time you neglected to do your duty;

You didn't get a wicked forbidden thrill

Every time you let a policy lapse or forget to pay a bill;

You didn't slap the lads in the tavern on the back and loudly cry Whee,

Let's all fail to write just one more letter before we go home, and this round of unwritten letters is on me.

No, you never get any fun

Out of things you haven't done,

But they are the things that I do not like to be amid,

Because the suitable things you didn't do give you a lot more trouble than the unsuitable things you did.

The moral is that it is probably better not to sin at all, but if some kind of sin you must be pursuing,

Well, remember to do it by doing rather than by not doing.

Ogden Nash, Portrait of the Artist as a Prematurely Old Man

Works Cited

Love is not all: It is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain,
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
and rise and sink and rise and sink again.
Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
pinned down by need and moaning for release
or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It may well be. I do not think I would.

Millay

Works Cited

Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid. To open the mind so wide as to keep nothing in it or out of it is not a virtue; it is the vice of the feeble-minded.

G.K. Chesterton, Autobiography

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Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?

Frost, Reluctance

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When the black snake
flashed onto the morning road,
and the truck could not swerve--
death, that is how it happens.

Now he lies looped and useless
as an old bicycle tire.
I stop the car
and carry him into the bushes.

He is as cool and gleaming
as a braided whip, he is as beautiful and quiet
as a dead brother.
I leave him under the leaves

and drive on, thinking
about death: its suddenness,
its terrible weight,
its certain coming. Yet under

reason burns a brighter fire, which the bones
have always preferred.
It is the story of endless good fortune.
It says to oblivion: not me!

It is the light at the center of every cell.
It is what sent the snake coiling and flowing forward
happily all spring through the green leaves before
he came to the road.

Mary Oliver, The Black Snake

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May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.

Robert Frost, Birches

Works Cited

Those who think that they have had religious experiences of their own have to judge for themselves the quality of that experience. But the great majority of the adherents to the world's religions are relying not on religious experience of their own but on revelations that were supposedly experienced by others. It might be thought that this is not so different from the theoretical physicist relying on the experiments of other, but there is an important distinction. The insights of thousands of individual physicists have converged to a satisfying (though incomplete) common understanding of physical reality. In contrast, the statements about God or anything else that have been derived from religious revelation point in radically different directions. After thousands of years of theological analysis, we are no closer now to a common understanding of the lessons of religious revelation.

Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory

Works Cited

A firm whose behavior was consistent with a myopic pricing strategy [a strategy involving maximizing current profit even if it results in strengthening competitors in the long run] was the Reynolds International Pen Corporation. Reynolds was one of the inventors of the ballpoint pen. Starting in 1945, it sold its ballpoint pen for between $12 and $20, while unit cost was only 80 cents. In response to this high price, a hundred competitors rushed into the market. By 1948, Reynold's market share was zero! However, it made off with considerable profits over that three-year period.

W. Kip Viscusi, et al Economics of Regulation and Antitrust

The Last Question

Jacob linked to this Asimov story. I enjoyed it.

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The working of the emotional mind is to a large degree state-specific, dictated by the particular feeling ascendant at a given moment. How we think and act when we are feeling romantic is entirely different from how we behave when enraged or dejected; in the mechanics of emotion, each feeling has its own distinct repertoire of thought, reactions, even memories. These state-specific repertoires become most predominant in moments of intense emotion.

One sign that such a repertoire is active is selective memory. Part of the mind's response to an emotional situation is to reshuffle memory and options for action so that those most relevant are at the top of the hierarchy and so more readily enacted. And, as we have seen, each major emotion has its hallmark biological signature, a pattern of sweeping changes that entrain the body as that emotion becomes ascendant, and a unique set of cues the body automatically sends out when in its grip.


Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence

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A great many people seem to think that if you are a Christian yourself you should try to make divorce difficult for every one. I do not think that. At least I know I should be very angry if the Mohammedans tried to prevent the rest of us from drinking wine. My own view is that the Churches should frankly recognise that the majority of the British people are not Christians and, therefore, cannot be expected to live Christian lives. There ought to be two distinct kinds of marriage: one governed by the State with rules enforced on all citizens, the other governed by the Church with rules enforced by her on her own members. The distinction ought to be quite sharp, so that a man knows which couples are married in a Christian sense and which are not.

...

If there must be a head, why the man? Well, firstly, is there any very serious wish that it should be the woman? As I have said, I am not married myself, but as far as 1 can see, even a woman who wants to be the head of her own house does not usually admire the same state of things when she finds it going on next door. She is much more likely to say "Poor Mr. X! Why he allows that appalling woman to boss him about the way she does is more than I can imagine." I do not think she is even very nattered if anyone mentions the fact of her own "headship." There must be something unnatural about the rule of wives over husbands, because the wives themselves are half ashamed of it and despise the husbands whom they rule. But there is also another reason; and here I speak quite frankly as a bachelor, because it is a reason you can see from outside even better than from inside. The relations of the family to the outer world--what might be called its foreign policy--must depend, in the last resort, upon the man, because he always ought to be, and usually is, much more just to the outsiders. A woman is primarily fighting for her own children and husband against the rest of the world. Naturally, almost, in a sense, rightly, their claims override, for her, all other claims. She is the special trustee of their interests. The function of the husband is to see that this natural preference of hers is not given its head. He has the last word in order to protect other people from the intense family patriotism of the wife. If anyone doubts this, let me ask a simple question. If your dog has bitten the child next door, or if your child has hurt the dog next door, which would you sooner have to deal with, the master of that house or the mistress? Or, if you are a married woman, let me ask you this question. Much as you admire your husband, would you not say that his chief failing is his tendency not to stick up for his rights and yours against the neighbours as vigorously as you would like? A bit of an Appeaser?

...

War is a dreadful thing, and I can respect an honest pacifist, though I think he is entirely mistaken. What I cannot understand is this sort of semipacifism you get nowadays which gives people the idea that though you have to fight, you ought to do it with a long face and as if you were ashamed of it. It is that feeling that robs lots of magnificent young Christians in the Services of something they have a right to, something which is the natural accompaniment of courage--a kind of gaity and wholeheartedness.

...

There is no need to be worried by facetious people who try to make the Christian hope of "Heaven" ridiculous by saying they do not want "to spend eternity playing harps." The answer to such people is that if they cannot understand books written for grown-ups, they should not talk about them.

...

But to point out that I, who use Whitesmile's (and also have inherited bad teeth from both my parents), have not got as fine a set as some healthy young Negro who never used toothpaste at all, does not, by itself, prove that the advertisements are untrue.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

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All the same, the New Testament, without going into details, gives us a pretty clear hint of what a fully Christian society would be like. Perhaps it gives us more than we can take. It tells us that there are to be no passengers or parasites: if man does not work, he ought not to eat. Every one is to work with his own hands, and what is more, every one's work is to produce something good: there will be no manufacture of silly luxuries and then of sillier advertisements to persuade us to buy them. And there is to be no "swank" or "side," no putting on airs. To that extent a Christian society would be what we now call Leftist. On the other hand, it is always insisting on obedience-obedience (and outward marks of respect) from all of us to properly appointed magistrates, from children to parents, and (I am afraid this is going to be very unpopular) from wives to husbands. Thirdly, it is to be a cheerful society: full of singing and rejoicing, and regarding worry or anxiety as wrong. Courtesy is one of the Christian virtues; and the New Testament hates what it calls "busybodies."

If there were such a society in existence and you or I visited it, I think we should come away with a curious impression. We should feel that its economic life was very socialistic and, in that sense, "advanced," but that its family life and its code of manners were rather old-fashioned-perhaps even ceremonious and aristocratic. Each of us would like some bits of it, but I am afraid very few of us would like the whole thing.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity