The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency – the belief that the here and now is all there is.
The inflamed sensitivity induced by radicalized democratic theory finally experiences any limit as arbitrary and tyrannical. There are no absolutes; freedom is absolute. Of course the result is that, on the one hand, the argument justifying freedom disappears and, on the other, all beliefs begin to have the attenuated character that was initially supposed to be limited to religious belief.
I suggest that we need a generation or two not of theory but of an attempt to discover the real phenomena of eros.
I have no desire... to preach a high-minded and merely edifying version of love.
Shakespeare is to me the purest voice of nature, and he does no meddle with nature. His plays provide us with the greatest variety of erotic expression, and with Shakespeare eros is the proper term to use.
The most striking fact about contemporary university students is that there is no longer any canon of books which forms their taste and imagination... This state of affairs itself reflects the deeper fact of the decay of the common understanding of – and agreement on – first principles that is characteristic of our times.
Utopianism is, as Plato taught us at the outset, the fire with which we must play because it is the only way we can find out what we are. We need to criticize false understandings of Utopia, but the easy way out provided by realism is deadly.
But nowhere is this a more urgent task than in matters of eros, the first and best hope of human connectedness in a world where all connectedness has become problematic.
I simply try to act as an honest broker for greater persons and writers than I am... I present no theory, nor do I have one... I have constructed no Schema... in terms of the struggle between Eros and agape and the futility of the former in the face of the latter. I have no aspirations, hoping only to show you what some great writers thought these things are.
Here’s a real man!” I said. “It’s been pretty transparent all along that other people’s opinions about these things wouldn’t be enough for you.
There is a quest, but ever more hopeless, for arrangements and ways of putting the broken pieces back together. The task is equivalent to squaring the circle, because everyone loves himself most but wants others to love him more than they love themselves. Such is particularly the demand of children, against which parents are now rebelling.
Openness used to be the virtue that permitted us to seek the good by using reason.
Music, as everyone experiences, provides an unquestionable justification and a fulfilling pleasure for the activities it accompanies: the soldier who hears the marching band is enthralled and reassured; the religious man is exalted in his prayer by the sound of the organ in the church; and the lover is carried away and his conscience stilled by the romantic guitar. Armed with music, man can damn rational doubt.
What poor substitutes for real diversity are the wild rainbows of dyed hair and other external differences that tell the observer nothing about what is inside.
In us the contempt for the heroic is only an extension of the perversion of the democratic principle that denies greatness and wants everyone to feel comfortable in his skin without having to suffer unpleasant comparisons.
He argued that the spirit’s bow was being unbent and risked being permanently unstrung.
Most writers in older lands despaired of being understood by those who had not lived their language.
People sup together, play together, travel together, but they do not think together.
Contrary to what is commonly thought, without the book even the idea of the order of the whole is lost.
Without the great revelations, epics and philosophies as part of our natural vision, there is nothing to see out there, and eventually little left inside.
Cultural relativism destroys both one’s own and the good.