Walkable Quotes
Here are a few things that have caused me to stop, drop and roll in my reading of late.
Dallas Willard's Conspiracy Against Shallow Christianity
(from The Divine Conspiracy)
"The truly powerful ideas are precisely the ones that never have to justify themselves."
And then quoting John Maynard Keynes, "Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back."
(This is the stuff that gets my blood chugging on spin cycle. The ideas embedded in popular and fine works of art slowly but surely re-program, de-program, mal-program Joe and Jane in our pews. How do we as pastors expect our people to actually hear what we're saying when we have six days of pop culture ideology and academic intellectual crime competing against us?)
G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)
"'An artist is identical with an anarchist', [Mr. Lucian Gregory, the anarchist poet] cried. 'You might transpose the words anywhere. An anarchist is an artist. The man who thorws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything. He sees how much more valuable is one burst of blazing light, one peal of perfect thunder, than the mere common bodies of a few shapeless policemen. An artist disregards all governments, abolishes all conventions. The poet delights in disorder only'."
(And forty pages later our protagonist Gabriel Syme speaks with a curious policeman, unlike any he had ever come across. Finally the strange policeman reveals himself.)
"'The work of the philosophical policeman,' replied the man in blue, 'is at once bolder and more subtle than that of the ordinary detective. The ordinary detective goes to pot-houses to arrest thieves; we go to artistic tea-parties to detect pessimists. The ordinary detective discovers from a ledger or a diary that a crime has been committed. We discover from a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed."
(I looooove that last line: We discover that a crime shall be committed in the future. We need to keep thinking in 30 to 40-year chunks. What we're dealing with now is the "farming of ideas" in the '60s. What we're wanting to see happen in the Church will not come to fruition till the year 2037. Patience, my young paduan, patience.)
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
(Lord Henry speaking to Basil the artist.)
"It is a sad thing to think of, but there is no doubt that Genius lasts longer than Beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves. In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place. The thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-a-crac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value. . . .
Nowadays people know the price of everything, and the value of nothing."
(Once again the disquieting thing about this comment is that it was written on June 20, 1890. That's a smooth 120 years ago. Goodness gravy, almost incredible. Poets as seers, humans as self-recycling their issues from one century to another.)
Henri Nouwen on Loneliness
Dallas Willard's Conspiracy Against Shallow Christianity
(from The Divine Conspiracy)
"The truly powerful ideas are precisely the ones that never have to justify themselves."
And then quoting John Maynard Keynes, "Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back."
(This is the stuff that gets my blood chugging on spin cycle. The ideas embedded in popular and fine works of art slowly but surely re-program, de-program, mal-program Joe and Jane in our pews. How do we as pastors expect our people to actually hear what we're saying when we have six days of pop culture ideology and academic intellectual crime competing against us?)
G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)
"'An artist is identical with an anarchist', [Mr. Lucian Gregory, the anarchist poet] cried. 'You might transpose the words anywhere. An anarchist is an artist. The man who thorws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything. He sees how much more valuable is one burst of blazing light, one peal of perfect thunder, than the mere common bodies of a few shapeless policemen. An artist disregards all governments, abolishes all conventions. The poet delights in disorder only'."
(And forty pages later our protagonist Gabriel Syme speaks with a curious policeman, unlike any he had ever come across. Finally the strange policeman reveals himself.)
"'The work of the philosophical policeman,' replied the man in blue, 'is at once bolder and more subtle than that of the ordinary detective. The ordinary detective goes to pot-houses to arrest thieves; we go to artistic tea-parties to detect pessimists. The ordinary detective discovers from a ledger or a diary that a crime has been committed. We discover from a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed."
(I looooove that last line: We discover that a crime shall be committed in the future. We need to keep thinking in 30 to 40-year chunks. What we're dealing with now is the "farming of ideas" in the '60s. What we're wanting to see happen in the Church will not come to fruition till the year 2037. Patience, my young paduan, patience.)
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
(Lord Henry speaking to Basil the artist.)
"It is a sad thing to think of, but there is no doubt that Genius lasts longer than Beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves. In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place. The thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-a-crac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value. . . .
Nowadays people know the price of everything, and the value of nothing."
(Once again the disquieting thing about this comment is that it was written on June 20, 1890. That's a smooth 120 years ago. Goodness gravy, almost incredible. Poets as seers, humans as self-recycling their issues from one century to another.)
Henri Nouwen on Loneliness
(in The Wounded Healer)
"We live in a society in which loneliness has become one of the most painful human wounds. The growing competition and rivalry which pervade our lives from birth have created in us an acute awareness of our isolation. This awareness has in turn left many with a heightened anxiety and an intense search for the experience of unity and community."
(I am again struck by the prescience of his observation. Nouwen wrote these words in 1979, but they feel as if they could have been written today. It is so fantastical, or fantastically demented, how our society blithely marches forward into greater and greater loneliness, with more self-pleasing, self-enclosing technological gadgets that promise to keep us connected. But it seems to me that the more time we "connect" via phones and computers and text-messages and myspaces [Get it? "my"-space], and instant-messaging [for instant intimacy] and movie-watching and videogame tournaments--in short, via spectating, re-routed activity--the more our human relationships turn into information exchanges, not the exchange of souls and deep, hard-won love. The more we suck face with our technology, the more we become remade into the image of machines. We're forgetting what a human relationship actually is. We're forgetting how hard it is and how satisfying it is. So we're settling for "catching up" and "power-lunching" and "firing off a quick email to stay in touch," which makes me think of the artificial and marginless life.)
Walt Disney the happiest lonely man of the 20th century
(from Books & Culture, Mar/Apr 2007, Bill McKibben, "The Cheerful Solipsist," in a review of Neal Gabler's book Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination)
"'It was what one might have called the "tragedy of perfection", with all that was human driven out . . . It was the consummate act of wish fulfillment....
"It was a perfect corporate world: 'Disneyland had no ambiguity, no contradictions, and no dissonace'. The very opposite, that is, of a real town, a real community. . . :
'At Disneyland the guests were part of the overall atmosphere of happiness, and they reveled in their own manipulation because it was so well executed, because it was so comfortable and reassuring....'
"He died, in Gabler's words, 'quite possibly the most famouse man in America' but all 'among the loneliest'. With neither the consolations of religion or close friendship, he bowed out ten days past his 65th birthday, so terrified of death that he hadn't even left instructions for his burial."
"ABANDON HOPE, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE!"
(from Dante's Inferno, Canto 3)
"THROUGH ME LIES THE ROAD TO THE CITY OF GRIEF.
THROUGH ME LIES THE PATHEWAY TO WOE EVERLASTING.
THROUGH ME LIES THE ROAD TO THE SOULS THAT ARE LOST.
JUSTICE IMPELLED MY MIGHTY ARCHITECT:
THE POWER DIVINE, AND PRIMAL LOVE AND WISDOM
SURPASSING ALL, HAVE HERE CONSTRUCTED ME.
BEFORE I WAS CREATED, NOTHING WAS
SAVE THINGS ETERNAL. I SHALL LAST FOREVER.
ABANDON HOPE, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE!"
(Sheesh. Thank God Dante had a trilogy in mind. That's some seriously Oprah unfriendly stuff.)
A People Without Margin
(from R. Swenson's Margin: Restoring Emotional, Physical, Financial, and Time Reserves to Overloaded Lives)
"Our relationships are being starved to death by velocity. No one has the time to listen, let alone love."
"We are addicted, and progress knows it."
"Long-term friendships are increasingly rare."
"The driven live on the edge and wouldn't have it any other way. They eat, breathe, and sleep adrenaline. Productivity is the goal, not living."
"We are a tired society . . . In an attempt to squeeze more things in, we try to do two or three at the same time. Activity overload takes away the pleasure of anticipation and the delight of reminiscience . . . We take on too many relationships and too many responsibilities. We enroll in too many courses, hold down too many jobs, volunteer for too many tasks, make too many appointments, serve on too many committees, have too many friends. We are trying to be all things to all men all at once all by ourselves."
"It is God the Creator who made limits, and it is the same God who placed them within us for our protection. We exceed them at our peril."
(What's funny and demonic about all this is that I know the truth, I just don't do it. I know the good but I don't believe it. God help me. I have an early morning guys group that's reading through this book and we're trying to resist. We desperately want simple and quiet so we can experience contentment and fullness. But goodness gracious you'd think we were trying to find the double helix; or that damned elusive Pimpernel.)
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