Quotation Happiness

From "Time Travel", by Lewis H. Lapham, in Harper's, on the loss of Arthur Schlessinger Jr.

AS: Many signs point to a growing historical consciousness among the American people. I trust that this is so. It is useful to remember that history is to the nation as memory is to the individual. As persons deprived of memory become disoriented and lost, not know where they have been and where they are going, so a nation denied a conception of the past will be disabled in dealing with its present and its future.

AS:Problems will always torment us because all important problems are insoluble: that is why they are important. The good comes from the continuing struggle to try and solve them, not from the vain hope of their solution.

And Goethe too: He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living hand to mouth.

Roots, something the vast PoMo play in signifiers, now a context for us in America, the sad, bad kind of PoMo. Transcending this requires not the forgetting of history, but lots of knowledge of it in order to responsibly imagine our future.

And LH:Just as the fifteenth-century printing press made possible the overthrow of a settled aesthetic and political order, so also in the twenty-first century the revolutionary forms of high-speed communication -- television, computers, the Internet, cell phones -- give rise to new structure of feeling and thought. (PP) Narrative becomes montage, and our ministers of state forget why and how we go to war. Our news broadcasts bring us the world in twenty-two minutes. Hollywood markets its product to audiences assigned and average age of sixteen and believed to be happily at play in the bathtubs of the Everlasting Now. ...

Worth some attention, this essay.

And now these from Cry, the Beloved Country, by Alan Paton, which I just finished, and because these sentences actually sing:

Therefore I shall devote myself, my time, my energy, my talents, to the service of South Africa. I shall no longer as myself if this or that is expedient, but only if it is right. I shall do this, not because I am noble or unselfish, but because life slips away, and because I need for the rest of my journey a star that will not play false to me, a compass that will not lie....

I do this not because I am courageous or honest, but because it is the only way to end the conflict of my deepest soul. I do it because I am no longer able to aspire to the highest with one part of myself, and to deny it with another.

-- And against what was young Jarvis working?

Yet men were afraid, with fear that was deep, deep in the heart, a fear so deep that they hid their kindness, or brought it out with fierceness and anger, and hid it behind fierce and frowning eyes. They were afraid because they were so few. And such fear could not be cast out, but by love.

Nice things to carry about in oneself.