Re the 2nd-rate composers who get exposure on “In the Shadow on Tom Allen’s excellent CBC Radio program, Music and Company… One must learn to recognize the signposts of mediocrity in life which, as a friend intoned recently, is too short to drink bad wine…. Probably 90 per cent of the renovations in our major cities would qualify for a visual version of In the Shadow – cautionary tales of mediocrity rampant on a field of good intentions.”

William Thorsell in Globe & Mail June 2, 2003 [ironically the same William Thorsell who oversaw a dreadful renovation of the Royal Ontario Museum].

“The product of over-civilisation is shamelessness.”

G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News May 2, 1908, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #1 (9-10/22)

“There’s just gotta be a place up ahead where men ain’t low-down and poker’s played fair. If there weren’t, what are all the songs about? I’ll see y’all there and we can sing together, and shake our heads over all the meanness in the Used-To-Be.”

The last words of Buster Scruggs as he approaches heaven with his harp and the duet fades out, in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.

“the decade that taste forgot”

Regarding the 1970s, and attributed to “one journalist” by David P. Deavel in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #1 (9-10/22) (in a piece saying the late Fr. James V. Schall “never succumbed to the 1970s habit too many of his Jesuit confreres had of wearing the intellectual and spiritual (not to mention sartorial) clothing of that decade”.

Claiming a special French “right to idleness”, radical eco-feminist Green MP Sandrine Rousseau said hard work was “essentially a Right-wing value”.

The Telegraph November 14, 2022 [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/11/14/french-have-got-even-lazier-study-shows-vast-majority-happy/]; I trust she did not overstrain herself writing that admission disguised as a boast.

“Boomers, we know, didn’t appreciate getting long in the tooth. They’re the ones who started this whole fight against Old. But as a Gen Xer, I have to assume it’s worse for us. Our entire gestalt is built around an aura of disaffected youth. There is no natural progression for that energy into middle age. I don’t see us easing into words like ‘seasoned’ or ‘mature.’ Millennials will no doubt take their own kind of offense to aging when it’s their turn, but that is not our cross to bear.”

Pamela Paul “Wait, Who Did You Say Is Middle-Aged?” opinion piece in New York Times October 16, 2022

“An acquaintance who worked in United States Air Force intelligence tells the story of a pilot who was imprisoned in North Vietnam for many years, and lost eighty pounds and much of his health in a jungle camp. When he was released, one of the first things he asked for was to play a game of golf. To the great astonishment of his fellow officers he played a superb game, despite his emaciated condition. To their inquiries he replied that every day of his imprisonment he imagined himself playing eighteen holes, carefully choosing his clubs and approach and systematically varying the course. This discipline not only helped preserve his sanity, but apparently also kept his physical skills intact.”

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Flow [though if I spent every day imagining myself playing what passes for golf in my life I assure you it would not help preserve what passes for sanity in it]

“To know, but to be as though not knowing, is the height of wisdom.”

Last passage in Bruce Lee, Striking Thoughts