“When the tide is receding from the beach it is easy to have the illusion that one can empty the ocean by removing water with a pail.”
Rene Dubos, quoted in Laurie Garrett, The Coming Plague: Newly Emergent Diseases in a World out of Balance
“During the 19th century, and through much of the early 20th, Hamlet was regarded as Shakespeare’s central and most significant play, because it dramatized a central preoccupation of the age of Romanticism: the conflict of consciousness and action; the sense of consciousness as a withdrawal from action which could make for futility, and yet was all that could prevent action from becoming totally mindless.”
Northrop Frye Northrop Frye on Shakespeare
“There are no bad things, only bad uses of things.”
G.K. Chesterton “in his book on St. Thomas Aquinas” quoted by Gabriel Ahlquist in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 6 (July-August 2023) [but in defence of AI which I suspect may test that rule severely]
“Ottawa goes tame”
One of mine from May 20, 2007 re the Senators reaching the Stanley Cup final.
“We do not see in the past a perpetual line of increasing liberation or enlargement of artistic experiment. What we see in the past is the much more human business of men first doing something badly; then doing it well; then doing it too well – or, at least, too easily and too often. Then they commonly begin to do something else; but the thing is much more often an old thing than a new thing.”
G.K. Chesterton in “Novelty in Art” in Illustrated London News October 6, 1928, reprinted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 6 (July-August 2023) [critiquing “the rather antiquated theory of progress”.]
“An After School Satan Club plans to begin offering activities to children at a Tennessee elementary school following Christmas break, officials said. The Satanic Temple plans to host the club at Chimneyrock Elementary School in Cordova, news outlets reported.... A flyer about the club says the Satanic Temple is a non-theistic religion that views Satan ‘as a literary figure who represents a metaphorical construct of rejecting tyranny and championing the human mind and spirit.’ It says it does not attempt to convert children to any religious ideology, but offers activities that ‘emphasize a scientific, rationalistic, non-superstitious worldview.’”
Associated Press December 13, 2023
In a departure from my normal grouchy columnist routine, I had a piece in the Kingston Whig-Standard urging people to volunteer for their local lake association (or similar group). Please consider it.
In my latest Epoch Times column I say there is much to celebrate on Canada Day/Dominion Day, as well as much to fix, and say let’s do it.