Posts in Arts & culture
Words Worth Noting - January 5, 2025

“It looked at Ransom in silence and at last began to smile. We have all often spoken – Ransom himself had often spoken – of a devilish smile. Now he realized that he had never taken the words seriously. The smile was not bitter, nor raging, nor, in an ordinary sense, sinister; It was not even mocking. It seemed to summon Ransom, with a horrible naïveté of welcome, into the world of its own pleasures, as if all men were at one in those pleasures, as if they were the most natural thing in the world and no dispute could ever have occurred about them. It was not furtive, nor ashamed, it had nothing of the conspirator in it. It did not defy goodness, it ignored it to the point of annihilation. Ransom perceived that he had never before seen anything but half-hearted and uneasy attempts at evil. This creature was whole-hearted. The extremity of its evil had passed beyond all struggle into some state which bore a horrible similarity to innocence. It was beyond vice as the Lady was beyond virtue.”

C.S. Lewis Perelandra [it being a devil who has possessed the body of the late scientist Edward Rolles Weston]

Words Worth Noting - January 4, 2025

“my husband… recently took up the gentle art of bee-keeping. After a disastrous start… he triumphed with a ninth-place finish in the fiercely fought honey competition at the Royal Winter Fair. He and his fellow drones… beat out literally tens of entries from all over the province…”

Margaret Wente in Globe & Mail December 24, 2004

Words Worth Noting - January 3, 2025

“What the world wants, what the world is waiting for, is not Modern Poetry or Classical Poetry or Neo-Classical Poetry – but Good Poetry. And the dreadful disreputable doubt, which stirs in my own sceptical mind, is a doubt about whether it would really matter much what style a poet chose to write in, in any period, so long as he wrote Good Poetry.”

G.K. Chesterton in “About Poetry” in As I Was Saying quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #1 (Sept.-Oct. 2023)

Words Worth Noting - January 1, 2025

“I was an insatiable book reader from the age of five. The list below of some of my favourites as a teenager may give the impression that I’m showing off, but I’m not: it is quite honest. History of England by Macaulay, Essays by Francis Bacon, Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, Vanity Fair by Thackeray, Little Lord Fauntleroy by Frances Hodgson Burnett, Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, Poems by John Keats, Paradise Lost by John Milton, the Sherlock Holmes stories by Conan Doyle, Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain, and the novels and stories of Rudyard Kipling. Thank you for reminding me of those wonderful days when I read so many exciting things the first time period./ Sincerely, Rex Stout.”

Nero Wolfe creator Rex Stout in response to the school newspaper of Junior High School 115 in New York City asking him in 1967 “Which book or books were your favourites as a teenager and why?” [in a note at the end of Rex Stout Three Witnesses]