“Man must be taught to see things as symbols – must be trained to use them for effect, and never for themselves. Above all, the door of delight must remain firmly closed.”
Some bright young devil's pitch to Satan at a board meeting in Hell in Robert Capon The Supper of the Lamb p. 111 (hence Capon’s imagined “Harry” who on p. 112 refuses noodles with the Chicken Paprikash because he’s counting calories. “There are, to be sure, greater blasphemies than that against the goodness of creation; but none illustrates better the fundamental antimaterialism of the age. Harry sits in front of one of the finest and simplest goods in the world, and he begs off, not because he does not like it, but because he has ceased to see it. Noodles, for him, are not unique and delightful beings; they have become an abstract subject called highly caloric food. No matter to him that Martha made the noodles herself – that he has before him something he will not meet again for years: He turns them down precisely because they are, to him, no matter at all. It is calories, not noodles, that count…. How sad, then, to see real beings – Harry and all his fellow calorie counters – living their lives in abject terror of things that do not even go bump in the night.”
“‘Frankly,’ I reply, ‘I wouldn’t know how to describe the difference.’”
John O’Sullivan in National Review March 25, 1996 (the specific reference was people who diet down to ugly sticks then ask “Notice any change in me?” but it offers far broader “He’s an extraordinary man” possibilities)
In my latest Loonie Politics column I condemn the Liberals for promising us the moon on health care and climate without explaining how they’ll lasso it and haul it down or why, if they know how to perform such lovely miracles, they didn’t do either at any point during their past four years in power.
In my latest National Post column I list the sorts of questions journalists should be asking party leaders in the current federal election if they (politicians or journalists) thought elections were a time to discuss serious issues seriously.
In my latest Epoch Times column I puncture the surprisingly widespread notion that the 2019 Canadian federal election is, like all the others, the single most important and pivotal turning point in our lifetimes in deciding who we want to be as a nation going forward or backward united for the sake of the children into light or darkness as we … zzzzzzzz...