“If vacillation dwell within the heart the soul will rue it.”
Wolfram von Eschenbach Parzival [1st sentence of book]
“Yet The Hobbit is unlike Beowulf or any of the tales in The Silmarillion in its published form. The Hobbit represented departure from the kind of story that Tolkien loved and that he had been trying without success to write in the Silmarillion. Beowulf and all of the Norse stories that Tolkien loved shared a common plot. Simply stated is it is this: the hero fights against impossible odds and dies. The culture out of which Beowulf appeared was grim and dark. The Celtic world, which included the Germanic and Norse peoples as well as the Britons and Irish, indeed most of pre Christian Europe, believed in dreadful gods who demanded human sacrifice. The Celtic peoples offered their own children, and eventually their slaves, as human sacrifices, which they then devoured in ritual cannibalism. They did not love their gods, but feared them. The gods themselves had nothing to look forward to except their own destruction. Alliteration can be a pleasant literary device unless overdone, but it is impossible to overdo the nature of the Norse mythologies. Thus, their stories are characterized by darkness, doubt, depression, dismay, dread, despair, destruction, and death. The stories set a mood of stubbornness, suffering, sorrow, shadow, and sadness. The characters experienced treachery, torment, terror, trouble, tears, threat, and treason. The stories are tales of futility, faithlessness, foulness, fear, and folly. These disquieting words are the words used by Tolkien throughout the Silmarillion. In the Norse tales, the heroes make their journeys to death and ruin. The Hobbit represents an entirely different kind of plot. The plot, and later that of The Lord of the Rings, comes from a different culture. It is the plot that C.S. Lewis learned to love as a teenager and never outgrew. It is the story of the struggle, against all odds to the end of the world for the great prize that ends in victory and a return to home as a changed person. It is a story that comes from a culture with an entirely different kind of God – a God who journeys into time and space as a man in order to battle death itself and rise victorious. It is a story of hope rather than despair.”
Harry Lee Poe The Making of C.S. Lewis
“If you’re afraid of being spoiled by success, get a job in weather forecasting”
In a BC Transit publication called The Buzzer Jan. 14, 1994
“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself./ And stupid. We should be scared [expletive deleted] of stupid.”
Emailed by a friend as a graphic without further attribution
In my latest Epoch Times column I say the reason for having one day set aside for Thanksgiving is to help us be more grateful every day… and act on it.
In my latest National Post column I say the reason neither party can pull ahead in the American Presidential contest is that they’re both right about how awful their opponent is and dead wrong about how good their candidate is.
“One person with a belief is equal to a force of ninety-nine who have only interests.”
John Stuart Mill, quoted in Anthony Robbins, Unlimited Power
“A year earlier, during the third week of April 1940, Lewis had read Christopher Dawson's Beyond Politics. What struck Lewis about the book was the distinction Dawson drew between the ideal of freedom and the ideal of democracy. The idea of democracy as propounded by Rousseau and embodied in the French Revolution placed its emphasis on the ‘general will’ of the community over against the individual. The idea of freedom as expressed by the English placed its emphasis on the rights of the individual over against the will of the whole. Dawson traced modern English notions of freedom to the nonconformists of the 17th century, who sought religious liberty, and to the English aristocracy, which asserted its rights over against the Crown. Dawson concluded that without freedom, modern democracy and modern dictatorship are ‘twin children of the Revolution’ with their emphasis on the community or collective or state. Jack told [his brother] Warnie that he thought this view explained a great deal about the difference between the English and the European democracies. The French offered no exemption from military service for a conscientious objector, but the English did, even if reluctantly. This also explained the political alliance in the 17th and 18th centuries in England between the great nobility and the nonconformist merchant class. It was never the marriage of convenience as some supposed but a marriage of conviction. This view also explained to Jack why he and Warnie he felt so strongly about freedom but less so about democracy. These observations would not have risen to much more than a passing interest, except they became the thesis of C.S. Lewis’s first radio broadcast in May 1941.”
Harry Lee Poe The Making of C.S. Lewis