In my latest Epoch Times column I offer principles not predictions to navigate the stormy waters of 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)
“History is the only laboratory we have in which to test the consequences of thought.”
“Étienne Gilson (1884-1978), French philosopher” quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail February 6, 2012
“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]
“Asses would rather have refuse than gold.”
Heraclitus, quoted by an author whose name I did not record in Chronicles magazine November 1992
In my latest Epoch Times column I say the new “ambitious plan” from the Canadian Armed Forces to expand its ranks represents not a step forward but a flight into fantasy, and the extent to which anyone takes it seriously measures how far official Ottawa and the chattering classes have abandoned difficult reality for comforting make-believe en masse.
“‘Bravo, Watson! Voila la devise de notre firme: nous allons essayer en tout cas.’”
Sherlock Holmes in Arthur Conan Doyle Archives sur Sherlock Holmes [a 1956 translation]
“We often hear, ‘Life is short… better enjoy it’! How about, ‘Eternity is long, better prepare for it’!”
Emailed by a friend without attribution April 29, 2024.