Forwarded from 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐁𝐨𝐨𝐤 𝐂𝐥𝐮𝐛
He does not love his cat, but his cat’s kittens; nor, in truth, the kittens, but only the kittens’ kittens, and so on forward forever to the end of cat-dom. The “purposive” man is always trying to secure a spurious and delusive immortality for his acts by pushing his interest in them forward into time.R e t r o g r a d e d , n o t L e f t B e h in d.
— Whoever, in the present day, still derives his
development from religious sentiments, and perhaps lives
for some length of time afterwards in metaphysics
and art, has assuredly gone back a considerable
distance and begins his race with other modern
men under unfavourable conditions ; he apparently
loses time and space. But because he stays in
those domains where ardour and energy are
liberated and force flows continuously as a volcanic
stream out of an inexhaustible source, he goes
forward all the more quickly as soon as he has
freed himself at the right moment from those
dominators; his feet are winged, his breast has
learned quieter, longer, and more enduring
breathing. He has only retreated in order to
have sufficient room to leap ; thus something
terrible and threatening may lie in this retrograde
movement.
— Whoever, in the present day, still derives his
development from religious sentiments, and perhaps lives
for some length of time afterwards in metaphysics
and art, has assuredly gone back a considerable
distance and begins his race with other modern
men under unfavourable conditions ; he apparently
loses time and space. But because he stays in
those domains where ardour and energy are
liberated and force flows continuously as a volcanic
stream out of an inexhaustible source, he goes
forward all the more quickly as soon as he has
freed himself at the right moment from those
dominators; his feet are winged, his breast has
learned quieter, longer, and more enduring
breathing. He has only retreated in order to
have sufficient room to leap ; thus something
terrible and threatening may lie in this retrograde
movement.
Forwarded from The Letters & Musings of Grant Brooks
New article on our shared Anglo Protestant Civilization, and what it means. For your consideration
https://grantbrooks.substack.com/p/the-western-british-empire
https://grantbrooks.substack.com/p/the-western-british-empire
The Letters of Grant Brooks
The Western British Empire
A dream beyond the veil
The civilization we live in at present is a gigantic technological structure, a skyscraper almost high enough to reach the moon. It looks like a single world-wide effort, but it's really a deadlock of rivalries; it looks very impressive, except that it has no genuine human dignity. For all its wonderful machinery, we know it's really a crazy ramshackle building, and at any time may crash around our ears. What the myth tells us is that the Tower of Babel is a work of human imagination, that its main elements are words, and that what will make it collapse is a confusion of tongues. All had originally one language, the myth says. The language is not English or Russian or Chinese or any common ancestor, if there was one. It is the language that makes Shakespeare and Pushkin authentic poets, that gives a social vision to both Lincoln and Gandhi. It never speaks unless we take the time to listen in leisure, and it speaks only in a voice too quiet for panic to hear. And then all it has to tell us, when we look over the edge of our leaning tower, is that we are not getting any nearer heaven, and that it is time to return to earth.O, then, at last relent: Is there no place
Left for repentance, none for pardon left?
None left but by submission; and that word
Disdain forbids me, and my dread of shame
Among the Spirits beneath, whom I seduced
With other promises and other vaunts
Than to submit, boasting I could subdue
The Omnipotent. Ay me! they little know
How dearly I abide that boast so vain,
Under what torments inwardly I groan,
While they adore me on the throne of Hell.
With diadem and scepter high advanced,
The lower still I fall, only supreme
In misery: Such joy ambition finds.