Lo, across the white, silent Sepulchre of the Drift, there scuttles a dark, hirsute Reality—this grim, eight-legged Lycosa, a misplaced Spark of Vitality wandering with desperate Earnestness through the crystalline Void, as if to hurl a defiant "No!" against the pale, all-devouring Empire of Frost.

All true Intellectual Labour is, at its core, a suffering; a wrestling with the chaotic Inane to wring Order from it. So, too, with reading. If, instead of marching boldly into the Thicket, you lean upon the crutch of Abridgement and Simplification, seeking to grease the wheels of Thought, you have, O unfortunate one, but thickened the walls of your own stupidity, retarded thyself, and shut out the very Light of Heaven from your mind.

Read. Whole. Books. Difficult ones.

Vivek slinked back on to X

This might be fair. Why would Americans be the highest experts on what an American is?

We can think of plenty of examples where this sort of thinking would be wrong. I know what a bird is better than the crows in my yard do. The Soviets and the Nazis, during their battles against America, both understood some things about America and Americans that the average American didn't.

There's really no reason to think Americans have some special knowledge about America or being an American. If anything, they're probably more confused on the matter than average.

If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of it.

—Thomas Carlyle, recounted in a letter by a friend and then quoted in Carlyle at his Zenith by David Alec Wilson.

Notice the difference between Carlyle's spoken and written English. To dribble onto Paper the raw, unfiltered fluid of Conversation is the method of the dilettante, not of the Thinker. The Talk of the mouth is a thing of instinct, a mere reflex of the stomach and throat. Do not spew this filth onto the Page, which is Sacred. Writing must be forged, hammered, and tempered in the Fire of Forethought. Remember, O Scribbler, that what is written stands fixed; dare not, then, to inscribe a carelessly written sentence into the Great Ledger of Eternity; Thou art called to be a Priest of the Intellect; therefore, cast thy raw sentences into the Furnace, and let the fire of Diligence burn away the dross until only the Gold remains.

“Piled High”
18 inches of snow piled on the handrail of this bridge in Tahquamenon Falls State Park in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

—Douglas Jones Photography.

Never hire someone who has a tattoo.

There is a vernacular proverb in a land where the English govern much but dwell little—“There are three dangers—the horns of an ox, the heels of a horse, and the tongue of an Englishman.”

In this pamphlet Carlyle implied that the God of the Bible was incredible, and said that ‘a man’s “religion” consists not of the many things he is in doubt of and tries to believe, but of the few he is assured of, and has no need of effort for believing.’ Accordingly the ‘modern man’s religion’ was such as might have been expected of pigs, “if the inestimable talent of Literature should, in these swift days of progress, be extended to the brute creation, so that swine (I mean four-footed swine) could communicate to us on paper what they thought of the Universe.” Whereupon he gave a humorous sketch of Pig Philosophy, such as Swift might have written but no other man of letters on record, full of fun, yet making one feel uncomfortably how much we modern men resemble swine.

—David Alec Wilson, Carlyle at his Zenith

Under this, my regime, let no Man think to parade his Drug-Madness within the Public Visage! Whosoever staggers abroad, his God-given Reason drowned in the foul Vapours of the Poppy or the Hemp-weed, has abdicated his very Soul; he is no longer a Citizen, but a Walking Chaos. My State tolerates no such Waste-product. For the Public Flyer, the Law prescribes but one sharp Medicine: the Gallows, a swiftly delivered Rope for the rotting branch.

Carlyle, as usual, has important things to tell us on this matter of stoning the stoned:

Ask yourself about “Liberty,” for example; what you do really mean by it, what in any just and rational soul is that Divine quality of liberty? That a good man be “free,” as we call it, be permitted to unfold himself in works of goodness and nobleness, is surely a blessing to him, immense and indispensable;—to him and to those about him. But that a bad man be “free,”—permitted to unfold himself in his particular way, is contrariwise the fatallest curse you could inflict on him; curse and nothing else, to him and all his neighbours. Him the very Heavens call upon you to persuade, to urge, induce, compel, into something of well-doing; if you absolutely cannot, if he will continue in ill-doing,—then for him (I can assure you, though you will be shocked to hear it), the one “blessing” left is the speediest gallows you can lead him to. Speediest, that at least his ill-doing may cease quàm primùm.

Certainly, by any ballot-box, Jesus Christ goes just as far as Judas Iscariot; and with reason, according to the New Gospels, Talmuds and Dismal Sciences of these days. Judas looks him in the face; asks proudly, "Am not I as good as thou? Better, perhaps!" slapping his breeches-pocket, in which is audible the cheerful jingle of thirty pieces of silver.

—Carlyle, Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question

Carlyle certainly has a way with words. He simultaneously attacks, first, democracy, for valuing the opinion of Judas to the exact same degree as that of Christ, and, second, economics and modern man's commercial worldview, for insisting that Judas might in fact be better than Christ, because, after all, Judas possesses those 30 pieces of silver earned through his betrayal, while Christ only hath the nails in his wrists and feet. (...And with a title like that...)

He had witnessed the ongoing birth of the age of Mammonism; he tried to warn us, but we marched onward, progressing readily towards a bright new glorious epoch of man's creation.

By modern liberal metrics, Judas is equal to or even perhaps better than Christ.... We truly live in an absurd time, my friends.