Serious Living

Never More Necessary …

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Well, it’s been awhile since anyone has posted anything, so I thought I’d put up a thought-provoking passage I read recently. To be honest, I haven’t been reading all that much lately; this is actually something I read more than a month ago. We’re in the middle of trying to move in to a house that’s been all but completely renovated, but we’re currently staying with my parents-in-law and it’s left us feeling a little displaced (even though her parents are great). I realize I seem to have a penchant for longer quotes, but I promise if you read the whole passage it will make sense why I have to include it all.  🙂

Anyway, the quote is from Aldous Huxley’s Huxley and God: Essays on Religious Experience. I picked it up off the bargain rack in a bookstore across from Yale University (I was only there on business) and although Mr. Huxley is anything but Christian, he is a deep thinker and careful observer. The following was written in 1941:

… it is upon fashions, cars, and gadgets, upon news and the advertising upon which news exists, that our present industrial and economic system depends for its proper functioning. For, as ex-President Hoover pointed out not long ago, this system cannot work unless the demand for non-necessaries is not merely kept up, but continually expanded; and of course it cannot be kept up and expanded except by incessant appeals to greed, competitiveness, and love of aimless stimulation. Men have always been a prey to distractions, which are the original sin of the mind; but never before today has an attempt been made to organize and exploit distractions, to make of them, because of their economic importance, the core and vital center of human life, to idealize them as the highest manifestations of mental activity. Ours is an age of systematized irrelevances, and the imbecile within us has become one of the Titans, upon whose shoulders rests the weight of the social and economic system. Recollectedness, or the overcoming of distractions, has never been more necessary than now; it has also, we may guess, never been so difficult.

Things really haven’t changed much, it seems …

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This is a quote from the The Jugurthine War, written by Sallust (Gaius Sallustius Crispus) about 41 B.C., nine years after he was expelled from the Senate for alleged immorality and approximately six years before he died at the age of fifty-one.

Men have no right to complain that they are naturally feeble and short-lived, or that it is chance and not merit that decides their destiny.  On the contrary, reflection will show that nothing exceeds or surpasses the powers with which nature has endowed mankind, and that it is rather energy they lack than strength or length of days. 

But if the soul is enslaved by base desires and sinks into the corruption of sloth and carnal pleasures, it enjoys a ruinous indulgence for a brief season; then, when idleness has wasted strength, youth, and intelligence, the blame is put on the weakness of our nature, and each man excuses himself for his own shortcomings by imputing his failure to adverse circumstances. If men pursued good things with the same ardor with which they seek what is unedifying and unprofitable — often, indeed, actually dangerous and pernicious — they would control events instead of being controlled by them, and would rise to such heights of greatness and glory that their mortality would put on immortality.

Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time, because the days are evil. (Ephesians 5:15-16)

 

Some hardy morsels …

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 I came across these quotes while reading a book by George MacDonald entitled Dish of Orts (Orts means a scrap or morsel–I had no idea either:).  He actually used these passages in his own essay on forms of literature and I was so taken with them that I scoured the Internet until I found a scanned-in 1853 edition of Mr. Lynch’s book.  I downloaded it and, using “economy” mode on the printer, printed all 166 pages. 

The first quote brings to my mind the moments of warm recollection, often caused by a simple scent or the fading sun or a cup of coffee, of times spent with brother-books, the ones  we remember as fondly as we do our faithful dogs;  the second, that reading should exist reciprocally with all other parts of life;  and the third, which doesn’t so much make me want to begin reading a biography (it kinda does) as it does review my own story in light of what Mr. Lynch says here.  After all, the payment of self-sacrifice is non-refundable, is it not?  [Read more…]

Oh, this hurts …

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One more quote:

Coleridge is the supreme tragedy of indiscipline. Never did so great a mind produce so little. He left Cambridge University to join the army; but he left the army because, in spite of all his erudition, he could not rub down a horse; he returned to Oxford and left without a degree. He began a paper called The Watchman which lived for ten numbers and then died. It has been said of him: “He lost himself in visions of work to be done, that always remained to be done. Coleridge had every poetic gift but one—the gift of sustained and concentrated effort.” In his head and in his mind he had all kinds of books, as he said himself, “completed save for transcription.” “I am on the eve,” he says, “of sending to the press two octavo volumes.” But the books were never composed outside Coleridge’s mind, because he would not face the discipline of sitting down to write them out. No one ever reached any eminence, and no one having reached it ever maintained it, without discipline.

—Donald Whitney quoting William Barclay in Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life (22)

Thanks, Glenn, (I think) for sending that our way!