12/1001 - Beerbohm, Chesterton, and Whitman

Short Story: A.V. Laider by Max Beerbohm

An interesting little story - was Laider telling the truth, or maybe the better question is, when was he?

Essay: On Misunderstanding by G.K. Chesterton 

The collection is out of print, but good old archive.org has it. 

Some worthwhile quotes:

"In their hapless topsy-turvy philosophy [of modernity], digestion is the creator and divinity the creature. They have at the back of their minds, in short, the idea that there is really nothing at the back of their minds except the brute thing called the body. To them, therefore, there is nothing comic or incongruous about saying that a violin solo should be a servant of the body or of the brute; for there is no other god for it to serve."

"I think it was a great medieval philosopher who said that all evil comes from enjoying what we ought to use and using what we ought to enjoy. A great many modern philosophers never do anything else. Thus they will sacrifice what they admit to be happiness what they claim to be progress; though it could have no rational meaning except progress to greater happiness. or they will subordinate goodness to efficiency; though the very name of good implies an end, and the very name of efficiency implies only a means to an end. Progress and efficiency by their very titles are only tools. Goodness and happiness by their very titles are a fruition; the fruits that are to be produced by the tools. Yet how often the fruits are treated as fancies of sentimentalism and only the tools as facts of sense. It is as if a starving man were to give away the turnip in order to eat the spade; or as if men said that there need not be any fish, so long as there were plenty of fishing-rods."

"There is more generally a flat, unlifted, unlaughing spirit, that can accept this topsy-turvydom without even seeing that it is topsy-turvy. it does not even rise high enough to be cynical. It does not utter its materialistic maxim even as a pessimist's paradox. It does not see the joke of saying that the Passion Music can assist a gentleman to absorb a veal cutlet, or that a Mass of Palestrina might counteract the effects of tasted cheese. What is said on this subject is said quite seriously. That seriousness is perhaps the most frivolous thing in the whole of this frivolous society. it is a spirit that cannot even rouse itself enough to laugh."

Poem:  

When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer

by Walt Whitman

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,

When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,

When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,

Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

In totally - or maybe slightly - unrelated news, I've picked up a new-to-me hobby which solidifies my reputation as one of the few 44-year-old 84-year-olds. I enjoy learning new things, new crafts, and so I finally started this cross-stitch kit purchased last year. I don't know why cross-stitch has always intimidated me. Probably because accurate counting is involved and I'm not the world's best with numbers.