The Portrait

So, if you like to wander around the university like me, you will have noticed a portrait that hangs in the Becton Center Engineering (or Science?) Library. Right above the circulation desk. There is a  man standing and touching ever-so slightly a piece of paper. An eraser to his left and a broken piece of chalk [...]

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Diderot

Sometime ago I found an interesting volume entitled, “Western Atheism, A Short History” by James Thrower. I copied down the page number of a passage that caught my attention. It was page 106.
Towards God [Diderot] was filled with wrath, bitterness and rage; witness his story about the misanthropist who hid himself in a cave and [...]

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Trollope and Discipline

His precision as a writer, I think, he compared to that of a shoemaker.
pg 297 of the Oxford Edition
[B]efore I reached Melbourne I had finished a story called Lady Anna. Every word of this was written at sea, during the two months required for our voyage, and was done day by day—with the intermission of [...]

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Trollope

They among Englishmen who best love and most admire the United States, have felt themselves tempted to use the strongest language in denouncing the sins of Americans. Who can but love their personal generosity, their active and far-seeking philanthropy, their love of education, their hatred of ignorance, the general convictions in the minds of all of them that a man should be enabled to walk upright, fearing no one and conscious that he is responsible for his own actions? In what country have grander efforts been made by private munificence to relieve the sufferings of humanity? Where can the English traveller find any more anxious to assist him than the normal American, when once the American shall have found the Englishman to be neither sullen nor fastidious? Who, lastly, is so much an object of heart-felt admiration of the American man and the American woman as the well-mannered and well-educated Englishwoman or Englishman? These are the ideas which I say spring uppermost in the minds of the unprejudiced English traveller as he makes acquaintance with these near relatives. Then he becomes cognisant of their official doings, of their politics, of their municipal scandals, of their great ring-robberies, of their lobbyings and briberies, and the infinite baseness of their public life. There at the top of everything he finds the very men who are the least fit to occupy high places. American public dishonesty is so glaring that the very friends he has made in the country are not slow to acknowledge it,—speaking of public life as a thing apart from their own existence, as a state of dirt in which it would be an insult to suppose that they are concerned! In the midst of it all the stranger, who sees so much that he hates and so much that he loves, hardly knows how to express himself.

“It is not enough that you are personally clean,” he says, with what energy and courage he can command,—“not enough though the clean outnumber the foul as greatly as those gifted with eyesight outnumber the blind, if you that can see allow the blind to lead you. It is not by the private lives of the millions that the outside world will judge you, but by the public career of those units whose venality is allowed to debase the name of your country. There never was plainer proof given than is given here, that it is the duty of every honest citizen to look after the honour of his State.”

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First

Welcome amateur readers to an amateur Web-log.
The purpose of this small enterprise still waits to prove itself.
So, let us wait along with it.

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