ex cathedra: The importance of great quips

Sunday, April 29, 2012

The importance of great quips

LADY BRACKNEEL: And what are your politics, Mr. Worthing?
WORTHING: Well, I am afraid, Lady Bracknell, that I really have none. I am a Liberal.

CECILY
Then have we got to part?
ALGERNON
I am afraid so. It's a very painful parting.
CECILY
It is always painful to part from people whom one has known for a very brief space of time. The absence of old friends one can endure with equanimity.

MISS PRISM
Do not speak slightingly of the three-volume novel, Cecily. I wrote one myself in earlier days.
CECILY
Did you really, Miss Prism? How wonderfully clever you are! I hope it did not end happily? I don't like novels that end happily. They depress me so much.
MISS PRISM
The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...: Something that I think was from the early four-act version (so I can't readily look it up) in the proposal scene:

JACK
Gwendolyn, I hope that what I am about to propose will not in any way be a shock to you.
GWENDOLYN
I am certain that it won't. I have never been shocked in my life. I think that to be shocked at anything reveals a rather low ethical standard.

--Nathan; 7:57 AM, April 30, 2012
Anonymous said...: "Poetically [in poesis, making] man dwells. That's what fiction means."
—Hölderlin

"The noble [gennaios, vornehm] end happily. The false end with non-selfs. That's what karma means."
—Nietzsche; 10:01 AM, April 30, 2012
Anonymous said...: The Buddha: In Sankhara [doing some becoming] man dwells in a temporal aiôn.

(And since temporal experience is impermanent or temporal, it's intrinsically a fail, compared with permanent, everlastingly ongoing types of experience too numerous to mention. Or if the only everlastingly ongoing not-impermanent experience is zilch, your longing is for zilch.); 1:41 PM, April 30, 2012

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Toward Our Future

What the sons of Europa need is a new religion: one that is as tribal, portable and survivalist as Judaism, as masculine, terrestrial and tough as Islam and as intellectually and aesthetically creative as Christianity...with a dose of the unflinching realism of the ancestral ways of the Greeks and Romans, Germans and Celts and Slavs..And for the larger Indo-European frame, something of the Indian capacity to combine an ultimate and philosophical realization of The One with a robustly mytho-poetic religion on-the-ground. Oh, and some of the psychological acumen of Buddhism.

Liberalism's Basic Flaw

Liberals believe that the chief role of the State is to force everyone to be equal, (ie, take vengeance on the successful). So when they are confronted with any group that they deem less well off than themselves, they are morally disarmed, completely and utterly. Any group that can achieve Victim Status is on their way to power and the (White) liberal's only job is to give them what they want, no matter how much that damages him. And nothing may ever be expected, much less demanded, of them in return. It's a recipe for suicide: no other outcome is possible.